Around Christmas, I read the Return to Wonderland Cover Gallery as one of my comics for the 40 Years project. A few days later, on an unblogged day, I read the Vampirella Model Search Special. Whenever I encounter issues like these in the collection, I'm conflicted. My project is ostensibly the 40 Years of Comics Project, and I'm not 100% sure I consider these particular kinds of publications comics. If they were published in any other format besides the traditional comic book, I'd have no question, but because of this format, because of where they were marketed, I'm unsure.

I have similar qualms with a series of Tome Press issues I have that are reprints of Lewis Carroll stories and poems, accompanied by the original artwork published for each piece. Again, if these were reprinted as books, hardcover or paperback, it wouldn't even be a question of including them in the project. It comes back again to format and marketing.

The GCD has a rule that only allows something to be entered and considered "a comic" if it has a certain percentage of "comics" content. What that might be, I'm not really sure, as the aforementioned Vampirella book has no comics content at all, but still has an entry in the database. Though even as I was reading that issue, I considered that the photographs within were not simply illustrating what the text was telling us, but were actually showing further detail of the event the text was describing. So the words and picture worked together to tell a broader story, one that you couldn't get by just reading the words or looking at the pictures. How far does our definition of comics stretch?

I am starting to fall on the side of removing galleries and text-based reprints from the collection. They don't quite fall under my personal definition of comics. But please don't ask me to elaborate on that just yet. It's a work in progress.