[Cecil Terwilliger]

So I did something neat.

I’ve always had a tough time keeping my books in order. Like reading or chronological order. Not necessarily on my shelves but for reading purposes across titles. I don’t always have to read them in exact order, which would be largely impossible, but try to sometimes and helps me know where a book takes place within the world of constant reboots, deaths, character changes etc.

For Marvel I have a visual timeline online that works pretty well. But it wasn’t great for tracking read/unread or my ratings if I liked the book or not. Only when it was published and which issues are contained in which trades. For DC I own so few I could literally just make a list. Also my backlog is now huge and I needed a better way to track what I’ve read and start rating things so I can try to remember what I liked.

I wanted something like Letterboxd but for comics. After a couple tries I found one that’s way less awesome and sleek but still really good. It’s subscription based at $20 a year so it’s definitely not for everyone. Called CLZ comics.

But after 2 days, a ton of barcode scanning, searching and indexing, I’ve finally organized all 1232 single issue comics/trades/digital comics that I own. Their catalog is rather large but i still had to manually enter a fair amount of book details, a couple were missing altogether and I had to manually add or make due by using a different printing/edition/cover. All my digital stuff I had to manually code as such. That was a bit tedious.

But now I’m done. 375 digital issues/trades. 628 individual physical comic issues. 194 softcover trades, 26 hardcovers, 8 square bound. Overwhelmingly marvel at 881. 1028 read, 204 unread. Xmen lead the way at 328 issues/trades/digital. Followed by Wolverine at 226. Then Batman at 120 or so.

Unfortunately it doesn’t let me track or code how many issues are in each trade so it’s still impossible to find out how many issues I own in total individually and within trades.

Many are even grouped by event/crossover which is neat if I’m inclined to sort by that.

Many, many of the sort categories had to be manually entered/changed which was a tedious pain. But now that I’m done it’s awesome. Every issue has a cover, creative team automatically in their database. Many (most?) have the plot, publish date, cover price, issues/titles contained (for trades). The stuff I had to manually enter was the “series group” and digital “format”. I can even rate their condition but I’m not that kind of collector. I did add notes on which are signed by the writer/artist (hint not many).

One thing it doesn’t do well is track read order (that’s ok I track that other ways) and book families. So unlike the Marvel app, for example, there’s no link for an issue or a trade with its parent title. Marvel/ComiXology apps do that well so you can track which issues are from which crossover/title and which trades belong to which title. And they all have clickable links that bring you to the parent/child page. This app needs that. Even if I have to manually link them.

It also doesn’t let you do multi edits. Every title must be individually edited. That was lame.

Still, highly recommended for collectors and should help with reading, expanding, cataloging my collection and future purchases. Although I’ll probably need to keep my Marvel timeline updated concurrently. That’s ok I like both.