If ComicBase 14 is any indication, software for managing comics collections has become astonishingly sophisticated -- and possibly indispensable.
I've always had some sort of archival system so that I could find various comics. With more than 150 long boxes -- not to mention more than a dozen bookshelves -- having a system for finding individual books is a necessity. And finding them quickly is a priority. After all, if you can't find it, you don't own it.
Although I dabbled with electronic filing systems and various spreadsheets in days gone by, I saw them as a novelty. My system of loose-leaf notebooks worked better, and, besides, it would take a system a quantum level better than the notebooks to induce me to do data-entry for 60,000 comics.
So imagine my shock that ComicBase 14 by Human Computing is just such a system. It's amazing how this thing has anticipated my every need or want.
First, it's the most comprehensive listing of U.S. comic books I've ever seen. It easily eclipses the increasingly irrelevant "Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide," long the Bible of comics buying and selling. It's on a par with the "Standard Catalog of Comic Books," with which it is partnered. But it's superior in that it can update electronically with the latest releases.
Not only does it have the most books (450,000), it also has the most information about them -- date of publication, plot summaries, guest stars, creators, even hard-to-find circulation numbers. And you can search for books by those categories, so if I wanted to, say, find everything Stan Lee wrote, I could do so with a simple command.
Plus, it connects to the Internet to continually update back-issue prices as they average nationally -- impressive.
And it's flexible. It has customizable fields, which is where my notebooks become superfluous. I have designated one field for location, and it is there that I list my box number for each book. And since ComicBase is electronic, I can easily change huge amounts of information. If, for example, "X-Force" outgrows the box it shares with "X-Factor," I can move those books to a new box and change the location with a couple of clicks. Those kinds of changes were labor-intensive with my notebook system.
