Everything is more fun with comicbooks!

[elspethdixon]

To further the pretense that I'm actually working on this Information Structure paper, here is an excerpt (and by excerpt, I mean "half of what I have thus far") from my schema for a searchable comics database:

When the comics are scanned into the database, the indexer will tag them with descriptors indicating the publisher (DC or Marvel), the title of the comic (for example: "Captain America"), the issue number (such as "volume 5 #25"), the writer (in the case of this particular issue, "Ed Brubaker"), and the artist ("Michael Lark"). This will enable searchers to browse for only DC or only Marvel comics, to access comics by title (i.e. to search for all issues of "Batman" or all issues of "Amazing Spiderman"), and to search for the work of a particular writer or illustrator (all comics by Frank Miller, for example, or all comics illustrated by Jack Kirby).

This will require the following entity relationships:

comicid [written by] name
comicid [drawn by] name
comicid [in volume] volume number
comicid [has issue number] number
comicid [has title] title
comicid [published by] publisher

for example:

comicid [written by] Ed Brubaker
comicid [drawn by] Michael Lark
comicid [in volume] Captain America volume 5
comicid [has issue number] 25
comicid [has title] Captain America
comicid [published by] Marvel

Individual comics will also be tagged with descriptors identifying the major characters appearing in the comic (comic character), so that a user may, for example, search for all comics about Batman as well as all comics titled "Batman."