Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Comics/organization

Suggestion

Maybe even before we work on templates (aside from the project notice, which will be quick, easy, and uncontroversial), we should think seriously about organization. I'm thinking it should be structured somewhat similarly to United States. Let me summarize:

United States example

United States
The United States of America is a federal republic...

• History

Main article: History of the United States

Brief summary of US History

• Politics

Main article: Politics of the United States

Brief summary of US Politics

• Geography
• ...

And so on. So each of those second-tier articles (History, Politics, Geography) has its own page, which is structured in much the same way:

History of the United States

• Pre-Colonial America

For details, see the main Pre-Colonial America article.

One-sentence summary of this period

• Colonial America

For details, see the main Colonial America article.

One-sentence summary of this period

• History of the United States (1776-1789)

For details...

And so on.

Science Fiction example

Science Fiction, to use a more relevant example, has a similar structure, although it relegates History of Science Fiction to "Related Articles," instead of incorporating it bit-by-bit into the main article, which is what I would prefer. It also points to the Genres, subcategories and related topics to science fiction, which is the kind of indiscriminate list-making we should strive to avoid. United States, meanwhile, has a well-organized template of related topics at the very bottom which I think is great, and should be emulated.

Comics prototype

Here's my current idea (levels of bulleted-ness imply a heading in the parent article, and often a complete article of its own [if so, a short description should still be included in the parent article, as in the example above]):

• comics (topmost level)
  • History of comics
    • Pre-literate
    • Pre-newspaper combine these two?
    • Early newspaper comics
    • The Golden Age
    • The Silver Age
    • The Modern Age
    • Unsure how to handle this one, frankly (that is, the hierarchy of history). Split up Eastern and Western comics, with "Western" containing "European" and "American"? Mainstream and Independent? Comic strips and comic books?
  • Comics Formats
    • comic strip
      • webcomic
      • newspaper comic strip
    • comic book
      • serial comic book
      • graphic novel
      • minicomic
      • trade paperback
    • other formats
      • cartoon
      • non-verbal instructions (e.g. airplane safety guide)
      • storyboard
  • formal conventions of comics
    • formal conventions of Eastern comics
    • formal conventions of Western comics
  • genres of comics
    • a whole slew of genres
  • comics community
    • comics criticism
    • comics conventions
    • comics awards

I've spent too long on this already today, so I'll have to stop there. Responses? -leigh (φθόγγος) 02:01, Dec 7, 2004 (UTC)

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Responses

That's a good start! The history is very U.S. comicbook centric, though. I'm the guy that made that big edit vis. Comic Book and American comic book a few months ago. I looked at Dance, Painting, Writing and Fiction for some guidance, which ended up supporting that "momentous" edit. Rand 20:53, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)

• I know it is, and I appreciate your efforts to de-bias things. I'm just not sure where to fork things, if you know what I mean. The "prehistory" of comics, if you will, is necessarily international and multiformat, just because of the paucity of data (thinking here things like cave paintings, Egyptian mummy diagrams, the Bayeux tapestry, perhaps Trajan's column. You know, the "some critics have suggested X is an early example of sequential art, or comics" kind of stuff. After that, Eastern and Western sequential art differs pretty distinctly; does that mean they should be seperate articles? But European comics become quite distinct from American comics pretty quickly, don't they? History of American comic books is pretty easy to organize; you do the standard "ages" breakdown and figure out how to cover both mainstream and indy comics. History of American comics is also pretty easy; it's History of American comic books plus History of American comic strips and History of American Webcomics. It's integrating that with the bigger picture that's giving me trouble. -leigh (φθόγγος) 01:31, Dec 16, 2004 (UTC)

I don't thing we can so easily integrate all these things. If course there is a common early history, of course nowadays we have a mix of genres and influences ("comics globalisation" ?), wbut comics is something deeply interlaced in the local popular culture. For exemple, are Comics criticism the same in US, EU, Asia, ... ? History should be split up geographically, at least. Lvr 12:09, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

• Well, there is a History of the World article... I agree that geographic subdivision is necessary, but:

1. we should have a broad overview, like History of the World, in a history of comics article (and then a one-paragraph summary of that in the comics article)
2. The structure of the geographic/temporal-based subpages needs to be decided. Shall we have a history of Asian comics, history of American comics, history of European comics trifecta?

Thanks for responding. -leigh (φθόγγος) 19:40, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)

The Victorian Age and The Platinum Age are the two eras that scholars are debating as coming between pre newspaper and golden age, I believe. Will do some more digging another time. I think anything before this like tapestries or columns should go on a sequential art page that I'm working up in rough at the moment and then will put up for debate at some point. It's very sketchy at the moment though.Hiding 21:43, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

Written up

I've been bold and codified what was here to move the conversation along and also to have something more concrete to hand. Hiding talk 22:25, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Can't place it yet, but something seems very... off... about a lot of it.

Probably mostly me finding McCloud insufferably pretensious, and you stating explicitly that it's based on his stuff, but still... - SoM 22:56, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Well, we do base the article at comics rather than sequential art, so I thought it best to lay out why. As to the rest of it being off, see if you can work out why, it's mainly meant to be a loose structural outline of the big concept articles. It became apparent to me recently that we need some sort of structure we can point to as an indicator of the structure. The page names and so on are pretty much just placeholders rather than set in stone, I just thought it best to mark out comics as the top page, and note all the formats and so on and how it all ties together. Hiding talk 23:25, 13 November 2005 (UTC)