Comics Software Review: Choosing Collectorz.com, pt. 2

Collectorz.com definitely had the main features I was interested in: Software stored info on my hard drive (not just an online service), it had a modern loo, it provided stats on my collection and individual series, and it was at a price I could afford ($30 for standard version, $50 for pro) for a collection of unlimited size. It also has a comprehensive cover database and the ability to add custom fields to each comic.

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In addition to Collectorz.com's Cover Flow which we looked at last time, there are two other views that are very welcome when dealing with a lot of comics. This Image View is very useful for looking at your collection as a whole. You can quickly glance at covers throughout the run to see what you've got. But sometimes you need to see a lot of info at at time, including cover dates and other info.

Click on image to see full-size view

In this screen shot, I'm showing the Publisher, which really doesn't help matters when dealing with this particular run of comics. However, when looking at some older titles that hopped around a bit (like Donald Duck or Godzilla), that info could be helpful.


All in Color for a Dime

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So the software had decent reporting, sorting and detail features. All of that is nice, but the main thing I need to do with this software is enter my collection, which is something this software did better than the other two I looked at.

If the series does not exist in your collection, you start by typing in the title. This brings up a list of titles that match your criteria. In this example I search for the title "Avengers" and get all the various Avenger titles out there (I blew the text up in this image to make it readable in the thumbnail). Since I've already added a few titles, you can see them in blue text. As you can see, the Publisher info is a little more useful here because it helps you distinguish between the US and UK editions.

Click on image to see full-size view

 Next to each title is the number of issues in that title. This is very useful info. Take, for example, the West Coast Avengers title. You can see that there are two identical titles, but the first one only has four issues which helps me identify that it's the original four-issue miniseries from 1984 and not the 102-issue series that started the next year.

Once you select a title, you can expand it and then select all of the issues in that run (as shown in this screenshot) by clicking on the checkbox next to the title name. Or you can add individual issues one at a time. Or you can click on the series, add all the issues, then go back through and unselect any issues you don't have. This entry method is one of the things that definitely set this software apart from ComicBase 15, which required that you enter the entire run at once and then go back and pull out the issues you didn't want. To me, that was one of the two deal breakers (the other being the price).

One thing I didn't like at first about Collectorz.com's entry system was that when you clicked on an individual issue in the treeview, it didn't automatically bring up the cover. There was a link in the right-hand pane where you could click to see the cover (alternatively, you can double-click on the name of the comic and the detail info will come up. As I said, I didn't like this at first, but after the buggy downloading and scrolling issues I had with ComicBase, this turned out to be much less annoying and much faster because I wasn't waiting for covers that I don't need to download.

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In this example, you can see that I brought up the cover (and details) before adding the issue to my collection. I had to make sure which of the two variant covers for this issue was the one that came with my Kevin Keller subscription (again, I've increased the type size to make it easier to read).

That's an area where Comic Collector shines. It handles variant covers, editions and even variant publishers with ease (a variant publisher might be someone like Diamond or Wizard who reprints Action Comics #1 as a promotional comic, or DC Comics reprinting Police Comics #1 to celebrate the first appearance of Plastic Man).

Click on image to see full-size view

It also has the ability to handle (and enter) a lot of detailed info, such as cover price, release date, creators, characters, publisher, story title, and it will even track cross-overs (like those big summer blockbuster mega series that hop around from title to title). It also tracks info about your copies, specifically how many copies you have, condition, and (super important to me) it lets you create individual fields of info, such as Location. This helps me track which box has which comic. The ability to edit several comics at once (once the comic is entered, you go to the List View and click on multiple comics and then you can edit all of the info for the titles selected -- in this case, the Location attribute).

As you may recall, the custom field option was an absolute must have on my Wish List for comic book database software. After all, what's the point of having a lot of comics if you can't find your copy of Joker #1? These features combined to make this a product I like using. And these are the main reasons I selected the Pro Version of Collectorz.com's Comic Collector as the software I am now using to catalog my collection.

Check back Monday for some closing thoughts on Collectorz.com's software, and stay tuned for more adventures in collecting.