User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-4028641-20150822192856/@comment-188432-20150824191824
Well, the deal is this. American comic books should have a page for each of the following:
- the story
- each individual issue (see T:MAGS)
- any trade paperbacks which collect it
Because most of DW comics aren't American, we often haven't done a great job of observing point 2, but we should.
This is because we took a firm decision quite a number of years ago that we would continue cataloguing memorabilia, despite the existence of another wiki that concentrated on merchandise. That being the case, we actually need the pages for individual issues to be complete in our coverage. Issue pages simply make a better and more logical place to house cover variants, rather than some massive gallery at the bottom of a single page about the whole story.
And while the (comic story) page is the usual one that would be cited within an in-universe page, there are definitely times where it would make more sense to cite a particular issue — particularly if trying to catalogue, say, an artist's work and they only work on a portion of a run. This kind of thing happens all the time — and maybe even every time — in American comics. Very few runs, even if short, have exactly the same crew in every single issue.
As to where the plot should fall, I don't think we've definitively hashed that out. But I think in an ideal world, the plot on the (comic story) page would be a fairly broad overview, while the one on the individual issue pages would be more specific with the events of that issue. We should't use the same, lengthy style on an American comic book story page that we do on a British comic book story page. Remember, DWM stories are very much shorter than most American comic book stories, so we'd be setting ourselves up for monster plots if we tried to put everything on an American (comic story) page. The plot of the Assimilation² page is unnecessarily huge for this reason, as I recall.
