User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-4028641-20150822192856/@comment-188432-20160723234340
As T:MAGS states, pages for individual issues should be created, and they should generally be created at an acronym of the indicia name. Hence, FD 1 is named perfectly correctly.
But let me pick out a sentence from the original post for further examination.
If I understand this all right, Four Doctors (comic story) is the comic series, in the same light as Doctor Who: The Ninth Doctor, and each issue's page is where we should be putting continuity, plot, and character lists.
No. It's in the title really. If the page is called (comic story), then it's about the story, not the series. And a story page is where the narrative information lives. Plot, continuity and references should definitely not be on an issue page. A (comic story) page should be as equivalent as possible to an (audio story) or (TV story) page.
The issue page serves mainly as documentation of a piece of merchandise: the issue itself.
However, and this is a big however, the creative team and character lists should also go on the individual issue pages, wherein they are tailored to just what applies to that issue. Comic creators often change from issue to issue, and it's extremely unlikely for a 6-issue series to have the same characters in each issue. To be of greatest utility to our readers, we really should try to give issue-specific information about cast and crew.
Lastly, American comic books have brought in a third type of page: the (comic series) page. It’s important to have such a page, because there is a difference between the series and the story. Obviously, ongoing series have more than one story in them, so you need a series page to tell you all the stories that were published therein. You also need a series page when trying to distinguish between two similar things — like The Ninth Doctor v. The Ninth Doctor (ongoing). Or the opposite, as when a title called Doctor Who was reduced from being an ongoing series into what became retitled-when-collected as Agent Provocateur. The series page is also the appropriate place to put dates of publication for the entire series, and background notes about the series. For instance, there’s probably a tale to tell about why the limited-run The Ninth Doctor turned into an ongoing series, so the series page would be the place to explain that.[1]
Are you going to find that we’ve followed this issue/story/series separation everywhere on the wiki? No. Or, rather, not yet.
The notion of original, American Doctor Who comics only dates to the turn of the decade, long after this wiki was set up. Obviously, Doctor Who comics were originally just strips in TVC, DWM, and DWA — and these (still) require a different approach. So you will find some confusion about how to handle IDW/Titan comics.
However, this basic distinction between story, series, and issue pages is what we should be striving towards with respect to American comics.[2]
- ↑ See Doctor Who (1984) for one example of a series page, and how covers can be used to link to individual issues.
- ↑ As explained upthread, there's also the case of the trade paperback/graphic novel. And, yes, we should have a separate page for these, as well. But that case applies only to a minority of comics that happen to lend their names to the collected edition.
