Data Structure for Brands

Brands are images, logos, artwork, style, wording, and combined media that form the "public image" of a Publisher or line of comic books. It is used to provide continuity often across discrete Series and Issues for comic books. Often, on a printed comic book, the Brand is part of the "masthead" on the cover and is continuous for at least a few Issues in the same Series.

As with many things in the comic book industry, there has been little continuity of Brands for Publishers. It is not uncommon for a Publisher to maintain many Brands at a time. And, it is very common for Publishers to change their Brands regularly.

The XOWComics.com site is attempting to track the Brands used by Publishers. This is done by assigning titles to each of the Brands, often either the listing of the textual wording used in the Brand or a textual description of a purely artistic Brand. The tracking of the scans of Brands is also an ongoing project. To the left you can see an example of a Brand Detail page, with a few image scans of the Brand as it changed thru the years of usage.

A Brand must be associated with one and only one Publisher in the XOWComics.com site. Though there are examples of Brands used across different Publishers, often Publishers that are subsidiaries of a single larger Publisher company, this restriction maintains consistency and integrity within the data in the XOWComics.com site.

A Brand has a limited number of attributes that the XOWComics.com site tracks. These individual attributes are as follows:

Name

Years in Use (Year Began and Year Ended are separate)

Web Site (URL)

Note

Note: for Years in Use, individual values will be displayed in italics if the values are not certain to be correct.

A Brand can contain details relevant to other data within the site. The following is a listing of these items:

Publisher

Issues Count

Printings Count