• WeirdAlex03
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    2 months ago

    Nice sleuthing! I totally forgot about Ready for Battle.

    Swapping them would still make sense, but I think this order makes more sense. I read this as Amity upset that she didn’t see Titan Luz yet, and then jaw-drop-amazed at it the first time (though tbf that would probably happen the second time, too, and the third time, and the fourth time…)

    At this point Mark’s canon is all over the place, and finding old comics is pretty difficult

    Uh huh. I wanted to look up Being Strong earlier, but I knew I didn’t have time to find it.

    I know the r/TOH wiki has lists of MM comics by theme (Angsty, “Cool”, Funny, Heartwarming), but they’re going on 2 years out-of-date now, so less helpful.

    That site you linked is nicer for putting everything in one list and being up-to-date, but still kinda needs you to know the name or general time of the comic, else you need a tab explosion.

    I’ve also made use of the “the library” on Tumblr account moringmark-tagged (particularly the archives), which doesn’t do comic titles, but does add tags for all the characters/ships/time periods present. Only as useful as the least common character in the comic (good f’in luck if the only character you can remember is Luz), and you can only search by one tag at a time, but at least it’s easier to skim through to look for what you want. … Or at least, it was until Tumblr added a login wall recently.

    Honestly at this point I’m pretty seriously temped to start a spreadsheet to track all the comics. Tag all the chars/etc like Tumblr, but also include a brief synopsis of each for better Ctrl+F-ability

    • Aielman15@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I was thinking the same thing when looking for those pages yesterday. Even the main sagas are very difficult to follow at this point, if you didn’t read them as they released.

      LHoB is somewhat consistent with naming but still has a few annoying outliers, such as Fear, Cliche or the One-shot.

      But the Ayzee saga is all over the place and at this point I’m thinking that Mark’s doing it on purpose, with the naming changing constantly (from Grom Factor to Enna to Mama Eda to Fight Coven, and I’m forgetting more) and even super duper important pages such as Having her work cut out for her and A change of pace having their own name, separate from all the others! And that’s not even accounting for all other pages that enrich the lore or explain some things that happen in that story, such as Ori, Cool uncle Gus (+ Insert battle music), So, yeah. And again, these are the names that I remember. I wasn’t able to find the page where it’s revealed that Jay is a Grimwalker, for example, and I’m sure I’m forgetting more.

      Oh, and by the way, while I was grabbing those links, I remembered that Ayzee has met the Collector, so here it is. Apparently the Hexsquad has somehow managed to rescue him from the evil!collectors, and he still has François with him.

      All this to say: yeah, at this point a spreadsheet with a tag system is mandatory to keep track of everything and look back at specific pages in a reasonable time. Think it would be possible to set one up online as a community effort? I’m busy these days but I’d be more than willing to dedicate some time every day to add a few pages and tag the characters in each. I’m not well versed in this specific topic though, so I don’t know what would be the best option to have a document online easily modifiable by all contributors (and ideally closed to anyone else to avoid trolling).

      • WeirdAlex03
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        2 months ago

        I have officially done a thing.

        It’s a very early start, but hopefully communicates the idea. I’ll slowly flesh it out over the coming days, and of course you may, too. The Data sheet is going to be a lot of checkboxes for everything, which will work well for filtering, but obviously a bit hard to read and a lot of blank space. So I also designated a Display sheet, which will be purely automated to read from Data and print just the relevant stuff in simple text

        It’s currently editable by everyone. I’ve started a few other similar projects like this that were globally editable without problems, but just in case I do have the power to revert and restrict (adding data validation and protected ranges will also help)

        (also btw the evil!collectors are called the archivists)

        • Aielman15@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          This is great, thank you so much! I’ve spent the last hour fleshing out the characters, dividing them into subsections that hopefully make sense. There are a few currently underutilized (mostly the Empire/Coven Heads), but I included them just in case some of them make an appearance in the ongoing Hexsquad series alongside Adrian. If they don’t, they’ll probably be folded in the Misc category. Apart from that, the list should now include (most of) the characters appearing in the comics.

          We should have this posted and stickied at the top of the community!

          • WeirdAlex03
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            2 months ago

            Awesome work! I added and rearranged a few, but I’m sure that will remain in flux for a while. Now on to the rest of the fields!

            I definitely plan to make a separate post to announce it, but I figure it would probably be a good idea to at least the overall formatting done first (obviously filling the entire backlog is going to take a while)

            • Aielman15@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              I’ve filled the form with two months-worth of Mark’s comics. Question: Is the “storyline” tab meant for the general theme like on r/TOH wiki (Angsty, “Cool”, Funny, Heartwarming), or to tie together comics that share a common story/characters but different names (such as Fight Coven and Grom Factor, for example)? I wouldn’t mind the latter, it seems more useful.

              Also, I’ve decided to tag characters based on a “tag everything that appears on the image” policy, so even characters that are shown only in the background of one frame are tagged. Drawing a line between what should be tagged and what not would get difficult otherwise. If you have a different opinion, please let me know so that I will tag them correctly in the future! :)

              • WeirdAlex03
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                28 days ago

                Finally had time to back and finish up the Display Links formula, thanks for keeping up with the comics! Google Sheets only lists all links in the cell when you click on it, not the specific link you click on, put the formatting does looks good on the cells. Also Lemmy links are now all run through https://lemmyverse.link/ to redirect to everyone’s preferred instance

                While dropping in the last few days of comics, I realize we don’t have a Timeline tag for timeskip-era when Luz and Amity are adults but not part of an ongoing storyline. It looks like you’ve just been calling those Post Finale? That might need a little review

                Contrast also calls our character listing into question now too. I’m find with listing everyone seen, even in cameos, but what if they’re completely unseen, with no dialogue, but explicitly confirmed to be in the area?

                Anyway, next I’ll (hopefully quickly) concatenate the full list of characters into one cell for the Display page, then start building out the Locations section on Data

                • Aielman15@lemmy.world
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                  28 days ago

                  While dropping in the last few days of comics, I realize we don’t have a Timeline tag for timeskip-era when Luz and Amity are adults but not part of an ongoing storyline. It looks like you’ve just been calling those Post Finale? That might need a little review

                  You have a point. I suppose it would be best to use “Next generation” (or maybe change the name to “Adults/Next gen” so that it covers both), as they are theoretically the same time period.

                  Contrast also calls our character listing into question now too. I’m find with listing everyone seen, even in cameos, but what if they’re completely unseen, with no dialogue, but explicitly confirmed to be in the area?

                  I’d say no, because that opens a huge can of worms. I think it would get too difficult to take into account who might be in the general area, and in some cases, it would make for a messy tag system, mostly in established storylines where multiple pages happen in the same location/time frame, but characters drop in and out of view (such as aLHoB or Grom Factor). For example, the students fighting Kikimora in aLHoB change every other page (the Fear chars only appear in the beginning and the end of the fight, Jerbo only in the end, Boscha appears in the beginning and in the aftermath, etc…). If someone is trying to look for all the appearances of a certain character, it’s going to get real messy really soon if the tagging gets made on a “who is in the vicinity” policy.

                  Tagging only characters that physically appear in the page will also be useful to run some stats on chars appearances after we’re done! I’d be really curious to see the results of a list of chars sorted by number of appearances.

                  • WeirdAlex03
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                    27 days ago

                    I suppose it would be best to use “Next generation” (or maybe change the name to “Adults/Next gen” so that it covers both), as they are theoretically the same time period.

                    Yeah good point. We already have enough ambiguity for Human Realm stuff between before or after S3 (unless Hunter is seen), we don’t need to think about or draw a line between before or after Ayzee. The Storyline tag can cover that

                    I’d say no, because that opens a huge can of worms.

                    Agreed. We’ll just leave those to mentions in the Synopsis.

                    Tagging only characters that physically appear in the page will also be useful to run some stats on chars appearances after we’re done! I’d be really curious to see the results of a list of chars sorted by number of appearances.

                    Yeah that’ll be fun! I think the next step after filling out locations will be a general contributing guidelines/notes to explain stuff like Timeskip=>Adult/Next Gen and how we distinguish before/after S3 in the Human Realm (how do we do that? just assume one or the other unless its obvious?). That can then become the main source of data for Series/Timeline/Storyline options, and I can add extra stats there

                    In other news, Chars and Locs and now listed on the main page, because we now have the start of location data! Same format for both. Haven’t bothered sorting locs yet as we figure out what we’ll need