qcomicbook displaying Mark Waid's Insufferable #2qcomicbook displaying Mark Waid's Insufferable #2

Everyone who gets into collecting comics seriously eventually ends up asking the question – how do I keep track of my comics? It becomes hard to remember which ones you have and where they are in your house. I ended up using Tellico.  It works on KDE which is primarily a Linux desktop environment, but there is also KDE for Windows and OSX.  It looks something like this:

Tellico main view
Tellico main view

Originally, I just considered Tellico because it works so well with KDE, but I’ve stayed with it because it’s so awesomely customizable.  You can store and sort based on whatever fields you want.  It has a comic book template, but I’ve customized the heck out of it to have all kinds of data.  And here’s a great example of all the data that I store for my comics:

Tellico - the data I input for each of my issues
Tellico – the data I input for each of my issues

I’ve been using it since I started collecting my comics last year.  Recently I started thinking about digital comics and whether it makes financial sense.  For my comic book reader I decided to use qcomicbook.  I really like how it works.

qcomicbook displaying Mark Waid's Insufferable #2
qcomicbook displaying Mark Waid’s Insufferable #2

The only problem is that qcomicbook doesn’t have a built-in comic database.  It’s not extremely easy to see all my Spider-Man comic books, for example.  Then I realized that I already had all that data within Tellico.  I can sort by author, series, character, and pretty much any other field I have in there.  All it would need is a way to link the comic to the file on my computer and to be told to use qcomicbook to launch it.  The programmer already has something like that built in for viewing the cover, so it shouldn’t be too hard to have that added on. This would also work really well because there isn’t really a standard with digital comic books for storing the metadata.  I’m going to see if the Tellico programmer is game to doing so and if he does, I’ll be sure to blog about it here.

By Eric Mesa

Eric was an avid comic reader in the late 1990s. He then took a hiatus from comic reading until 2011 when he dove head-first back into comics. Back in the 90s Eric only read Marvel comics although he loved Batman: The Animated Series. After a 2 year dalliance (2011-2013) with Marvel and DC, Eric now almost exclusively reads Image Comics.

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