What’s in a Name?

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They're the Great Lakes Avengers... or X-Men... or Champions...

They’re the Great Lakes Avengers… or X-Men… or Champions…

I’m oddly exacting about how I want to organize books. My comic dividers put most modifiers behind the actual title, and include a year.

So, while the run that started with Joss Whedon might theoretically just be listed as

ASTONISHING X-MEN

is, in my collection,

X-MEN, ASTONISHING (2004)

This allows, in an ideal world, for it to be placed alongside other X-Men titles if an ABC consistency is allowed/desired, and including the year it was launched gives a good (but not perfect) way to separate the title from it’s 1995 iteration and any future volumes. A best bet to see what year a comic started is comicbookdb.com.

For some books, this leads to some oddities.

WICKED + THE DIVINE, THE (2014) is just to keep “THE”s at the end of the title, even though it looks odd.

SUPERBOY (2011) and SUPERBOY (2011) are a problem I’m vaguely avoiding, for one is Jeff Lemire’s “black shirt and jeans” pre-FLASHPOINT book, while another being the Scott Lobdell “super-bodysuit” NEW 52 iteration. For this, I’m going to roll with SUPERBOY (2011) I and SUPERBOY (2011) II; situations like these are rare, thankfully, but Marvel just tossed a bunch of them with ALL-NEW, ALL-DIFFERENT MARVEL relaunching books like SILK, SPIDER-WOMAN, HOWARD THE DUCK, and THE UNBEATABLE SQUIRREL GIRL within months of their previous iteration’s #1.

Also, titles that may actual lack a colon, but make sense for me mentally (especially in the case of a indicative divider), I might add.

GREEN LANTERN EMERALD WARRIORS and GREEN LANTERN NEW GUARDIANS

exist in my collection as

GREEN LANTERN: EMERALD WARRIORS (2010)
and
GREEN LANTERN: NEW GUARDIANS (2011)

Additionally, I’m completely unsure on how to tackle a book that jumped back and forth on numbering, such as ACTION COMICS or THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN. My current thinking is to just set any re-numberings as a new volume, but as I get to these issues, I’ll handle it more.