Comic Vine

A couple years ago I decided that I was going to read every X-Men related series, mini-series and one-shot ever put out by Marvel since the publication of X-Men #1 in 1963. I stopped a little over a year ago when I built my new computer, and by that point I had followed the continuity up to 1988 with the help of an archaic looking web flow chart. Over the last couple of months I've been getting back into comic books a whole lot more - thank you, in alphabetical order, Amy, Arthur, Chad, Jared, and Josh - and I've found that my archaic guide no longer exists. They apparently stopped paying the domain fees.

After I could find no satisfactory reading order flow charts, I began looking for web sites that could tell me about publication dates. There are quite a few wikis out there that claim to have all of the good information regarding comic books, their publication dates, story summaries, character overviews and creator information, but just about every one I encountered was not worth the time. While looking for the continuity of X-titles in the late-80s, I kept finding web sites with little or no information on older issues, issues that debuted before the era of wikis. While looking for recent comics - the recent 2009 reboot of the Ultimate Marvel Universe under the title Ultimate Comics, for example - I found huge gaps even much of the information hadn't even been archived on the main comic publishers' web sites. I waded through a whole lot of crap before I finally found something I could put my name behind.

Comic Vine is the wiki I put my name behind in reference to comic book information on the web. I've fed a great deal of titles into this database from post-Crisis on Infinite Earth Batman story arcs to Green Lantern: Rebirth continuity in reference to Infinite Crisis, 52, and Final Crisis, Marvel's X-titles from 1963 until present, Marvel's Ultimate Comics titles, and Starman. Equipped with an easy to use search box and intuitive formatting, Comic Vine is like the IMDB of comics mixed with the Rotten Tomatoes of comics. Whenever I'm either too embarrassed or it's too late to ask one of my super-knowledgeable comic book friends, I am on Comic Vine. If you're into comic books, I'd check it out here.