Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Daniel Clowes Bibliography: 10 Years

February 1 marks the ten-year anniversary of the Daniel Clowes Bibliography, a project I began researching in 1999. In the mid-late 90s, David Pautler put a bibliography of Clowes’s work online at wraithspace.com (long since gone), which (if I remember correctly) had around 200-250 items. With David's permission, I took that information as a starting point and began using various search engines, library databases, store for-sale lists, eBay, correspondence, etc. in an effort to identify as many items as I could. Currently, the bibliography has around 1400 items, though I'm sure many others exist.

It's been through a few formats with different sections and subsections; the format I’ve had for the last few years is, I hope, an arrangement that makes it easy for users to locate an item they're searching for, or to see all of the work Clowes has done in a given category. I have also gathered material from the main sections of bibliography into two lists:

Stories in Eightball, Lloyd Llewellyn, and DC Collections
, an alphabetical, cross-referenced list of stories in his two comic series and his books.

Uncollected Stories
, a list of stories/strips that have never been collected into a Clowes anthology.

Initially, the site had no updates section, and a few users requested one; so I have been keeping a record of updates since July 2002. Users occasionally suggest that I provide images of each object, but my goal is simply to track down items, place them into the bibliography’s categories, and annotate them -- when it’s useful to do so. Some sections have more details -- here, for example, I identify all of the contents (with page counts) of each issue of Eightball -- while other sections are simply a list of items.

A number of people have been helpful along the way, and I thank them here.

http://www.danielclowesbibliography.com/

2 comments:

Charlie said...

I have nothing really interesting to note here but I thought I should post to say that I do indeed find that site of yours very helpful.

I do kind of wish though, as you say others have suggested, that you would collect and archive images too but I imagine that would probably quickly become a burden to keep on top of.

Ken Parille said...

Charlie,

Thanks. I have considered adding images a number of times, but it's too labor-intensive -- maybe when I get an intern . . . .