I see the issue with something as vague as "comic books" being misleading. I totally think manga/manwha are valid subcategories from a format perspective. Someone suggested breaking out "superhero comics," which aren't a format per se, but which handles the problem of the Big Two as massive fandoms and makes it clear what doesn't belong in that category. Since the vast majority of floppies would end up there, that would be cool. There would be limited crossover with manga/manwha and graphic novels. It might solve the problem of just having a giant soup in the main category-- the number of comic books that would end up in the main category would be significantly smaller.
I work in comics, and the way to distinguish is usually to refer to periodical comics as floppies, but I don't know how ubiquitous that term is.
Y'all are doing a great job with this. All of your responses have been well-thought-out, reasonable, and I definitely feel like my opinions have been considered. Thanks a ton to everybody working on it.
Floppies is, I think, a pretty well-known term if you're immersed in comics fandom and basically totally unknown if you're not. I read comics for years without ever coming across it, because I bought trades instead and was only a casual reader, and then learned it once I actually got into DC and then Marvel fandom rather than just reading some of the titles. So it probably has no issues for users who are already firmly in the fandom, but would be opaque to a new fan hitting the archive as their first stop for fic.
I was one of the people who suggested "Superhero Comics" and I'm not in love with the option, which is likely to create significant headaches (is "Sandman" a superhero comic? Do all Vertigo titles belong in that category by virtue of being published by one of the big two, regardless of whether they fit there at first glance? And so on and so forth) but I think it's still better than the current proposal. I've seen people suggest "American Comics" as an alternative, which seems like it might potentially be useful, but that does have some overlap with the new "Country of Origin" tags in ways that I can see might seem undesirable if you look from an archive organization standpoint rather than purely a user interface one.
For me, I think the reason I like "Superhero" is because of things like Vertigo-- many Vertigo titles are adamantly not superhero comics and don't really belong thematically with the rest of the DC titles. Sandman is a little trickier, because it is a comic with superheroes, but not a superhero comic. But, then, things can belong to multiple subgroups.
I don't think "American" comics works because not all comics in that format are American.
Comment on Call for Feedback on Category Change Proposal
teaberryblue Thu 19 Sep 2013 06:10PM UTC
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LadyOscar (Category_Change_Workgroup) Thu 19 Sep 2013 09:23PM UTC
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teaberryblue Thu 19 Sep 2013 09:27PM UTC
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undomielregina Thu 19 Sep 2013 11:41PM UTC
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teaberryblue Fri 20 Sep 2013 01:35AM UTC
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