Do single issues of comics count as books?

[Grace]

Here is The Manhattan Projects volume 1, a trade paperback which collects issues 1-5 of the comic: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

Someone has also added every individual issue of the comic as a separate book - everything in this list after the first three (which are trades) seems to be a single issue 32-page comic book: https://www.goodreads.com/series/8271...

Same thing with the comic series East of West, by the same author. The first two in the list are trades, everything else is an individual issue: https://www.goodreads.com/series/1023...

This might be the same type of thing, not sure? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

Is this ok? The single issues duplicate material that's in the trades, so maybe they should be treated as different "editions" and merged? Or should they be deleted? Sorry if I'm mistaken, but I don't think I've seen individual comic issues, magazines, journals etc on Goodreads before.

[Z-squared]

If you search the librarian manual, you find this heading under 'these items are books:'

* single-issue magazines and comic books on an individual and unencouraged basis, although they should be typed as "periodical" in the work: media type field

I guess the 'unencouraged' bit just means it is frowned upon, but if someone has gone to the trouble of entering them, leave them be. You could edit them to be a periodical, though.

I wouldn't merge them with multi-issue collections, though. That's like merging separate works into omnibus editions, which is a distinct no-no.

[Cait]

Grace wrote: "Is this ok?"

Not really.

Z-squared wrote: "I wouldn't merge them with multi-issue collections, though. That's like merging separate works into omnibus editions, which is a distinct no-no."

Actually, that is what we do with comic book issues when someone wants to tackle the cleanup. They're treated like short stories which were not published individually and merged into the published book which contains them. (Publication as a periodical issue is not really considered publication as a book.)

Someday soon we're going to have to revisit this policy, though, because people keep adding these issues as book records -- and cataloging them pretty thoroughly! -- and it's far more trouble than it's worth trying to clean them up. I mean, if we're going to open up the floodgates on this definition of "book", we might as well do it for a group of readers well-known for being obsessive catalogers. (Full disclosure: I myself am a comic book reader.)

[Z-squared]

Wow, then someone really, really needs to rewrite that section of the manual.

[Rick]

Glad I found this thread, I was going to post the same question about the same series. The only reason I could see someone taking the time to post all those single issues is that they read the books that way and didn't want to just mark the collected editions as read. I would guess maybe they also like bumping up their numbers. I think changing that word "unencouraged" in the policy would be very useful, I don't really think we need hundreds of issues of TIME or Vogue listed here.

I ran across this problem because I just bought the first collected edition of Manhattan Projects and was stunned to see my search results filled with single issues. I agree that single issues should not be allowed, GR just isn't the place to track reading periodicals/serials IMO. It would take me a VERY long time to add all my comic books to my GR lists...

[Bargle]

My comics also would take a long time.

I know I've run across a large number of SF & F magazines that are in the database.