34 posts tagged with "comic"

I've spent the last week or so, implementing User Collections, a feature for Metron that lets you catalog, organize, and track your personal comic book collection.

What is User Collections?​

User Collections is a comic book collection management system.

Key Features​

📚 Complete Cataloging​

Track every aspect of your collection:

• Quantity tracking for duplicate copies
• Format support (Print, Digital, or Both)
• Professional grading (CGC, CBCS, PGX) or self-assessed grades
• Purchase details including date, price, and store
• Storage locations to help you find your comics
• Personal notes for each item

⚡ Bulk Operations​

Adding your entire collection is fast and efficient:

• Add entire series runs in seconds with the "Add from Series" feature
• Specify issue ranges to add specific portions of a series
• Automatic duplicate detection prevents adding the same issue twice
• Smart defaults for format and reading status when adding multiple issues

📊 Statistics & Analytics​

Get insights into your collection:

• Total items and value tracking
• Reading progress (read vs. unread counts)
• Format breakdown with visual charts
• Publisher distribution to see where your collection focuses
• Top 10 series by item count
• Series type analysis (ongoing, mini-series, etc.)

🔍 Smart Gap Detection​

Helps you complete your series runs:

• Missing Issues list shows series where you own some but not all issues
• Color-coded progress bars (red/yellow/green) indicate completion percentage
• Detailed missing issue views list exactly which issues you need
• Completion statistics help you prioritize which series to finish

⭐ Reading Tracker & Ratings​

Track your reading journey:

• Mark issues as read with date tracking
• 5-star rating system for personal recommendations
• Quick rating via HTMX (no page reload required)
• Filter by reading status to find unread comics

🔐 Privacy First​

Your collection is completely private:

• Login required for all collection features
• No public sharing (unlike reading lists)
• Owner-only access ensures only you can view/edit your items

How It Works​

Adding Individual Issues​

Navigate to /collection/add/ and search for any issue using the autocomplete feature. Fill in optional details like grade, purchase price, storage location, and click "Add to Collection."

Bulk Adding from Series​

Visit /collection/add-from-series/ to quickly add entire series runs:

1. Select a series
2. Choose to add all issues or specify a range (e.g., #1-50)
3. Set default format and reading status
4. Click "Add Issues"

The system automatically skips issues already in your collection, making it perfect for cataloging longboxes or digital libraries.

Finding Missing Issues​

The Missing Issues feature (/collection/missing/) identifies gaps in your series runs:

• See completion percentages for each series
• Click "View Missing" to see specific issue numbers
• Use these lists when shopping for back issues
• Track your progress toward completing series

Powerful Filtering​

Find exactly what you're looking for with extensive filtering options:

• Series name, publisher, or imprint
• Grade and grading company
• Format (print/digital/both)
• Reading status and ratings
• Storage location or purchase store
• Combine multiple filters for precise searches

Technical Highlights​

Built on Django with:

• CGC grading scale with 27 grade levels (0.5 to 10.0)
• Money field support for accurate purchase price tracking
• HTMX integration for seamless rating updates
• Chartkick visualizations for statistics
• Optimized queries with proper indexes for performance
• Unique constraints prevent duplicate entries
• RESTful API available at /api/collection/

Use Cases​

For Completionists: Use Missing Issues to systematically fill gaps in your series runs. Color-coded progress bars show which series you're close to completing.

For Investors: Track purchase prices and grades for valuable books. Monitor total collection value and maintain detailed records for insurance.

For Readers: Mark issues as read, rate them, and track your progress. Filter to find unread comics in your collection.

For Organizers: Use storage locations to keep track of where comics are physically stored. Perfect for managing multiple longboxes or storage units.

Mokkari​

A new release of Mokkari will be made this week with support for the user collections API endpoints.

Possible Future Enhancements​

More Import Options: When I get some time, I'll look at adding support for importing existing collections. If you track your collection elsewhere I'd be interest what export options you have, so please contact me.

Wish List: A logical addition would be to have the option for make a wish list of issues to purchase.

Pull List: Another closely related feature that could be useful.

Comic Value: It would be interesting to be able to provided estimated market values for issues.

Monthly Statistics​

During November the Metron Project added the following to its database:

• Users: 30
• Issues: 1,042
• Creators: 158
• Characters: 531

Thanks to everyone that contributed!

Reading Lists​

Mea Culpa​

So... the last post I made introducing Reading List, unfortunately caused a bit of drama, since I forgot to attribute that the 13 initial reading lists were created from cbl files from the CBL-ReadingLists group. I'm sorry for this oversight and it wasn't my intention to give the impression they were created by me. I've since made a note on those reading lists attributing them to this group, and removed the import CLB functionality from the site.

Due to the aforementioned drama, I've had to call a bit of an audible in regard to the maintaining of the reading lists owned by the Metron user. I'm planning to work on adding support for non-admin users to edit these lists over the Holiday break and if you have an interest in helping to maintain them, please contact me.

One side-effect of my mistake is that it spurred on one of our community members to write a tool to retrieve the data directly from the reading lists source and check them against the site, and then produce a json file or if issues are missing generate a report that can be acted upon. Currently, I've got a management command to import these json files, but maybe I'll look at adding POST support to the API in the future.

Down the road, I'll look at adding arc-based bulk additions, other import options, and maybe an associated reading list fields.

Adding Series to Reading List​

I've added the option to add a series to a reading list, which should be easier than just adding individual issues.

API​

I've spent the last week or so working on the Reading List API, and it's finally been pushed to production. There is fairly detailed API documentation on the wiki, and there is also the Swagger API Documents.

I was originally planning to write a simple tool to generate reading lists from the API, but have held off due to:

• CBL files don't really have a schema.
• json-cbl-standard aren't currently designed to handle information from an API that well.

Mokkari​

A new version of Mokkari has been released that adds support for the new Reading List API, and also reworked the rate limiting code so that it produces more feedback to the user. If you have written an application that uses Mokkari, you'll want to modify your API calls to Metron to sleep when receiving RateLimitError. For example:

>>> import time
>>> from mokkari.exceptions import RateLimitError
>>> session = Session("username", "password")
>>> def fetch_with_rate_limit_handling(issue_id):
...     while True:
...         try:
...             return session.issue(issue_id)
...         except RateLimitError as e:
...             if "per minute" in str(e):
...                 # Minute limit - automatically wait and retry
...                 print(f"{e}")
...                 print(f"Waiting {format_time(e.retry_after)}...")
...                 time.sleep(e.retry_after)
...                 continue
...             elif "per day" in str(e):
...                 # Daily limit - ask user whether to wait or quit
...                 response = input(f"Wait {format_time(e.retry_after)}? (y/n): ")
...                 if response.lower() == 'y':
...                     time.sleep(e.retry_after)
...                     continue
...                 else:
...                     raise
...             else:
...                 raise
>>> issue = fetch_with_rate_limit_handling(1)

Metron-Tagger​

A couple of releases of Metron-Tagger were made since my last blog post. The big change was support for writing/reading metadata was added, but implemented differently than other tagging software which have overloaded the PDF metadata. I decided to treat PDFs, like we do with CBZ, by embedding the metadata.

After discussing this with AJ, he has also made a release of Comicbox supporting this method of writing comic metadata to a PDF.

The latest release has also improved the rate limiting, so that when the daily limit is exceeded, the user is asked whether they want to wait the reported number of minutes or quit processing the remaining files.

Cloudflare​

The site has been dealing with AiBots and scrapers quite a bit lately, and I'm giving serious thought to moving the site DNS over to Cloudflare to take advantage of the bot protection. I'm still working on what the migration plan would entail (name server changes, SSL certs, nginx, etc) and will make a decision once that's finished. If we do make the switch, the site will most likely be down for a while (assuming everything goes as planned), and I will put a notice on the site beforehand.

OpenCollective​

If you would like to help keep the lights on at the project, we have an account at Open Collective to defray the servers costs and help with increasing future server capacity.

Anyway, I think that's everything for this month! Take care.

Monthly Statistics​

During October the Metron Project added the following to its database:

• Users: 27
• Issues: 940
• Creators: 83
• Characters: 462

Thanks to everyone that contributed!

Website Changes​

I spent most of the month working on improvements to the site.

Major Features​

Wiki Integration​

One of the most substantial additions to Metron is the integration of django-wiki (#403), replacing the previous flatpages system. This enhancement includes:

• A wiki with article creation, editing, and history tracking
• Custom Bulma CSS styling for all wiki templates with dark mode support
• Support for attachments and images through wiki plugins

I've copied over the information from the old flat pages, but work still needs to be done on adding information that is of use to our users.

Performance Optimizations for Detail Views​

A fairly comprehensive performance overhaul (#412) dramatically improved page load times across all detail views:

• Implemented lazy loading for related resources using HTMX
• Added prefetch_related() and select_related() to reduce database queries
• Created reusable LazyLoadMixin to eliminate code duplication
• Added count annotations to replace separate COUNT queries
• Introduced pagination for related items on detail pages

Edit History Tracking​

The project now includes comprehensive edit history tracking using django-simple-history (#392) compared to our fairly hacky prior implementation:

• Historical records for all major models (arcs, characters, creators, issues, publishers, series, teams, universes)
• Dedicated history views showing who edited what and when
• Improved data audit trail

Feature Enhancements​

Issue Credit Duplication​

Added a convenient feature to duplicate issue credits (#411), streamlining the workflow when creating issues with similar creative teams.

Variant Price Support​

Extended the variant model to support price information (#391), including price and currency fields.

Money Field Migration​

Migrated the Issue price field to use proper MoneyField (#390) using a multi-step database migrations:

• Currency support with custom widget for price entry
• Safe data migration preserving existing price information
• Enhanced API serialization for price data

Reprint Story Management​

Added functionality to sync characters, teams, and story titles to collections (#372, #373) from the issues being reprinted which should make it a bit easier to add collected editions.

Code Quality Improvements​

Refactoring Efforts​

A bunch of refactoring was done to improve code maintainability:

• Model refactoring (#409): Cleaned up model properties and methods
• View refactoring (#407): Introduced constants and mixins for DRY code
• API refactoring (#406, #405): Streamlined serializers across all endpoints
• Template refactoring (#374, #375): Reorganized templates with new partial system and improved Bulma CSS integration

Query Optimization​

Optimized database querysets across all major views (#408) using select_related() and prefetch_related() to reduce N+1 query problems.

Testing​

Added comprehensive test coverage:

• README files for test directories (#404)
• ForeignKey history tracking tests
• Improved test fixtures and factories

User Experience Improvements​

Template Modernization​

Significant template improvements focused on consistency and usability:

• Introduced reusable partials for forms, pagination, and card grids
• Enhanced empty states and error messages
• Improved mobile responsiveness

UI/UX Enhancements​

• User profile pages now show contribution statistics
• Better icon consistency across the interface
• Improved text contrast for accessibility
• Integration of Bulma Calendar for date inputs

Infrastructure & Dependencies​

Django Updates​

• Updated to Django 5.2.7 (#371) and subsequent patch releases
• Added django-money for proper currency handling
• Integrated django-htmx for performance optimizations

Code Quality Tools​

• Updated pre-commit hooks and code formatting rules (#401)
• Enforced consistent code style with djlint and ruff

API Improvements​

• Enhanced pagination schema definitions (#398) (Artem Ryabkov)
• Improved serializers for better API response efficiency
• Fixed edge cases in various API endpoints

Bug Fixes & Minor Improvements​

• Fixed template rendering for mobile devices (#395)
• Improved empty state handling (#399)
• Enhanced form validation and error handling
• Better currency display in API responses
• Fixed various template formatting issues

Future Plans​

I've started to think about what I'd like to work on next year, and the big item is to reduce the project reliance on me. In particular, I want to address:

Financial Independence​

Over the past six years, I've covered the hosting costs and related expenses (domain registration, email services, etc.). Recently, I've started drawing from the project's OpenCollective funds, which currently provide approximately 11 months of runway at our current capacity.

The Goal: Build a sustainable funding base through many small contributions ($2-$5/month) rather than relying on a few large donors. This distributes the financial responsibility and ensures the project's long-term stability.

How You Can Help:

• Share ideas for attracting recurring financial supporters
• Suggest ways to recognize and thank contributors (I'm considering adding OpenCollective widgets to the site)
• Spread the word about the project's funding needs

If you have suggestions or feedback, please reach out!

Governance​

As the project has grown, so has the need to evolve from a single-person decision-making model to a more collaborative governance structure. While centralized decision-making worked well in the early days, enabling quick iterations and changes, but as the project has matured it make sense to add more leadership.

Why Change: Distributing governance responsibilities will:

• Bring diverse perspectives to project decisions
• Reduce dependency on a single maintainer
• Create more opportunities for community involvement
• Ensure the project's continuity and resilience

Next Steps: I'm researching governance models from similar projects, particularly the Grand Comics Database (GCD), to understand what structures work well for community-driven comic databases. My experience with Fedora Project governance provides a foundation, though Metron likely needs a different, more streamlined approach given our scope and community size.

I'll be starting a discussion thread on our GitHub Discussions page soon. If you're interested in helping shape Metron's governance structure, please join the conversation or reach out directly.

OpenCollective​

If you would like to help keep the lights on at the project, we have an account at Open Collective to defray the servers costs and help with increasing future server capacity.

Anyway, I think that everything for this month! Take care.

Monthly Statistics​

During September the Metron Project added the following to its database:

• Users: 27
• Issues: 3,015
• Creators: 371
• Characters: 1,629

Thanks to everyone that contributed!

Metron-Tagger​

A new version of Metron-Tagger was released that added the ability to skip issues that have multiple matches (--skip-multiple) but can't be matched based its cover hash.

Collected Editions​

Back in May the decision was made to temporarily disable new collections (Trade Paperback, Omnibus, and Hard Covers) until better documentation was written since their handling was a source of confusion for users due to our lack of documentation.

Thankfully, anon_hacker47 (from the Matrix General Chat Room) spent time writing new documentation (located at the bottom of the page under the Collected Editions heading), which should help in most cases. Unfortunately, the comic industry isn't known for it's consistency, so there may be cases which the guidelines don't cover and in those cases it's best to ask either in the Matrix chat room or in the Github Discussions before adding a collected edition.

So, with that the documentation completed I've enabled support for collected editions on the site. In addition, I spent some time implementing a helper function which will add resource data (character & teams) to a collection provided that it has reprints associated with it. There are some caveats, tho:

• Only issues with a single story will be synced, since if there are more we can't differentiate what characters are in which story.
• Resource will be synced if the collection does not already have any characters or teams associated with it.
• I may add the reprinted issues story titles to the collection in the future, but need to look into it a bit closer to make sure it doesn't cause more work than it solves.

The Sync button, which is only active if it's a valid series type and doesn't contain any characters or teams, will be used to run this functionality. After it's ran, it will provide notification on what was or wasn't not added to the collection.

If you have suggestions on any improvements to the guidelines, don't hesitate to reach out on Matrix.

OpenCollective​

If you would like to help keep the lights on at the project, we have an account at Open Collective to defray the servers costs and help with increasing future server capacity.

Anyway, that's all I got for this month. Take care!

Monthly Statistics​

During August the Metron Project added the following to its database:

• Users: 52
• Issues: 1,822
• Creators: 182
• Characters: 332

Thanks to everyone that contributed!

ComicTagger​

Due to some API usage problems support for Metron was removed from ComicTagger. This was primarily done since ComicTagger was designed with Comic Vine's API in mind and Metron's API differs enough that ComicTagger was using 2-14x the number of API requests compared to other clients for the same data.

For example, someone tagging their Captain America series would be using around 4,616 API calls with ComicTagger compared to about 355 API calls if they had used Metron-Tagger. Due to trying to keep up with this additional load, we've had to upgrade our server specs twice this summer and came to the conclusion this wasn't sustainable in the long term.

So, after September 12th you will be unable to useComic Tagger to tag your comics,but if you still wish to use Metron for tagging, you can use Metron-Tagger or Perdoo. If you have any questions or concerns don't hesitate to reach out on Matrix.

OpenCollective​

If you would like to help keep the lights on at the project, we have an account at Open Collective to defray the servers costs and help with increasing future server capacity.

Anyway, that's all I got for this month. Take care!

This is a summary of noticeable happenings during July.

Monthly Statistics​

During June the Metron Project added the following to its database:

• Users: 45
• Issues: 1,786
• Creators: 228
• Characters: 448

Thanks to everyone that contributed!

Final Order Cutoff (FOC) Dates​

With Diamond announcing they will stop printing their Previews, I had some comic industry people contact me about adding the Final Order Cutoff (FOC) dates to upcoming issue releases. With that information, users could use our API to create their pull lists. This was a fairly simple request, which won't affect most users (since my tools that import upcoming releases will handle it) and was added to the site on June 17th.

One thing I still need to decide on is, whether to add new releases that don't have there final cover dressing released (Marvel, in particular, tends to release them really late) or not. If this was done, I would need to modify my tools to make it easier to update the issue covers with the final version when it is released, and most likely clean the sites cover cache more frequently.

Darkseid / Metron-Tagger Release​

I spent a bit of time this month refactoring Darkseid and Metron-Tagger which should make it easier maintain and give a bit of a performance improvements. If you are interested in the changes, they are here: Darkseid Release Notes & Metron-Tagger Release Notes

OpenCollective​

If you would like to help keep the lights on at the project, we have an account at Open Collective to defray the servers costs and help with increasing future server capacity.

Anyway, that's all I got for this month. Take care!

Monthly Statistics​

During April the Metron Project added the following to its database:

• Users: 49
• Issues: 3,051
• Creators: 709
• Characters: 1,288

And during May the following were added:

• Users: 46
• Issues: 3,398
• Creators: 208
• Characters: 1,222

Thanks to everyone that contributed!

Metron-Tagger​

A couple of new releases of Metron-Tagger were made in April. They primarily consisted of the following new features from Adrian Petrescu:

• If passing more than one comic when using the --id option it is assumed the id number is the Metron Series id. For example if you ran the following, it would assume all the issue in that directory where of the same series and improve the odds of a match:

  metron-tagger -m --id 9513 ~/Comics/DC\ Comics/Metamorpho\ -\ The\ Element\ Man/

• Added a --accept-only option to automatically accept single valid matches, regardless of the cover phash hamming distance.

Documentation​

Currently, the documentation for Metron is using Django's flatpages, which isn't great since it's very bare-bones, and I'd need to muck around with account permissions for regular users to edit them.

So, I'm planning to add django-wiki to the site to handle the documentation, since it fixes the short-comings of using flatpages. Unfortunately, to have it not stick out like a sore-thumb compared to the rest of the site, I'll need to override the templates for that app. To make matters more difficult, django-simple-bulma still uses v0.9.4 instead of v1.0.*, so that will need to be updated first (since I don't want to override django-wiki's templates twice). I've started working on doing that, but since upstream's (and mine) free time is fairly limited there isn't an ETA when that will happen. 😥

Trade Paperbacks​

Tying into the above topic, one constant source of confusion on the site is the handling of Trade Paperbacks (which is mainly due to the industries inconsistent handling of them over the last 30+ years). So, until better documentation on their handling is written, adding new TPB series has been temporarily disabled. I don't have an ETA when they'll be written (truthfully, I don't have much interest in TPB's), so if you'd like to help out writing them, contact me.

Miscellaneous​

• Translator was added as an option for a creator role.

OpenCollective​

If you would like to help the project, we have an account at Open Collective to defray the servers costs and help with increasing future server capacity.

Anyway, that's all I got for this month. Take care!

Monthly Statistics​

During March the Metron Project added the following to its database:

• Users: 55
• Issues: 4,564
• Creators: 1,686
• Characters: 1,470

Thanks to everyone that contributed!

Rate Limiting​

On March 10th, the API rate limit for the site was modified by adding another limit of 10,000 requests per day to the existing limit of 30 requests per minute. Most users shouldn't see any change, but this will allow the site to better manage a sudden influx of new users like what happened when Comic Vine went down last fall.

Recent Work​

Finished working on an internal tool that uses Metron's POST API to add series to the database, and have chosen a handful of users to give the appropriate permissions needed to run it. With any luck, this should free up some of my time so that I can spend more time working on the site's code.

One side effect of allowing some users to use the POST API is that I needed to disable the ability to create creators from the issue form. This is something I had already been thinking about doing, since it had created a fairly annoying amount of extra work on my end to remove the duplicate entries that had been created in error.

OpenCollective​

We've recently set up an account at Open Collective if you wish to help defray the server costs and help with increasing future server capacity. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Anyway, that's all I got for this month. Take care!

Monthly Statistics​

During February the Metron Project added the following to its database:

• Users: 51
• Issues: 2,674
• Creators: 526
• Characters: 879

Thanks to everyone that contributed!

Recent Work​

One of my goals for 2025 was to make the project less dependent on me, and for most of this month I've been working on the tooling to allowing some users to use the POST API to add comics to the database. This will allow other folks to handle requests to add series to Metron. With luck, I should finish next month, and I'll start looking at what users to promote.

Comic Book Reading Lists​

Recently, I've been looking at Comic Book Reading Lists since a bug report was opened to add support for generating them. Currently, users use CBL's that are imported into their comic server of choice (Kavita, Codex, etc.), which seems non-optimal primarily since, in essence, it's another database of information. Now, this makes sense, since for a long time the only source of usable data via an API was Comic Vine, which hasn't had a developer presence in years, and having a new feature added to their site is extremely unlikely.

I think a better solution would be for the other databases that offer an API (GCD & Metron) to have the option for users to create reading lists (similar to MovieDB) and have that data available either by generating a file or through an API call. Now, to do this we would need to work with the comic server developers to determine exactly what data they would need, though it would probably look similar to this:

{
  "arc": {
    "name": "Foo Bar Wars"
  }
  "issues": {
    "issue": {
      "id": {
      "cv_id": 9999
      "metron": 5678
      "gcd": 9856
      }
      "index": 0
    }
    "issue": {
      "id": {
      "cv_id": 12345
      "metron": 9999
      "gcd": 123
      }
      "index": 1
    }
  }
}

The current standard (CBL) and the recent json-cbl-standard contains a look of information that I can't see a comic server needing, primarily all the series-level info which the comic servers should already have in their databases. Of course, I'd love to hear from any developer in this space to verify that.

Once the basic functionality was added, importing any existing CBL into GCD or Metron should be fairly trivial, since Metron links other sites issue id's (GCD would be able to use Metron's API to link since they don't track this information).

Anyway, those are some of my quick thoughts on what the future of Comic Book Reading Lists could look like, and if anyone has interest in working on this potential future project, contact me on GitHub or Matrix.

Rate Limiting​

One thing I've been debating is whether to modify our Rate Limiting policy. The primary reason for this is there are a lot of user that hammer the API for 24+ hours straight for days on end, and I'm contemplating adding a total number of API hits per day (maybe something like 10,000) in addition to the 30/hour to ease the server load.

Now doing this will make it a bit harder implement to write software for the API since the developer will need to track the API rate between sessions, but there are libraries like pyrate-limiter which use a SQLite or Redis backend to make this easier to implement.

Anyway, this is something I'm just mulling over and if you want to weigh-in you can on Matrix or in a GitHub Discussion.

OpenCollective​

We've recently set up an account at Open Collective if you wish to help defray the server costs and help with increasing future server capacity. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Anyway, that's all I got for this month. Take care!