The 40 Years of Comics Project: Weird Metadata Post #3 (Crosspost from "Giant Box of Comics")

Apparently my database software can make graphs. This is endlessly amusing for me, and I'm going to share them with you.

Not all of my comics have all of the same data entered in the database. Some stories don't have titles, for instance. Or the writer and artist may not have been recorded in the comic. But most have Cover Years. It makes sense that 2001 and 2002 are the most represented, as that's when I had my store. But 1987 comes in after that, my X-Men, Avengers, Animal Man, didn't have to pay for my own food days.

Ha. Animal Man is the only character who makes enough appearances through the database to merit mention. What this actually says is that I was far more caring about keeping track of my Animal Man appearances than any other character in the collection. This'll be an interesting graph to run once all of the comics are properly indexed.

No surprise which genre wins out in my collection. That Adventure comes in second is interesting. I wouldn't necessarily characterize a lot of what I've got as Adventure, though I suppose that term can be applied quite widely.

As with the genre list, no surprises for the top place for writers. I suppose that Chris Claremont is the third-highest representation has something to do with the aforementioned 1987 collection. It would be interesting to find a year, and read only comics from that year for a year.

One last one for today. For publishers, the top two aren't much of a surprise. Actually, none of the top ones really are, simply for the fact that they can handle the kind of volume that produces far more representation than the smaller publishers.

Okay, that's it for now, but that's a fun little toy. I'll see if I can generate some other interesting visualizations another time.

The Building Chronicle: A Critical Consideration of LEGO's "Bionicle" Series - Building Through part 1.4 - 2001

I'd said last time that I would finish up with the Rahi this time through, but I think the only thing I have left to say about them is that I'm not a fan of dismantling them. As I noted before, they're amongst the most complex Bionicle sets, so they take a lot of time to take apart. That said, especially in the case of this build through, I'm excited to take them apart so I can get on to 2002. But before that...

I'll end off with a brief look at some of the ancillary merchandise that surrounded the Bionicle line at it's beginning. One of the fundamental things I'm going to be looking at with the case studies in my dissertation, of which Bionicle will be a minor one, is the transmedial nature of these stories. They span numerous different media, from traditional narrative sites (comics, books, etc.) to toys, costumes, video games, and music. Here in Canada, a lot of the ancillary items were not available. I don't recall seeing the Halloween costumes or running shoes with interchangeable masks at the time, though I imagine that their production runs were limited, as was their distribution. I'm not entirely certain where I found the checklist that I use to keep track of these items. I was pretty sure it was over at BZ Power, but I can't find it there anymore. My most recent find as far as this aspect of the series goes came just a few months ago when I found a Vakama Hordika voice changer mask on Kijiji for $25. It's pretty great, and I'll include it when we eventually get to 2005.

Not much really to say about this. It's the Happy Meal bag that the McToran were packaged in. I only ever got the one, as I'm a vegetarian and McDonald's offers very little (or did at the time) to accommodate me. I probably got this one for my son. Instead, I would hit all of the McDonald's in my local area (probably 6 or 7) once a week to see if the new Bionicle had come in. It took a while, but I eventually got there.

I was very excited for the "Quest for Makuta" game, and it really is a cool little portion of the series, if not actually a great game. The board (which I'll perhaps put together and post as an interregnum) is cool, depicting Mata Nui but broken up into pieces that allow for some random world generation. The central temple piece is the top from one of the old canisters, and the character pieces are great little stand-ups of each of the Toa Mata. As far as game play goes, however, I think I've only played this game twice in the 15 years I've owned it. I guess just because something can be transmedial doesn't mean it should poke it's nose into all media. My assessment of the 2003 "Mask of Light" board game is pretty similar. I've not got my hands on the later game (Inika-era, I think).

When Bionicle first dropped, Trading Card Games were huge. Bionicle's attempt at a TCG was relatively short-lived (main series, and I think two booster series), though there's a later attempt at the form that comes in 2003 (?). I was very much into TCGs at the time, so I picked this up, but it's definitely a game geared toward younger audiences. One has to travel around Mata Nui completing challenges and collecting pieces of armour, weapons, and masks in order to win the game. There were three starter packs, each featuring two Toa. As with the board game, I think I've played this game only a couple of times since I got it (which probably means it's time to give it, and the board game, another go), but the map, which was double-sided, makes a cool poster of Mata Nui for my building corner when two of them are put together.

(Anyone remember when the kids used to use pens?)

I kind of love these pens. What you don't see pictured here are the various little blocks and beads with which one could customize each pen. I think my affection for the pens is the same as my affection for the Lego watches - they embrace the customizability that is inherent in the whole line. Though I've got each of the little masks (each about the size of a thumb nail) at the top, one could easily move them down. There are lots of other blocks, and if I had to make one criticism of them, it would be that they're not compatible with the sets themselves, as the watches are. It would be great to use the little Pohatu mask as shoulder armour, or the blocks on a Turaga staff or something. I think of all the pieces in my collection, these one are the ones that feel most like collectibles, in that the ink has long since dried up, so they can't actually be used as pens anymore. They're decoration now. That's an intriguing thought, that something can shift identities within a collection based on the combination of time and physical make-up. I was about to say that this is the only example, but then there's this..

Along with Kopaka, this is the oldest piece in the collection, the reason being that it was packaged with Kopaka when I first bought him. I can't for the life of me remember what's on it, though I think the Po-Koro interactive tour, identical to the one on the Power Pack, is on there, with other stuff. However, it, too, is simply a collectible now, in that Windows 10 refuses to recognize the data contained herein. It's very likely that the information on this disc is preserved at the Biomedia Project, so it's still available, albeit in a mediated form.

And, aside from the comics and masks, that's it for 2001. As sophisticated and malleable as the series and its elements become over the years, I still have a soft spot for these original Toa and the variety of toys, books, games, and such that spring up around them. It's like looking at one of the original Superman comics, and realizing that a lot of them were pretty bad, but that without them, we wouldn't have what we have today.

So now I'm off to dismantle a year's worth of Bionicle, pack it all back into storage, and begin the lovely task of building 2002. The swarm is coming, the Matoran begin to fight back, and the Toa become something....new.

The Building Chronicle: A Critical Consideration of LEGO's "Bionicle" Series - Building Through part 1.3 - 2001

Whenever I engage in a rebuild of the Bionicle series, I always find myself excited to build the Rahi. They're certainly the most diverse of the villains the Toa (any of the Toa) face over the course of the decade-long first wave and, to me at least, represent a moment early on in the series when the designers were not...well, lazy is the word that springs to mind, though I'll admit that I have no idea of what kinds of decisions lay behind the movement from diverse modelling to clones.

That said, when I actually get to building the Rahi, I get impatient for the model to be done. The Rahi (Nui-Rama, Nui-Jaga, Tarakava, Muaka, Kane-Ra, Manas) are the closest the Bionicle line comes to the Technic line of models from which Bionicle sprang, and their relative complexity is one of the facets that links them to Technic quite fundamentally. We could posit that the Rahi models were actually LEGO's attempt to bring older builders into the Bionicle line in much the same way that the Toa, with their action figure-esque style, would be better suited to bring in younger builders. If I'm anything to go by, it worked. But I still get impatient building them, and I'm not sure why. It could simply be that I've been building and dismantling these models for nearly 15 years, so the shine is off. Regardless, they represent a very interesting, innovative, and unique moment in Bionicle's history.

Early on in the line, the Rahi were relatively difficult to find, and were remarkably expensive, compared to the Toa and Turaga. The expense of these sets might be a reason that the very large sets disappeared for some time from later Bionicle iterations, or perhaps it was the success of the figure-based models that spurred the creation of the "titans" line of villains and heroes, models that still incorporated some Technic elements, but really were very much on the way to becoming Bionicle, as opposed to Technic. But before that happened, we had wild animals to build.

The main series of Rahi are well-known by this point. Giant mosquitoes, giant scorpions, water lizards, bulls, great cats, and giant crabs. All of these creatures were possessed by the Makuta and sent to stop the Toa from locating their Masks of Power. In the comics and books, the Rahi who had been taken over by Makuta were always identified by the corrupted masks they wore. Unfortunately, the only model to have such masks was Muaka. I would have loved to see the Manas or Tarakava with infected masks, though the variety of colours of the original masks that we do get as a result of the colour-schemes of the Rahi is quite wonderful. Of course, bearing in mind the expense of the sets, these masks fall into the realm of the most rare and collectible of the series.

(Note: I haven't yet dealt with the collectability of the generation 1 masks, which seems odd considering this is a collecting blog. I think the masks will require a post all their own, perhaps one that encompasses all of the masks of G1, from the early to the last.)

For this particular build through, the aspect of the Rahi sets that was most interesting for me were the combiner sets. The Nui-Kopen, combiner model of the two Nui Rama, is one of my favourite models of the whole line. While the Nui Rama themselves are individually interesting models, the Nui-Kopen really conveys the sense of malevolence one wants to see from a giant insect.

Missing from this particular build through are the Kuma Nui, combiner of Muaka and Kane-Ra, and the Mana Ko, combiner of the Manas. As both of these sets were very expensive, finding them on the secondary market is difficult. But if there's one thing a collector never wants to see, it's the end of his or her collection - having such difficult quarry to hunt down is part of the draw of collecting as a life. This said, what we do have in these pictures and in this build through are numerous official Rahi that were not sets, instructions for which came through either the LEGO website or the LEGO magazine.

The Mata Nui Cow, or Mukau, is easily the cutest model of the Bionicle series. Of real note here, however, are the Ranama and the Kirikori Nui, two models that not only combine Bionicle pieces, but also incorporate elements of the Bionicle forerunners, Throwbots (or Slizers) and Roboriders. As I noted in the previous post, the dearth of older sets makes building these ones difficult, and my own versions of these two Rahi incorporate most, but not all, of the pieces from the official instructions. When I'm tracking down bits for these combiner models, I'll hit a certain point where I feel that, with the pieces I do have that can be used as replacements, building the model minus some of the "official" pieces is worthwhile. For the Ranama, for example, I am missing two of the Throwbot "gearbox" body pieces in yellow. But that's all, so replacing them with the purple ones that you (might) see in the picture is not a big deal for me as a builder. A few of the combiner models I'll be looking at through this series share similar replacement parts, but that's only until I can track down the right pieces.

I think that's long enough for this post. I'll offer some final thoughts on the Rahi next time, as well as looking briefly at some of the ancillary merchandise that accompanied Bionicle at this early stage.

(Okay, two more. The Kahu (Nui-Jaga combiner) and the Dikapi, which basically is a Bionicle chicken.)