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How do character and creator stats work?

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Comic books are complex. While many comics feature a single original story, this is often not the case. Trade Paperbacks and Hardcovers reprint stories from other comics. And of course, sometimes comics feature backup stories or other reprinted material. How many appearances do you count for Batman when he's in both the main story and the backup? Do you count only unique appearances if you purchased a Trade Paperback and its reprinted comics? Do you count cameos? For many comic book collection and read tracking tools, these use cases are not possible. Fortunately, League of Comic Geeks' story-driven comic book database empowers our statistics to give you both accuracy and personalization.

Creator and Character stats are calculated with the following settings:

Appearances Enumeration

Set which counting model you'd like to use for tracking.
  • By Comic: Regardless of how many stories there are within a comic, characters and creators are counted just one time each comic.
  • By Story: Pro/Patron Only. If a comic of any format has multiple stories, characters and creators are counted per how many times they are in or credited to a story.
  • By Story & Format: Pro/Patron Only. A combination of the above. Individual stories are not counted for Comics / Annuals / Digital Chapters, but Trade Paperbacks / Hardcovers / Graphic Novels will go by the Story appearance count.

Appearance Uniqueness

Set how you want to handle duplicate stories and comics.
  • Count All Appearances: All instances of an appearance or credit will be counted, regardless of additional copies, covers, or formats.
  • Count Only Unique Appearances: Pro/Patron Only. Only unique appearances will be counted. Multiple copies, covers, and formats will be ignored. For instance, you might have a Trade Paperback and the collected issues - your stats will ignore the additional instances of those stories or comics.

Character Role Filtering

Set what role types you want to include for character appearance tracking.
  • Main, Supporting & Cameo Roles: All appearances of a character will be counted.
  • Main & Supporting Roles Only: Pro/Patron Only. Cameo appearances will not be counted.
  • Main Roles Only: Pro/Patron Only. Supporting and Cameo appearances will not be counted.

Character Disambiguation

Set what type of breakdown of personas and characters you want to include for character appearance tracking.
  • By Personas: Each persona from a character will be counted separately. Eg. Dick Grayson's Nightwing and Robin will appear separately.
  • By Individual: Pro/Patron Only. All personas from a base character will be combined. Eg. All of Dick Grayson's personas (Robin, Nightwing, etc.) will display as "Dick Grayson".
Let's say you regularly read collected editions (Trade Paperbacks or Hardcovers), you can use By Story to count the individual collected stories without having the issues as well. By Story will count the appearances/credits in the reprinted stories, therefore reflecting what you'd see from having the individual issues. Should you also read the individual issues, Count Only Unique Appearances will allow you to avoid counting the duplicate story appearances from both the collected edition and the individual issues. So if a Batman TP included 6 reprinted stories, it will count 6 regardless of you adding the individual issues.

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