16

Jan

2012

Review – Collectorz CLZ Comics

Posted By on Monday January 16, 2012 at 5:47 pm
To Product Reviews, Tech

As I’ve stated before, I have a lot of comics. As of my last check, the count is 4813, or about 33 short boxes full. I basically have a small comic shop in my closet. In fact, I had to go spend about $150 to build more shelves in my closet to handle them all. See for yourself. Note however, this does not include the 3 short boxes full I bought between the bi-monthly Philadelphia Comic Con yesterday and at Frankenstein Comics‘ New Years Day sale. It’s a lot of work keeping track of all those comics, and keeping them in order.

Comic Closet - Left Comic Closet - Right
Have I mentioned that I’m a hoarder?

 

Now that is a lot of work I don’t want to do by hand. Being a software engineer, I could use some type of master Excel or Word Document like I see a lot of people carry at cons, or write myself some type of master database, but that’s a lot of work. Turns out I am not the only nerd with this problem, and there are a whole bunch of competing Comic Book Databases on the market. I’ve tried most of them, and they all have their little quirks, but the one I use on a day to day basis is CLZ Comics. This by no means a paid review, but I just really like this software, and wanted to share it with people and maybe you all can save yourself some aggravation at the next show you go to and stop yourself from buying something you already have, or walking around with pen and paper like a damn caveman.

Now the CLZ Comic solution is really an awesome tag team of two different pieces of software working together. First is the Shawn Michaels of the team, the Desktop Software. They sell two different versions of this, and I’ve had them both. If you have a very basic collection, and only need to add and edit comics one at a time, you might get away with standard. But if you have the $20, spring for the Professional. It has all kinds of extra fancy features. The one I find most useful is the bulk editor. That allows you to change details about a large group of comics at once. What I tend to use it for is updating the personal details of all the books I buy at a show, so I can tell where I bought them, on what date, and how much I paid for them.  When you buy comics at 200+ a shot, doing that one at a time is tedious, which is the max for how many you can edit at a time in the Standard version.

 
This is my actual CLZ Comic Collection

 

The cool thing about this software is there are multiple ways to get your data into the system. If you really wanted to, you can do the data entry by hand, and you’ll have to do that sometimes if you buy crazy independents like I do. But for the most part, they have a preexisting database of almost every comic, new and old, that you can query against, and all you have to do is click a checkbox and boom, listed as in your collection. And if you have to add something manually, you can submit that info into their master database for other people to find later. They also recently added a new feature I have yet to use, where you can just scan the bar code on your comic and it will look it up for you. This works pretty well for new issues, but since it’s a new feature, they don’t have as many bar codes for older issues, which is kinda my speciality, so I haven’t plunked down for a scanner yet. However, they do update older issues all the time, so eventually the field of comics with barcode data should be very large. If you don’t have a bar scanner handy (and really, who has one of those lying around? High School libraries?), they also sell an app that you can use on your phone to work like a scanner, CLZ Barry, I just haven’t used it. Now as part of this database of comics, every book comes with a bunch of data about it, including usually the cover art, the cover date and price, the writers and artists, the story arc, the characters involved, and the storyline. It’s pretty badass to have all that available and searchable right at your fingertips. You can view your collection as just a list, or my preference is the cover view, which allows you to “see” your whole collection without having to lug boxes down from the closet.

adding_entries_in_CLZfull
Adding issues in CLZ Comics. Just five more issues for a complete run from 200-current

 

The other part of the tag team, the Marty Jannetty if you will, may not be as flashy, but I think its the most awesome part of the software. The CLZ Comics Mobile App. Now, I’m too lazy to setup an android emulator to show you my collection, and I don’t think you want to see me take pictures of my phone, so I’m just going to use their standard stock photography pictures. Now the cool thing with this is, after you get all your comic books into your collection in the desktop software, you export them right to your phone/iPad. That way your whole collection is always right at hand. It gets sorted by series, and you can scroll down to one you’re looking for and select it. A nice new feature they added that is not in the pictures is a little line at the top telling you what issues you have in the form of  ‘Have: 118, 119, 140, 141, 143, 146, 148, 159, 160, 172, 175, 176, 179-183, 187, 189, 198, 199, 201, 203-205, 207-406, 408, 410, 412-416’, my real entry for Fantastic Four, Volume 1. In that way, when you are at a show, you can clearly see what the holes are you have to fill, and if the book you just pulled from that box under the dealer table is the one you need. The mobile app has all the same details and most of the functions of its big brother, the desktop app, in that you can search your collection for specific key words right from your phone.

CLZ Comics Mobile
 

One last piece I like about the software is it also does all kinds of reporting using various bar or pie charts. Besides the standard information that comes as part of the database, there are several personal fields you can add, such as price, store purchased from, and purchase date, and if you have read a particular comic, and when you read it. That way, if say you wanted to know how many comics you bought in the last year that you paid more than $2.00 for (that would be zero), you can easily grab that information. There are a ton of different variables you can use to sort by, be it publisher, storyline, character, even down to more esoteric things like page count. But I find the Series Group to be the most useful myself. If you buy the profession version you can even export to other formats, like .csv or html, which will give you a sweet list like this, my real current comic list.

CLZ Comics - Statistics
Yes, I know, I have very odd tastes in comics

Now don’t think that just because this has been a mostly glittering review thusfar that the software is without issues, it isn’t. There are a few things that could be improved. Just last week they issued an update that gave all date fields a date picker box. While you can filter your collection down on different field types, you can only use AND conditions, no ORs. Now I know I could use De Morgan’s law and a bunch of NAND statements, but I shouldn’t have to do that. And the reason this is a problem is, because the database is filled in mostly by contributors and other people using the product, they don’t always follow the same pattern, so sometimes you’ll have to adjust the data to meet your personal needs. When I was at the last show, Rick Leonardi (Cloak and Dagger, Spider Man 2099,  Green Lantern vs. Aliens among others) was there, and I used the software to pull all the comics he was an artist on to have him sign them. When I got to his table, he had a bunch of Superman #712, which is a really awesome story of Krypto, which was held back due to licencing issues over Superboy, as it was set right after Infinite Crisis. I had a copy of it, and really would have liked to get it signed, but because I filtered by “Artist” and not “Penciller”,  it did not come up in my filter. So now I know, just to use the quick search and that looks across all fields. But if I wanted to run a filter for say “written by Stan Lee” OR “written by Jack Kirby”, I can’t do them both at the same time, you would have to do two separate searches. Also, while there is a field for a “Current Value”, there is no mechanism to populate that from say, pulling from Overstreet, you would have to manually track that yourself, which can get tedious. I know personally my collection isnt worth shit, and I’m OK with that. There are a lot of software that their main thing is current pricing. CLZ went another way with it, and if that is your main concern, this may not be the software for you. The way it handles alphabetizing is also a little clunky. In my mind, Starship Troopers comes before Star Trek, even with the space, but CLZ does not behave that way. There are also instances where “The” does not get ignored, therefore Superman Special will come before Superman: The Man of Steel. This had lead me to a liberal use of the colon in title names, as that seems to always come first.

One other glaring issue that they are currently working on, but it is a big rewrite across all their software, is that the mobile app only communicates one way. Therefore, if say you go to the New York Comic Con, you can’t just take your phone with you and update from the show floor. You would need to take your laptop with you, add all your new issues to the desktop client, then re-export nightly back in your hotel room. I know it’s caused me some issues as I’ve bought things on the floor of the show twice, once from two different dealers during the same day, but its a minor issue in my eyes. Once they get it talking back and forth, you’ll be able to just take pictures of the barcode on your phone, add it to your collection, download all the details, then export from your phone back to your desktop to keep everything synced at the end of the day.

CLZ also makes a bunch of other inventory software, and that is their core competency. That philosophy carries over into their comic software. If you want to keep track of all your books, and have some added meta information, this does a pretty good job. The best part is the mobile app, which lets you keep track of your collection on the go. Does it do everything? No software ever does. But what it does it does well, and for that, I highly recommend it for the nerd who needs his comic collection with him at all times. I wouldn’t head to a show floor without the mobile app myself.

Read more about CLZ Comics and their various other software at their website, Collectorz.com


is the proud owner of a life size replica Captain Kirk Chair. He is a hoarder of Comic Books, Transformers, and Star Trek action figures. He attended Space Camp as an adult. He has taken vacations to the closing of the Star Trek Experience and the final night Shuttle launch. He has been known to yell at his television when the kids can't put together the damn statue in the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. When not writing for InsufficientScotty, he is a Software Engineer for a major healthcare communications company.

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