APL Shareware Review: ComLog Comic Logger

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 36

Sometimes I have cast my eye down the Vector product list and seen things that sound quite interesting, but I have no idea what they are. ComLog’s Comic Logger is listed in the OTHER PRODUCTS section and is described as "APL*PLUS II comic-book inventory system".

Intriguing stuff, I am sure you will agree, so I thought it would be nice to obtain a review copy of this software just to see what it was. I e-mailed the creator explaining I wanted to review ComLog for Vector and shortly after I received a review copy over e-mail. Everything installed just great, even under NT4.0, although I did experience some random hangs with the software, but I put this down to NT’s DOS session being very much not a real DOS box.

The software is a DOS menu-driven system, in fact, rather good for a shareware DOS product. It is basically a database product for cataloging Comics. What is so special about comics you might ask - why not use a generic database product? Comics have some interesting relations in their database structure, things like the fact that you get the same artists (wrong technical term probably but I do not want to get into that!) working on the same story lines most of the time, but every now and again switching to different story lines, the same artists and writers also tend to stay together in the same "teams" but again not always. The whole area of re-issues of past stories in different comics also causes great problems, so cross referencing to old issues needs to be possible. APL was presumably the perfect tool to provide the search facilities that allow the user to find given artists, price ranges and story lines.

The product is presumably invaluable to both professional and amateur comic collectors and although it is DOS-based it is cheap enough to be a good starting point in setting up a comic database. You would be hard pushed to produce an application that has this sort of functionality using just Microsoft Access for example. And, of course, if it helps publicize esoteric transatlantic comics like the mighty Silver Surfer it has to be a good thing!

If anybody else fancies reviewing a piece of APL software mentioned in the product guide, we would be happy to obtain review copies in exchange for a couple of paragraphs.