Greatcoat Support Grows…

By John Freeman on February 26, 2007

(I amended this entry as the debate has now closed)

Some of the great folks over at Forbidden Planet International have just pitched in to the debate over Wikipedia about the proposed deletion of an entry about my cartoon strip, The Really Heavy Greatcoat.

In a posting on the FPI blog, one team member suggests that this might be part of some wider crackdown by some Wikipedia’s editors on comics it includes. Personally, I don’t think that is the case — I wasn’t aware there were moves afoot to crack down on comics on Wikipedia which in some areas seems keen to support them — but what does annoy me most is that despite providing the “notability” required to justify THRG’s inclusion, some editors appear to be ignoring it, which runs counter to the entire principle of the project.

Wikipedia’s primary criterion for “notability” is

“Whether the subject of an article has been the subject of non-trivial published works by multiple separate sources that are independent of that subject, which applies to all classes of subjects”.

By those standards, The Really Heavy Greatcoat (created by myself and Nick Miller) ticks every box demanded: in addition to publication in print for years in Lancaster and through my own publishing efforts online, the comic has been independently published, in Comics International, by syndicated US cartoonist Michael Jantze’s in an issue of his The Norm comic, and in the UK comics anthology Paper Tiger, to name but a few.

I’m guessing now that some critical praise (from, say, Alan Moore, or Dave Gibbons, who I would hope the Wikipedia editors might just have heard of!) might help swing this the Greatcoat’s way, which would be a nice present as it celebrates 20 years of cartoon weirdness!

About the Author
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John Freeman

John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.

Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.

He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.