Skip to content

Organizing Star Wars comics. Data Manager and Library Organizer examples.

I've been working on properly organizing my Star Wars comics, and would like to show what I've done so far and get some input.

First and foremost, I want my star wars comics to be in a separate folder from my Marvel/Dark Horse/etc comics. I am organizing my all comics as described here but for the sake of consistency, i don't want my star wars comics to be in separate folder such as:

  • /Marvel/Multiverse/Alternate Universes
  • /Dark Horse Comics/
  • /Titan Comics/

For me, that's just confusing and if i want to read a Darth Maul comic, i really don't care who the publisher is (or if it is Legends or Canon).

Data Manager

My main goal is to easily find a specific era (e.g. Republic Era [c. 1000 BBY - 19 BBY]) and then a character (e.g. Darth Maul). In order to do this, I create a new structure in Data Manager as seen here. I added the major eras using a mixture of Legends timeline, Canon timeline and Timeline of galactic history.

Each comic has three different 'era' tags:

  • SeriesGroup: This is the major era and will be the first folder under my star wars root-folder.
  • First Series: This can be empty or contain a sub-era like Battle of Yavin within the Imperial Era.
  • Second Series: I try and avoid these, as the path on windows can be really long, but some eras really need a third level (e.g. Clone Wars which is a sub-era of Fall of the Republic, which in turn is a sub-era of the Republic Era.

I also tag each comic with a year or year-range. I find most of these years on the starwars.fandom.com page for each comic (e.g. 4 ABY for Age of Rebellion - Princess Leia #1).

I added a custom tag for IsStarWars which is pretty selfexplanatory and i use it for my smartlists and for Library Organizer.

Lastly i tag MainCharacterOrTeam as Star Wars in order to sort them out of my other library organizer lists that identifies comics based on MainCharacterOrTeam.

Two 'uncommon' SeriesGroups i use are Non Fiction and Star Wars Legends Epic Collection.

  • Non Fiction is used for Star Wars Insider and other magazine style entries.
  • Star Wars Legends Epic Collection is simply for the many volumes of Marvels Star Wars Legends Epic Collection as they collect a lot of different stories and does not necessarily fit within a single era.

Library Organizer

When Data Manager is done tagging, i have a separate entry in Library Organizer for Star Wars. The tag IsStarWars is used for the rule.

For the folder i use: Star Wars\{ <seriesgroup>}\{ <Custom(First Series)>}\{ <Custom(Second Series)>}\{ <Custom(BBY)>}\{ <series>}{ (<startyear>)} which looks something like this.

Whereas for the file i use: {<series>} { #<number3>} { - (<storyarc>{ <altNumber2>})} { [{<month>, }<year>]}{[<publisher>]} which looks like this or this (depending on the publisher).

The file name is the only place i mention the publisher, as i am not a stickler for legends vs canon.

I am not convinced my folder or file structure is definitive. As you can see here you often end up with overlapping years and i have yet to find a way to fix this, while still being able to get a quick overview of the timeline in each era.

Hopefully someone else is also sorting star wars comics and can use this.