Researching for school is one of the only times that I truly try to examine a source for legitimacy and approach the internet distrustfully. (The other times are when I’m searching a political topic that is important to me, when I try to stick mainly to news sources or primary documents, or religious subject when I take anything I find with a giant grain of salt). This means that most of the time, when I’m using the internet, I’m pretty inclined to trust the first few sources I find, and my searches tend not to be all that complex. But for fun, I decided to walk through a search I’m actually doing, as opposed to coming up with one.

Superhero comics being what they are in this country, most characters have decades of storylines and continuity to draw upon whenever there is a story being told. What this means for the readers is that while reading a story, you need to know a lot more than what is being told to you on the page. For example, if I decide to pick up a Superman comic tomorrow, I need to know that Superman was an alien baby sent from his dying planet to Earth so that he could have his own life. I’d need to know that he was raised as Clark Kent, though he was originally named Kal-El. I would need to know that he works as a reporter, and is married to another reporter named Lois Lane, and that they work at the Daily Planet newspaper together, along with Editor-in-Chief Perry White and photographer Jimmy Olsen. I would need to know all of that because the comic can’t explain everything to me every time I read it! But then there’s a problem – sure Superman is pretty popular and easy. But there are hundreds of superheroes at this point! How can I know every single one every time I pick up a comic? How can I know their friends and allies and history every time I want to read a story?

Well, twenty years ago it was a big problem. It still is a problem, actually, but a much smaller one, because of the internet. I can just grab a character’s name and plug it into Google and see what happens.

For this search, I chose the superhero Damage/Grant Emerson, a minor side character with an incredibly confusing history (although Supergirl and Hawkman could give him a total run for his money, check it out if you don’t believe me). I happen to be reading a comic in which he makes an appearance, and I realized I know almost nothing about him, so I decided to go do some research.

Before Google, I’ll start off at Wikipedia, land of shared information. I type in “damage comics” because most people tend to refer to superheroes by their heroic nicknames rather than their real names. I get this page:

From a quick glance, I can tell that the first result is the one I want, so I click on it.

Hmmm, it’s a pretty long entry, considering that he’s a minor character. I skim the breakdown of the page at the top, and notice that there is a lot of focus on his role in the past five years or so. (Blackest Night is a new series coming out, and Grant only joined the Justice Society recently.) But when I look through his fictional character history, I notice that he was a member of the Titans. Perfect!

And then I open a new tab, because I have a tendency to leave and tab with information open until I am totally done with it, and run my searches through multiple websites at the same time.

I go to Titanstower.com, which has always been a great site to find out about any characters that were ever members of the Teen Titans. I check out the meeting room, which has all the character bios and information. I noticed on the Wikipedia page that Grant joined the “federally sponsored Titans, led by Arsenal,” so I click on “aresenal’s new titans team.” I get a page listing all of the different heroes who joined that particular incarnation of the Titans.  I click on Damage to find out more information.

The best part about TitansTower as opposed to almost every single other site I’ve been able to find is the pictures. Titans Tower goes out of it’s way to show different scans of the character during key moments, so I really get a feel for what he looks like and how the different scenes took place. It’s much more informative than just the text alone.

Now I have two tabs open with two different biographies of the same character. But both of these biographies focus on different information, which is great. I read through them both, piecing together most of Grant’s past. It’s hard for any one biography to put together all the information about a single character because there’s always so much out there. After I read the biographies, I check out the information at the bottom of each page. Wikipedia gives me a list of sources and a few links. Most of the sources are comic books, which are a pain to track down in real life. There are ways to download them illegally, but I would prefer not to do that, because I want to support the comic book industry. When I check out the links, I notice that one of them is the TitansTower biography I have open in another tab! So I open up the other link in another tab.

The DCU (standing for DC Universe) Guide is a great resource for character biographies as well, but it looks like it was put together years ago, and I don’t like the choice of a black background with white letters. I end up on this site a lot, but I almost never go there automatically because the layout bothers me. Aesthetics on the internet are really important.

Ok, then I go back to the TitansTower page to see if there are are any other sources there I can open up. The TitansTower page has a great Essential Reading section for if I ever do decide to hunt down comics on the character.

The comics cited by Wikipeda

just happen to be those that were necessary to cite for the facts given on the page. They don’t give much of a background on the character, and most of them have been published fairly recently. The list on the TitansTower webiste is a list of comics that are important to the character if I want to pursue my search any further. There is also a detailed analysis of Grant as a character and of the Titans group he was a part of, and a commissioned drawing from a comic book artist at a convention.

Best of all is the timeline:

Even though it’s incomplete, it’s extremely hard to keep track of characters in a serialized format like comics. Imagine if your favorite character from a TV show – Jack Bauer, for example, – could appear in any TV show any week. So, one night he’s on 24, and the next night he makes a guest appearance on Law and Order and CSI and two night later he shows up on Psych. Then back to 24, which is the only show you’re actually watching. But the character did stuff on all those other shows! That’s a part of his history now, and he might reference his experiences at any time! That’s what reading comics is like.

Ok, the TitansTower page doesn’t have any more helpful links. I’ll leave it open anyway, and start really reading the DCU Guide page. This page has a more detail on his background, but less on his more recent actions like the Wikipedia page. It also doesn’t like out to any other interesting pages.

I do a quick swing by Google Images to see if I can find any other scans or info on Grant. I plug in a bunch of different searches, “grant emerson damge” “damage comics” “damage titans” “damage justice society,” etc. But overall, I’m not finding anything that hasn’t already been shown on the separate sites I’ve been exploring.

At this point, I’d probably stop pursuing the search on Grant unless I had found something amazingly interesting that I wanted to find more details. In fact, if I weren’t recording my every action, I would probably have opened a dozen new tabs by now searching stuff on other characters. I don’t know if anyone is looking at the pages I’m linking too, but Grant is an insanely connected character, he has team-ups and cross-overs with a whole bunch of different characters and he’s joined three separate teams at one time or another, so he’s connected to each of the characters on teams with him and at one point he saved the world in a super-mega-crossover event, so who knows how many different people he’s connected to! But I have a solid grasp of his background at least, and I feel comfortable enough that next time I run across a reference to him somewhere, I won’t be confused!