I really like comics, but I never got that into them. I never really read them much – other than Archies and the Platoon series as a kid. (Also, some stray Asterix and Obelix graphic novels in German that my parents had brought home after living in West Germany in the 1970s.)

I still dig graphic novels, though. And I like the idea of comics – the collectors and community surrounding them – even though I’ll never collect them myself.

So this day looked like a fun day to make a map for. And I wanted to create a map that might actually show some interesting data about comics and comic books, etc. But I had no idea what type of datasets existed.

So I used the Spatial Data Maker GPT on webmapgpt.com to help me find and create some datasets. Turns out, there is a lot of data available on self-reported comic book publishing by country.

Today’s map is not exhaustive. It only maps self-reported publishers, etc., but it is real data, snagged from the Library of Congress database. And it was compiled and given reliability ratings using one of my assistants. And right there, this capability is pretty darn cool. Navigating unseen and unvisited data portals via natural language is one of the most rewarding things about the prompt cartography workflow in my mind.

In this map, you can explore which countries have more comic book series per person than others. Or which country has more individual issues. The results may surprise you – check out Iceland and the Scandinavian countries. Other results are perhaps a bit less surprising – Japan. 🙂

I created an entire new map style using Map Styler GPT found at webmapgpt.com too. It’s now available for you to use when making comic book maps in the future. Just go to the Prompt Cartography website.

Happy International Read a Comic in Public Day!

View Map Here

Original Web Mapper GPT Prompt

Hi. International Read Comics in Public Places Day is coming up on Friday. I would like to make a map for the public that highlights which countries are producing a lot of comics per capita. Obviously, the dataset is limited to self-reporting entities, and it’s not completely authoritative, but it is reliable. Can you come up with some global map ideas for celebrating this day based off of the attached dataset and dataset metadata/description below about how it is compiled and where it came from? Please come up with 2-4 ideas and the pros and cons of each and we will iterate from there. Thanks!