A large number of magazines in the database, including MAD, Cracked, Heavy Metal and National Lampoon were recently changed from Magazine to Comic Book in the Type field. Does this have something to do with MrMiracle's definition change for magazines?

These are magazines, not comic books by any definition.

My Resident Evil Magazines from the late 90's are under comics. Not that I care, just sayin.

This was the result of a huge discussion among the approvers. The definition MrMiracle published was the result of that discussion and is the one we intend to use moving forward. By that definition, books such as Mad and Heavy Metal are indeed comic books, since they feature primarily sequential art.

Per the new guidance posted a few days ago after long discussions in this forum and the approvers forum.

Spider-Man, I know this will take some getting used to...I have a bunch of the Savage Tales and Savage Sword books, and had always thought of them as 'magazines'.

You missed a lengthy and in-depth discussion where the option of mushing the catagories of comics and magazines together was reviewed, then rejected. Then we discussed all sorts of criteria for how to keep them separated. Nearly every criteria met with examples of how that criteria didn't work: page count, size, table of contents, articles.

At first, I was worried that we wouldn't be able to come up with a reasonable way to keep them separated, but we did, and while not perfect, I think its pretty good, in the sense that, at the heart of it is the concept is that comics are books full of sequential art, and magazines are (at least partly) ABOUT sequential art.

So, there is our definition, and while it moves a lot of publications that people think of as magazines in with the comics, there IS a rational to it.

Trust us, this was not entered into lightly. Keep in mind that all comics are actually magazines. Our intent was, in the simplest terms, to separate books of comics and books about comics into two distinct groups. I think if we changed the names of the sections from "comics" & "magazines" to "Comic Magazines" & "Hobbie Magazines" it would have been easier to understand. These changes are for CCL classification purposes only.

Thank you all for your replies and the work you Approvers do behind the scenes. While I may not always agree with the decisions, I do understand them and realize they are only implemented after much discussion.

I don't have any of them in my collection (my mother threw out my early National Lampoons - she thought they were "dirty") but I saw the Change Requests and had to ask why.

Thanks again.