Since Rails is what the people asked for, Rails is what the people are gonna get.  I am starting work on the comic database and so the first step is to get Rails up and going on my local machine so I can do development easily.  I have started by using Locomotive, a very nice program that allows you to run a Rails server without configuring the system.  As I get further into the program, I think having the system actually configured to do Rails automatically is going to work better, so that is the big step for tonight.  After that, development and learning will commence.