The Grand Comics Database (GCD) is a nonprofit, internet-based organization of international volunteers dedicated to building an open database covering all printed comics throughout the world. Give our search a try, take a look at the menu to the left to see how you can help us improve the site, or use my.comics.org to track and manage your comic collection.

Uploading Milestone!

Cover Image

We reached 450,000 indexed issues !

We reached 450,000 indexed issues. The milestone issue was Il Grande Blek Anni 50 #v17#17 from the Italian reprint series from publisher Casa Editrice Dardo.

30 Years of the Grand Comics Database !

30 years ago the original announcement from Tim Stroup's on the Grand Comics Database first appeared on the Usenet group rec.arts.comics.misc on 1994-03-31 15:55:15 PST.

Founders included Jon Ingersoll, Bob Klein, and Tim Stroup.

Since then the GCD progressed and enhanced in database content and functionality, with ups and downs. In all that time, the database survived at least two major technology changes on the backend. All this was achieved by the contribution of work and time of several hundred of volunteers.

Thanks and congrats to all of us.

Updates To The Site! (Early 2024)

We deployed a different handling of characters from DC and Marvel in recent weeks. We now can record the universe from which a character originates. In the editing workflow this replaces the different character versions.

Examples of characters with different universes are:

Additionally one now can add the DC or Marvel universe in which a story takes place. One then can also see in which universe a character appeared in, or which stories take place in a given universe.

Examples are:

Note that most stories and characters are in the so-called mainstream universe. Since we do not want to track continuity, the mainstream universe is the at the time of publication standard universe for DC or Marvel, no matter the specific naming or continuity setup. In particular, no retroactive changes to the universe. We mainly want to be able to track stories and characters in DC or Marvel universes that are different from the standard universe. In other words, the mainstream universe is the default universe, unless a different universe is specified in the story or for the character.

We also added lists for characters, group and universes.

For publishers we added a list of creators that were published by it, e.g. for Norwegian publisher Hjemmet / Egmont.

That is in addition to all the other lists we added in the last year, where for navigation one often can further filter by country, language or publisher.

For all of these lists of course even more of our data needs to be migrated from text entries to linked records, or even entered at all. So, if you ever wondered about helping with the content of the database ?

Volunteers Wanted For Adding New Comics

Each week, a small number of GCD volunteers add listings to our database for the new comics released that week in North America. These are just the basic listings, not full indexes. This makes it easier for other volunteers who upload covers and for indexers, as well as for people using my.comics.org.

Each volunteer covers one publisher or a small group of publishers ("D publishers except DC", for example). From public sources such as ComicsList and Diamond Previews online, they add the issues and make note of the prices and a few other details. We are looking for additional volunteers for this weekly task.

Follow this link for a description of the process and a list of which publishers are currently covered.

GCD Comics Timeline

Brad Anderson (b. 1924)

1924 May 14 - 2015 August 30
Creator, writer and artist of the long-running single panel cartoon about a large dog, Marmaduke.

James Billmyer (b. 1897)

1897 May 14 - 1989 July 9
Commercial artist, who worked as a cartoonist at the Baltimore American in the 1910s - 1920s, and then provided illustrations for various magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Family Circle. He later painted geometric abstractions.

Jon Blummer (b. 1904)

1904 May 14 - 1955 October day?
Syndication:
Hop Harrigan [daily] (writer; pencils; ink) in 1942.
The Lone Ranger [daily and Sundays] (pencil; ink) in 1939 for King Features Syndicate.
The Sea Hound [daily] (pencil; ink) in 1944-1946 for King Features Syndicate.

Charles Winans (b. 1939)

1939 May 14 - 2007 March 15
Texas based artist. Has credits in Yellow Dog #5 (1968) and Skip Williamson's The Conspiracy Capers.

春花あや (b. ????)

????? May 14
Aya Haruhana (春花あや) is a manga artist. Known for the series Shōjo-tachi no Kizuato ni Kuchizuke wo (少女たちの痕にくちづけを).

智弘カイ (b. ????)

????? May 14
Kai Tomohiro (智弘カイ) is a manga artist and illustrator known for the series Destiny Lovers (デスラバ / Desu Raba) and its similarly titled sequel.

Pierre Lebedel (b. 1942)

1942 May 13
Journaliste spécialisé sur le sujet de la bande dessinée, c’est lui qui accompagna Edgar Pierre Jacobs pour la rédaction et la conception de la monographie Un opéra de papier (Gallimard), entre 1978 et 1981.
Il participa aux rubriques du magazine Pilote et préfaça des bandes dessinées du patrimoine français.
[A journalist specialized in the subject of comics, he accompanied Edgar Pierre Jacobs for the writing and design of the monograph Un opéra de papier (Gallimard), between 1978 and 1981.
He participated in the columns of the magazine Pilote and prefaced comics of French heritage.]

Fred Ludekens (b. 1900)

1900 May 13 - 1982 March 20
An accomplished American artist and illustrator, Ludekens has comics credits on various western-themed premiums from 1955 to 1963 for Wrangler.

Stan Mack (b. 1936)

1936 May 13
Cartoonist who did comics for the Village Voice, Adweek, and National Lampoon and has also written a number of books.

Sjoert Schwitters (b. 1912)

1912 May 13 - 1945 March 31
Despite being a Jew and a Communist, reporter, writer and editor of youth publications Schwitters managed to escape from the Nazi occupiers for several years until he was arrested by chance in January 1945. He and four others were shot in retaliation of the liberation of a group of young men by the Resistance.

How to Help

There are several ways in which you can help us to improve our site and its content.

  • You can provide missing data, update existing data, or upload cover scans. Just register an account with us, and you can start contributing.
  • Donate for our ongoing costs, e.g. the server infrastructure. We are a non-profit organization and any funds will be used for our goal of documenting and indexing all comics.
  • We need volunteer web designers and programmers! Please contact the gcd-tech group or visit our technical documentation if you can help with any of these roles:
    • Web designer / front-end developer (HTML / CSS / JavaScript)
    • Python / Django programming
    • ElasticSearch search server
    • Web Services API
    • Database Performance (MySQL)
Disclaimer
The Grand Comics Database Project (GCD) is a volunteer project with the goal of documenting and indexing all comics for the free use of scholars, historians, researchers, and fans.
The GCD acknowledges that the all-encompassing research nature of the project may result in the posting of cover scans for comics with images that some may find objectionable.
Viewer discretion is advised.
The Grand Comics Database Team
Notice
We need to rebuild our search index. During that, the searches will only show limited results until all the data is processed, should be finished by Tuesday.
Useful Links
my.comics.org
Last Updated Issues
Statistics
16,366 publishers
74,311 creators
202,762 series
2,049,006 issues
192,412 variant issues
450,367 issue indexes
1,215,225 covers
3,917,889 stories