Grand Comics Database (original) (raw)

Welcome to the Grand Comics Database!

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, use my.comics.org to track and manage your comic collection, or look how you can contribute.

GCD Comics Timeline

1978 October 15

Phil Balsman was a staff letterer for DC from 2003 to 2007, then became a freelance graphic artist and designer, working for Kodansha and doing covers for Del Rey / Random House. He also has done various logo, design, and illustration work for Grand Central Publishing, DC, Marvel, and others.

1921 October 15 - 2020 September 6

Bob Fujitani was an American artist of Japanese and Irish descent. Begining in the early 1940s he did work for American comic book publishers such as Ace, Avon, Dell, Harvey, Lev Gleason, and Quality.

Also in the 1940s, under the name Bob Wells, he worked on the daily "Judge Wright" newspaper strip. In the 1960s and 1970s he inked the daily "Flash Gordon" daily strip (mostly uncredited). In the 1990s, he worked on the "Rip Kirby" daily strip.

1975 October 15

Akiko Higashimura (東村アキコ) is a Japanese manga artist.

She debuted as a professional manga artist in the now-defunct manga magazine Bouquet Deluxe in 1999 with the short story "Fruits Kōmori" (フルーツコウモリ). Her first serialized work was Kisekae Yuka-chan (2001), published in the shōjo magazine Cookie.

She is known for series like Princess Jellyfish (海月姫 / Kuragehime), Tokyo Tarareba Girls (東京タラレバ娘 / Tōkyō Tarareba Musume), Blank Canvas: My So-Called Artist's Journey (かくかくしかじか / Kakukaku Shikajika), Yukibana no Tora (雪花の虎), Bishoku Tantei Akechi Goro (美食探偵 明智五郎), Himawari - Kenichi Legend (ひまわりっ 〜健一レジェンド〜), Mama wa Tenparist (ママはテンパリスト) and Omo ni Naitemasu (主に泣いてます).

Higashimura is renowned for her extraordinary productivity. Since the mid-2000s, she has consistently maintained multiple serializations at once, producing roughly 100 pages of manga every month for over a decade. Her productivity is supported by an unusually large team of assistants.

She is the elder sister of manga artist Takuma Morishige (森繁拓真), the author of the manga My Neighbor Seki.

1906 October 14 - 1976 January 16

Ray Patin was an animator and writer in animation whose filmography is found in the Internet Movie Database (IMDB):

1952 October 14 - 2021 September 3

Charlie Williams first came to prominence as a regular contributor to Chat, the Chattanooga clubzine published by Rich and Nicki Lynch. He also later appeared in all 30 issues of their Hugo-winning genzine Mimosa.

Williams was a member of the Knoxville Science-Fantasy Federation and in the 1970s, he owned a comics store in Knoxville and taught cartoon illustration at the University of Tennessee. At one time he was a member of the Spectator Amateur Press Association.

1955 October 13 - 2025 March 16

Marvel in support for productions and as assistant editor, 1983-1984.
Marvel as associated editor during 1985.
Marvel as editor from 1985 to 1990.
DC in support as assistant editor 1988-1991 and editor from 1992 to 1996.
Malibu as an editor from 1994-1995.

????? October 13

Alex's first professional work was on the profile images for the Transformers Armada: More Than Meets the Eye books, beginning with issue 2.

1960 October 13

George Pratt is an American painter and illustrator known for his work in the comic book field.

Pratt's first published comics work was for Darkstorm (Darkstorm Productions, 1982 series) #1. Since then, his work has appeared in Heavy Metal, Eagle, and many other publications. He has also inked other artists' work and created painted covers for DC Comics.

In 1990, DC published Pratt's first graphic novel, Enemy Ace: War Idyll (DC, 1990 series), which has been translated into several languages and at one point was on the required reading list at West Point. Longer works are Batman: Harvest Breed (DC, 2000 series) and Wolverine: Netsuke (2002 series).

Pratt has done cover and interior illustrations for books published by Bantam Books, Henry Holt, Warner Books, Mojo Press, and Random House, among others. Pratt taught for seven years at Pratt Institute. He has also taught painting and illustration at the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, the School of Visual Arts, the Savannah College of Art & Design, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Ringling College of Art and Design.

1965 October 12

Dan Abnett is an English comic book writer and novelist. He has been a frequent collaborator with fellow writer Andy Lanning, and has worked on comics for DC, Marvel and 2000 AD.

Abnett was responsible for the creation of one of the 2000 AD's better known and longest-running strips, Sinister Dexter. He has also contributed to some of the comic's major ongoing series, including Judge Dredd, Durham Red and Rogue Trooper.

His work for Marvel includes runs on Guardians of the Galaxy (2008 series), Death's Head 2, Battletide, The Knights of Pendragon (1990 series) (all of which he co-created), The Punisher, War Machine, Nova (2007 series) and various X-Men titles, as well as several stories for the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip. At DC he is probably best known for his 2000 relaunch of Legion of Super-Heroes as the limited series Legion Lost (2000 series) and then the ongoing series The Legion (2001 series). In the 2010s he wrote long runs of Aquaman (2016 series) and Titans (2016 series).

His Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40,000 novels and graphic novels for Games Workshop's Black Library now run to several dozen titles and have sold over two million copies. In 2009 he released his first original fiction novels through Angry Robot books.

1971 October 11

Wes Abbott started out in comic books as an artist for the Malibu imprint Eternity Comics, from 1990 to 1991. Starting in 1998, Abbott became a letterer via Comicraft for Marvel, from 1998 to 2015; Image, from 1998 to 2008; DC, from 1998 to present (2019); Dark Horse, in 1999; Harris Comics, in 1999; Black Bull, in 2000; Tokyopop, in 2006 and 2008; and Dynamite, in 2010.

1910 October 11 - 2005 May 15

In addition to ghosting for Joe Shuster on Superman, Cassidy engaged in post-graduate academic work on comics. His master's thesis, "An Approach to the Profession of Comic Strip Cartooning Based upon an Analytical Survey of Current Trends and Personal Experiences," was done at the University of Wisconsin in 1942 as part of a master's degree in art education.

1914 October 11 - 1953 August 2

Hubie Karp was a co-owner of and shared a studio with Jim Davis (The Fox and the Crow artist), Al Hubbard, and Jack Bradbury from 1948 to 1951.

1913 October 11 - 2011 December 14

Joe Simon was an American comic book writer, artist, editor, and publisher. Simon created or co-created many important characters in the 1930s–1940s Golden Age of Comic Books and served as the first editor of Marvel (then better known as Timely).

With his partner, artist Jack Kirby (b. 1917), he co-created Captain America (English), one of comics' most enduring superheroes, and the team worked extensively on such features at DC as the 1940s Sandman (English), and co-created the The Newsboy Legion (English), The Boy Commandos (English), and Manhunter (English). Simon and Kirby creations for other comics publishers include Boys' Ranch (English), Fighting American (English) and The Fly (English). In the late 1940s, the duo created the field of romance comics, and were among the earliest pioneers of horror comics. Simon, who went on to work in advertising and commercial art, also founded the satirical magazine Sick (1960 series), remaining with it for over a decade. He briefly returned to DC in the 1970s.

1932 October 11 - 2012 August 21

Sergio Toppi was an Italian illustrator and comics creator.

Toppi devoted himself to an artistic career starting in the 1950s, creating illustrations for the UTET Children's Encyclopedia. Alongside this project, he began collaborating on a series of animated advertising films with Pagot as well as working as a cartoonist for the satirical magazine Candido. In 1966 he finished his first comic strip for Il Corriere dei Piccoli, written by Carlo Triberti. For the same title Toppi produced numerous war stories.

In the seventies he also worked for comic magazines for children such as Il Giornalino from 1976 until the nineties, and Il Messaggero dei Ragazzi from 1977 to 1979, while also continuing in illustration. He also worked with other Italian comic magazines such as Sergeant Kirk, Linus, Alter Alter and Corto Maltese, publishing dozens of stories and illustrations.

One of the best-known series was a comic-strip version of the Thousand and One Nights titled Sharaz'de, originally serialized on Alter Alter in 1979. In the eighties he published the series Collector, the only permanent character of his career, for the series The Protagonists of Orient Express, as well as comic stories for historic Italian comic magazines such as L'Eternauta, Comic Art and Orient Express. For the French market in the early eighties he collaborated on the Larousse series "L'Histoire de France en Bande Dessinées" and "La Découverte du Monde En Bandes Dessinées." In the nineties he collaborated again with Sergio Bonelli Editore, creating some albums of the Nick Raider, Julia, Martin Mystère, and Ken Parker Magazine series.

His illustrations appear in various periodical publications, newspapers and book covers: from Famiglia Cristiana to Selezione from Reader's Digest, from Il Messaggero to Corriere della Sera, from Einaudi books to those of UTET. In 1989 he painted 22 pieces entitled Tarot of the Origins, published by Lo Scarabeo of Turin.

Story Arcs and Reading Orders

We recently added story arcs to our database. This is to group stories associated by some sort of title, which includes traditional story arcs, ccrossovers and events, whether identified by story titles, trade dress or other emblems. Will take some to populate the database, and we have not finally decided what all is considered a story arc. Click for current list of story arcs.

As a form of companion functionality, we added reading orders to our collection subsite my.comics.org. Any registered user can now create individual reading orders for any purpose. These can be made public for anyone to see, we might add search capabilities for reading orders at some point.

Uploading Milestone!

Cover Image

We reached 1,300,000 comic covers !

The milestone cover was the variant cover by Jim Mahfood for the issue Spider-Punk: Arms Race #2 .

Updates To The Site! (Q2 2025)

Besides updating and renovating our page designs, in particular making it useable on small screens, we made a couple of changes on the behaviour of the site.

The result tables and lists are now more consistent throughout the site. On many pages you now fill find these two symbols . By clicking on them one can switch with a list view and an image view, e.g. using covers or creator faces.

Filtering of search results or lists is now usually available.

To avoid visual information overload in case of many variants or reprints, we show the full list only if their number is below a threshold. Logged-in users can set the thresholds in their profile to allow user-defined display.

The functionality for adding issues to a collection, or editing their collection status, is now accessible on the main site.

Most data objects now support markdown in the notes for visual structure. Notes now also support internal links, these are generated automatically and shown with the object name, e.g. [gcd_link_issue](442), or generally [gcd_link_'object_type'](id)

We changed the colors on the series status tables for a more consistent appearance. For issues, we added another layer to indicate that some sequence data is present.

Keywords are now generally clickable troughout the site.

No More Ads!

Due to a United States IRS ruling regarding advertising revenue as taxable business income, we will no longer be displaying paid advertising on the website.

This is good news for all our users, but we are now fully dependent on donations to cover our costs in the future.

If you wish to donate you can simply click , where for US donors this is tax deductable. Thank you for your use and support.

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

Cloudflare

We are using Cloudflare as an external service to prevent misbehaving bots overloading our webserver. These measures are preventing excessive use of our site, e.g. due to accessing many pages in a few seconds. Sometimes we need to turn on enhanced services of Cloudflare, then an interstitial Challenge Page will appear regularly.

Turning off these measures is not an option for us. Our site would be regularly unresponsive due to the bots (which are often AI-related bots).

If you are getting blocked, this is almost always temporarily for a few minutes. If this persists, these are recommendations one can find for those who have issues with Cloudflare:

How to Contribute

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

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.