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
19??? July 17

Bruce Canwell is an associate editor at the Library of American Comics. An Eisner Award winner for his biographical text in Alex Toth: Genius, Illustrated, he has written about fiction on the page and on the screen for most of his life. He reviewed comics for Amazing Heroes and Comic Book Week, films for the Portsmouth (NH) Herald, and books for Algis Budrys’s on-line magazine, TomorrowSF. He has also published several stories at DC Comics, including the graphic novel Batman: The Gauntlet, teaming with his old friend Lee Weeks. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife Krista.

1897 July 17 - 1969 June 12

Sven Elven was born Hubert Frykholm. He legally adopted the name Sven Elven after immigrating to the US, date unknown. He was going by Sven Elven before comics. In 1933, as Sven Elven, he illustrated a book called "Unmentionables", a history of lingerie.

One of DC's most prolific early artists, his work appeared in early issues of New Fun/More Fun, New Comics, Adventure Comics, as well as Detective Comics #1, Action Comics #1 and Detective #27

Among Sven Elven's strips for DC were Treasure Island, She, The Three Musketeers, Cosmo Phantom of Disguise, Robin Hood, Captain Quick, and The Adventures of Marco Polo. In 1940, Elven left DC to join Fawcett, where he only did a handfull of stories, most notably the magician character, El Carim. He specialized in historical period pieces, and may have written these strips as well.

After comics, he worked at Emerson Electric Co, from which he retired in 1966 or 1967. Sven died June 12, 1969 at 71 years old in a farming accident in Bennington, VT. He is buried at Germaine Hill Farm in Vermont beside his wife, who lived to be 97.

1871 July 17 - 1956 January 13

Lyonel Feininger was a German-American painter, and a leading exponent of Expressionism. He worked as a caricaturist and comic strip artist. He was born and grew up in New York City. In 1887 he traveled to Europe and studied art in Hamburg, Berlin and Paris. He started his career as a cartoonist in 1894 and met with much success in this area, illustrating two comic strips "The Kin-der-Kids" and "Wee Willie Winkie's World" for the Chicago Tribune. He also worked as a commercial caricaturist for 20 years. At the age of 36, he began to work as a fine artist.

1938 July 17 - 2026 March 22

In 1966 Hermann began working with writer Greg on adventure feature Bernard Prince and with writer Jean-Luc Vernal on historical Jugurtha. Another feature, the western Comanche, was added in 1969.

Hermann began writing his own stories in 1977 and created the post-apocaliptic Jeremiah as both author and illustrator, which is his most extensive, longest-running and most successful creation. The feature Les Tours de Bois-Maury, set in the Middle Ages, was added in 1984. From 2000 until his death, Hermann also created many non-series graphic novels, often together with his son, Yves H..

1953 July 17

Jim Mitchell was a penciller for the Masters of the Universe and Princess of Power mini-comics that came with the Mattel toy packages. Mitchell worked a storyboard artist, character designer, and writer. He has worked for Disney and Hanna-Barbera, and various other movie studios.

1954 July 17

J. Michael Straczynski is an American filmmaker and comic book writer. He is known as the creator of the science fiction television series Babylon 5 and its spinoff Crusade, as well as the series Jeremiah.

From 2001 to 2007, Straczynski wrote Marvel's The Amazing Spider-Man, followed by runs on Thor and Fantastic Four. He is the author of the Superman: Earth One trilogy of graphic novels, and he has written Superman, Wonder Woman, and Before Watchmen for DC. Straczynski is the creator and writer of several original comic book series such as Rising Stars, Midnight Nation, Dream Police, and Ten Grand.

1952 July 17

With Jerry Sinkovec founded Street Enterprises, a publishing company that focused on reprints of newspaper comic strips from the United States and the United Kingdom. Operating from 1971–1984, Street Enterprises is most known for the sister publications The Menomonee Falls Gazette and The Menomonee Falls Guardian, as well as for taking over publication of the comics news-zine The Comic Reader.

1952 July 16

Makyo is a French comics writer and comics artist. He is best known as the author of the series Jérôme K. Jérôme Bloche and La Balade au Bout du monde. Makyo wrote and drew Grimion gant de cuir and the humorous series Les Bogros.

1958 July 16

Miguelanxo Prado is a Spanish comic book creator. Before Prado began his career as a comic artist, he studied architecture and worked as an author. For his comics, he uses the technique of direct coloring, in which the original itself is already created in color.

1927 July 15 - 1996 March 6

American comic book artist best known as an inker for leading publishers DC and Marvel. He was DC's primary inker on the Superman (English) titles in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and inked penciler Herb Trimpe (b. 1939)'s introduction of the popular superhero Wolverine [Logan / James Howlett] in The Incredible Hulk (Marvel, 1968 series) #181.

1955 July 15

Brent Anderson is an American comics artist known for his work on X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills and the comic book series Astro City.

In 1981, Ka-Zar The Savage, written by Bruce Jones, became Anderson's first regular series. The X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills graphic novel followed, as well as artwork on a number of Marvel series, including the heroic space-opera Strikeforce: Morituri. During this period, Anderson was active doing artwork for independent publishers Pacific Comics and Eclipse Comics.

In 1995, Anderson co-created with writer Kurt Busiek and cover artist Alex Ross, the award-winning Astro City.

1933 July 15 - 2003 July 31

Guido Crepax was an Italian comics artist. He is most famous for his character Valentina, created in 1965 and very representative of the spirit of the 1960s. The Valentina series of books and strips became noted for Crepax's sophisticated drawing, and for the psychedelic, dreamlike storylines, generally involving a strong dose of eroticism. From 1973, Crepax devoted himself to the realization of literary models such as Story of O, Justine, Emmanuelle and others. His work was often politically motivated too, inspired by his Communist convictions.

1970 July 15

Kelly Sue DeConnick is an American comic book writer. She started adapting translations of Japanese manga comics for Tokyopop and Viz Media. She wrote the Osborn limited series in 2011, drawn by Emma Ríos, together both created the Image Comics title Pretty Deadly, a Western story that blends elements of magical realism and horror. DeConnick wrote DC's Aquaman in 2019/20. From 2021 to 2022, DeConnick commemorated the 80th anniversary of DC's Wonder Woman by writing a three-issue limited series titled Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons.

1971 July 15

Brian Joines is a comics writer who studied Theatre at Washington State University.

1978 July 15

Tom King is an American author, comic book writer, and ex-CIA officer. He is best known for writing the novel A Once Crowded Sky, The Vision for Marvel, The Sheriff of Babylon for the DC imprint Vertigo and Batman, Mister Miracle, and Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow for DC.

1779 July 15 - 1863 July 10

Clement Clarke Moore was an American writer and scholar best known as author of the Christmas poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas." The poem, widely known by its opening line of "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," was first published anonymously in The Troy Sentinel, a newspaper based in Troy, New York, on December 23, 1823. Moore publicly claimed authorship in 1837. The poem has been used and parodied in a variety of media, including comic books.

1956 July 15 - 2025 November 29

Frank Pé is a Belgian comic book artist. After studying sculpture for three years at the Institut Saint-Luc in Brussels, he began to create comics and illustrations for Spirou magazine, specializing in articles about animals.

Since 1994, he has worked on his two main series: Zoo and Broussaille. Zoo is a romantic and nostalgic series, while Broussaille is contemporary, allowing the author to intertwine it with his own life. With Zidrou he worked since 2016 on Spirou and Marsipulami.

Uploading Milestone!

Cover Image

We reached 1,350,000 comic covers !

The milestone cover was the variant cover by Mark Buckingham for the issue Black Cat #4 published by Marvel.

Additional Lists

We added overview lists of character appearances in a group, e.g., Captain America and vice versa, e.g., The Avengers. You can also get a list of issues where Iron Man appeared as a member of the Avengers.

Multiple Brand Emblems per Issue

We changed our handling of brand emblems for an issue. One now can select more than one brand emblem. There will be cleanup of the existing combined brand emblems needed.
We also updated the list per brand emblem and its usages.

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, crossovers 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.

Indexing Milestone!

Cover Image

We reached 475,000 indexed issues !

The milestone issue was Tex Willer Gigantbok #13 - Den siste opprøreren from Norwegian publisher Egmont.

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.
Creators Calendar
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:

  • Make sure your browsers are up to date, or try a different browser.
  • Disable any browser extensions (at least for our website) that may interfere (e.g., ad blockers, privacy extensions). Since we don't serve ads any more, these extension don't have an effect on our site anyway.
  • Try accessing the website using a different device or network to see if the issue persists.
  • Avoid opening many pages into different tabs in quick succession.

How to Contribute

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 / Tailwind / JavaScript)
    • Python / Django programming
    • ElasticSearch search server
    • Web Services API
    • Database Performance (MySQL)

Data Access via API - Structured Data Import

We have developedan initial version of an API for our site. While the API endpoints URLs are stable, the provided fields and data format should not be considered stable as this point.

More information is at our github page.

Further development of the API depends on user feedback and contributions.

An import of issue and story data in JSON/YAML-format is now available, independent of the API.

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.
Statistics
17,650 publishers
110,281 creators
228,572 series
2,195,521 issues
246,771 variant issues
498,970 issue indexes
1,358,965 covers
4,506,504 stories
International Statistics
If you believe any of this data to be incorrect, please let us know.
Creative Commons License
All portions of the Grand Comics Database™, except where noted otherwise, are copyrighted by the GCD and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). This includes but is not necessarily limited to our database schema and data distribution format.