Wednesday, March 19, 3000

Welcome!

Welcome to Comics by the Date!

The site's purpose is to provide a curated chronology of North American comic-book publishing from 1934 to the present. The comics will be presented in order of publication. The cover is accompanied by detailed bibliographic information.

The comics featured are those of aesthetic and/or historical importance. In some instances, as with the various Superman and Batman publications, I will only include key issues of significant titles. However, I will for the most part be presenting the entirety of the major bodies of work. For example, every comic book with an original Carl Barks Donald Duck story will be featured in the posts.

One will get to see something of the context in which the comics were published. Take the original Barks duck comics as an example. They will, depending on the year, appear alongside the Walt Kelly Pogo books, the E. C. "New Trend" titles, and the 1960s Marvel superhero line. This should reflect, at least somewhat, the comics' shared presence on newsstands when they were originally on sale.

One goal is to track the marketing of comics material to booksellers. The listings will be fairly comprehensive when it comes to editions that were marketed to bookstores, and will include work that was not listed when published in a periodical format.

With the advent of the 1980s and the rise of the "direct sales" comics-store market, book editions that were exclusively marketed to comics shops will be restricted to the most significant titles.

The publication dates are by and large the on-sale dates the publishers reported to the U. S. Copyright Office. Exceptions will be noted.

Only magazines and books will be featured. Newspaper material will be included only when it has been published in these formats.

An index to the time periods covered thus far is in the right-hand column. The most recent post is below.

My thanks to Noah Berlatsky and The Hooded Utilitarian for originally hosting the Comics by the Date series.

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