Grand Comics Database (GCD) Comic Issue Scraper

Extract comprehensive bibliographic data for comic book issues from the Grand Comics Database public API.

The Grand Comics Database (comics.org) is the most authoritative open comics catalog on the web — over 2 million issues across 229,000+ series from 17,000+ publishers worldwide. While the GCD website is Cloudflare-protected, the /api/ endpoints are publicly accessible and return clean JSON with no challenge. This actor uses the API path exclusively — no browser required.

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What you get

Each record includes:

• Issue identity — GCD issue ID, series ID, series name, issue number, volume, title
• Publication details — publication date, on-sale date, key date, cover price (+ currency), page count, country, language
• Barcodes & identifiers — barcode, ISBN, indicia publisher
• Creator credits — per-story writer, penciller, inker, colorist, letterer, editor credits (in structured string format)
• Story details — story count, story titles, character lists, genre tags, reprint notes
• Variant linkage — variant_of_id and is_variant flag for variant cover tracking

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Three crawl modes

Mode	Description
series_walk	Walk all GCD series page by page — full catalog (229K+ series → 2M+ issues)
publisher_walk	Scope to specific publishers by ID (e.g. 78 = Marvel, 18 = DC)
by_series_ids	Fetch issues for a specific list of GCD series IDs

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Input

Field	Type	Description
mode	string	Crawl mode: series_walk (default), publisher_walk, or by_series_ids
maxItems	integer	Maximum number of issue records to return (0 = unlimited; default 15)
seriesIds	array	GCD series IDs to scrape (mode by_series_ids only)
publisherIds	array	GCD publisher IDs to filter by (mode publisher_walk only)
startPage	integer	Series page to start from in series_walk mode (default 1)

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Output dataset fields

Field	Type	Description
gcd_issue_id	integer	GCD database ID for the issue
issue_url	string	Canonical API URL for the issue
series_id	integer	GCD series ID (for joining with series data)
series_name	string	Series name with year, e.g. "Amazing Spider-Man (1963 series)"
issue_number	string	Issue number as published
volume	string	Volume designation
title	string	Issue title (if any)
publication_date	string	Human-readable publication date
on_sale_date	string	On-sale date (when available)
key_date	string	GCD sortable key date (YYYY-MM-DD format)
price	string	Cover price (numeric portion)
currency	string	Currency code (USD, GBP, EUR, etc.)
pages	integer	Page count
barcode	string	UPC barcode
isbn	string	ISBN (when available)
editing_credits	string	Editor credits
cover_image_url	string	Cover image URL (null — not available via GCD API)
variant_of_id	integer	GCD ID of the base issue (for variant covers)
is_variant	boolean	True if this is a variant cover
story_count	integer	Number of stories in the issue
story_titles	string	Story titles joined by " | "
story_credits	string	Creator credits per story joined by " || "
characters	string	Character appearances
genre	string	Genre tags
reprint_notes	string	Reprint notes
indicia_publisher	string	Indicia publisher name

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Use cases

• Comic price guides — join GCD issue records with pricing data (PriceCharting, GoCollect) via series_id / gcd_issue_id
• Collection management — build a personal or dealer catalog of owned/wanted issues
• Market research — identify key issue variants, first appearances, creator runs
• Publisher catalogs — enumerate complete run data for any publisher
• Data enrichment — supplement your comic database with bibliographic depth

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GCD data licensing

GCD data is released under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA). Commercial use with attribution is permitted. See comics.org for details.

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Rate limits

The GCD API is a community-run server. This actor uses conservative concurrency (8 parallel issue fetches) with 200ms delay between series pages and 50ms between issue fetches to stay well within polite-use limits.

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Notes

• publisher, publisher_id, country, and language are not returned on the issue API endpoint; they live on the series object. Use series_id to join against a separate series walk if you need these fields.
• cover_image_url is always null — the GCD API does not expose image URLs for individual issues.