INTRODUCTION

Comic Books, particularly super-hero comic books, have been a part of pop culture since before World War II. The introduction of Superman in ACTION COMICS #1 (1938) and the Human Torch in MARVEL COMICS #1 (1939) began a long line of costumed characters that now numbers in the thousands.

With new comics released every week, the database will never be "complete", but the goal is to provide valuable information for comic book collectors, and a special subset that are interested in knowing specific details such as where and when characters appeared. There are numerous online sources for information, the most prominent one I use being The Grand Comics Database, but I'm ultimately a fan of the desktop application. In that regard, I wanted to create a program that would provide much of the same information, but easier to update and much more comprehensive in the data provided. For instance, The Comic Book Index provides detailed character listing that, with a quick double-click, will show you every appearance of that character that has been indexed.

This help file is available to provide instruction on how to navigate and manipulate the wealth of data contained in the application.

HISTORY

The Comic Book Index was originally conceived as a researching tool in 2011, shortly after I started writing character profiles for the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. Based on the then-current Official Index series, the application grew in scope and agenda over the course of almost 2 years before being released for public usage. Originally connected to a local Microsoft Access database for my own usage, a problem arose once I decided to let a select few others use it. How would I get the updated data to them whenever I changed something? The answer came in the form of MySQL. With the help of my good friend Robert Scarcella Jr at Northern Host , we set up a web server, converted my database from Access to the MySQL format, and uploaded several thousand comic book covers. After some reconfiguring of the program and rigorous testing, the CBI went live in the summer of 2012. After a few months of further tweaking, the first public Beta version was released on April 1st, 2013! Beta version were regularly released over the next couple years, until version 1.0 finally became a reality.

Version 1.0 was released on August 8th, 2016

Version 2.0 was released on April 19th, 2017

Version 3.0 was released on April 30th, 2018

Version 3.1 was released on May 1st, 2019

Version 3.2 was released on October 15th, 2020

Version 3.3 was released on June 4th, 2021

Version 4.0 was released on October 20th, 2021