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, take a look at the menu to the left to see how you can help us improve the site, or use my.comics.org to track and manage your comic collection.

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.

---

GCD Comics Timeline

---

Ron Cobb (b. 1937)

1937 September 21 - 2020 September 21
Artist, cartoonist, writer, film and production designer who first became known for his political cartoons in the Los Angeles Free Press and other underground publications in the late sixties and early seventies. Collections of his work from this period include RCD-25 (1967), Mah Fellow Americans (1968), Raw Sewage, My Fellow Americans (1971), The Cobb Book (1974) and Cobb Again.

Later on he became a production designer with contributions to films like Star Wars, Alien, Conan the Barbarian, Leviathan and The Last Starfighter. Other films he's contributed conceptual designs to include The Abyss, Aliens, Back to the Future, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Dark Star, Real Genius, Total Recall and True Lies. His "Night Skies" story was the dark initial version of what later became the film E.T.

Charlotte Dematons (b. 1957)

1957 September 21
Born in France, Dematons moved to The Netherlands to study at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, from which she graduated in 1982. She has since worked as a book illustrator and occasionally does comic book work.

Tom McWeeney (b. 1965)

1965 September 21
More biographical information can be found in Amazing Heroes #162, 1989.

Lona Rietschel (b. 1933)

1933 September 21 - 2017 December 19
Lona Rietschel studied fashion graphics and cartoon, with the aim of becoming a cartoonist. However, as the DEFA Studio for Animated Films was moved to Dresden and Rietschel did not want to leave Berlin, she applied to the comic magazine Mosaik. However, she was only hired when another draughtsman stayed in West Germany in 1960. Lona Rietschel quickly became the most important cartoonist. She designed the main characters Dig, Dag and Digedag as well as supporting figures such as Ritter Runkel and the infamous pirate band "Teufelsbrüder".

When Hannes Hegen left Mosaik in 1975 and his figures, the Digedags, were taken away, new figures were created. Lothar Dräger invented the names and characters of the Abrafaxes and Lona Rietschel created the figures. Until 1999 she remained faithful to the monthly mosaic magazine and regularly drew her abrafaxes until old age. The covers of the anthologies as well as the motifs of the calendar for 2006 come from her hand. Not least, Lona Rietschel's ability to draw made the mosaic a comic legend.

Martin Hirchak (b. ????)

????? September 20
Creator and publisher of the comic book Pop Art Funnies (MPH, 2004 Series), also did some comic work in 1999 for the Detroit News (Detroit, Michigan).

Duncan MacPherson (b. 1924)

1924 September 20 - 1993 month? day?
First cartoonist to become a member of the Order of Canada.

Jay Ward (b. 1920)

1920 September 20 - 1989 October 12
Jay Ward was an American creator and producer of animated TV cartoon shows. He produced animated series based on such characters as Crusader Rabbit, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Dudley Do-Right, Peabody and Sherman, Hoppity Hooper, George of the Jungle, Tom Slick, and Super Chicken. His company, Jay Ward Productions, designed the trademark characters for the Cap'n Crunch, Quisp, and Quake breakfast cereals and it made TV commercials for those products, and the company also made a Drive-in Theater intermission in 1963, which later remastered in the 2010s. Ward produced the non-animated series Fractured Flickers that featured comedy redubbing of silent films.

Lloyd DeMause (b. 1931)

1931 September 19 - 2020 April 23
Founder of The Journal of Psychohistory.

Carla Hansen (b. 1906)

1906 September 19 - 2001 December 6
Vilhelm Hansen and Carla Hansen were an artistic couple. He was a trained lithographist, while she was a writer. Vilhelm worked mainly as an advertising artist between the two World Wars, and only started making comics and illustrating the tales written by Carla in the 1940s.

Their collaborative comic Rasmus Klump, about the adventures of a bear, a pelican, a penguin, and some other animals, debuted in Denmark on November 17, 1951, as a daily comic strip. It soon became one of the most popular European children comics, being translated and distributed into many languages and countries, mainly by the publishing houses Carlsen Comics and Casterman. While they no longer wrote or drew the stories after 1965, it was their names that stayed on the albums.

Garry Leach (b. 1954)

1954 September 19
Garry Leach is best known for his artwork on Marvelman and for co-founding Atomeka Press.

He also did support work as a letterer in British comic books during the 1980s. Leach also did support work for Quality Communications as an art director from 1981 to an unknown date and for Atomeka Press as an editor from 1988 to 1990.

Along with Garth Ennis and John McCrea, Leach won the Eisner Award "Best Single Issue" for Hitman (DC, 1996 Series) #34 (February 1999).