Open rouhannb opened 3 years ago
That's interesting, thanks for pointing it out.
Could you clarify whether this cover date actually means the date on which the cover was released? I know on Image Comics website for instance you can see the future issues to be released, and usually the cover is already there.
I believe that "cover date" refers to the date information literally printed upon the cover in ink, usually just Mon / Year. Publication date is traditional cataloging information.
Here is an example discussion of the difference at dc.fandom:
I’m not sure how widespread this is, but some publishers of US comics have two publishing dates: the date the issue was released, and a cover date, which is typically a couple months ahead, and also fuzzy. ComicVine distinguishes the two as “In Store Date” and “Cover Date” respectively.
For example, Wonder Woman #761 was released on August 25, but has a cover date of October.
It might be useful to distinguish the two, at the very least to prevent confusion for people writing scrapers or manually writing metadata.