News, deals, and a catalog that shows its work

The last update was about new things to read — character chronologies, creator pages, issues that describe themselves. This one is mostly about new things to know: what's happening in comics, what changed in the catalog overnight, and what a book actually costs today.

A comics newswire

There's a News page now. It pulls from eleven comics outlets — Bleeding Cool, The Beat, CBR, AIPT, ComicBook.com and others — and lands them on one timeline, grouped by day.

The useful part is the deduplication. When five sites cover the same announcement you get one entry, credited to whoever ran it first, instead of scrolling past the same headline five times. As of this writing that's 116 stories from 11 outlets, refreshed through the day.

News also shows up where it's relevant: edition, creator and character pages carry an In the news module when there's something recent about that specific book or person. It only appears when the match is unambiguous — a story about "Batman" doesn't get stapled onto every Batman book in the catalog.

Everything that changed, in order

Catalog Updates is a running log of what happened to the catalog itself. New books, revised solicitations, changed release dates, corrected contents — 1,231 entries so far, newest first, grouped by day and then by publisher.

This is the page that answers "did anything get announced this week?" without you having to notice it yourself. Each entry says what kind of change it was — Added, Solicitation revised — so a wave of twelve Marvel entries on one day reads as one announcement rather than twelve unrelated events. You can search within it, filter it, and switch between the cover grid and a compact list.

Books at half off

On Sale Now is the page for deep discounts: collected editions currently at least 50% off cover price, checked continuously. Every card shows the discount, the condition, the actual price and which shop it's at. There's a second tab for books that are simply back in stock rather than discounted, and the whole thing filters by format and sorts by how much you'd save.

The honest caveat is on the page itself: it says when prices were last checked. A 60%-off badge from last week is not a deal, and we'd rather show you the timestamp than let you find out at checkout.

Six more places to buy

Where-to-buy kept growing. Since the last update the catalog picked up Book Outlet (publisher overstock), MyComicShop (used copies, graded), Bullseye Deals (eBay outlet), Tales of Wonder, Image Comics and DC direct, and a set of publisher- and creator-direct storefronts including Fantagraphics, Clover Press, Flesk and Matt Kindt.

That's on top of Alibris, AbeBooks, InStockTrades, Cheap Graphic Novels, Panel Bound, DCBS, eBay and Amazon. Every row is still a delivered price with shipping folded in, and every shop now has its logo on the row so you can find the one you trust without reading.

Two smaller things in the same area: shops you click through to are now reached by a proper outbound link rather than a raw handoff, and there's a public price want-list — the books being actively watched for price drops — which the alert bots read from.

Series pages that organize themselves

Big publishing lines used to be a wall of covers in no particular order. DC Finest, Epic Collection and DC Compact now have proper hubs: every volume placed in its line, in content order, with the years each book covers printed on the cover. The DC Finest hub above carries 99 editions across two dozen lines with a jump-to rail down the side.

Series pages in general got three upgrades. There's a Timeline view alongside the grouped one, so you can read a series by release date instead of by line. Nothing opens folded any more — there's Expand all and Collapse all instead of hunting for the section you wanted. And each hub carries a Years fact that reflects the stories inside the books rather than when the books were printed, so a 2024 omnibus of 1963 comics reads as 1963.

Series that exist in more than one format now get a page per format, too, with Previous and Next links that walk you through a reading sequence one book at a time.

Knowing what you already own

The most common expensive mistake in this hobby is buying a book you mostly already have. Book pages now carry a Related editions panel that names every other collection covering the same material and labels the overlap honestly — Partial overlap, Smaller slice — with the exact arithmetic beside it: 17 same · 31 only this · 2 only other. Click Compare contents and you get it issue by issue.

If you're signed in, series and creator pages also show real reading progress, counted at the issue level rather than the book level. Ten of nineteen books can be 110 of 120 issues, and the bar now says so.

There's also a calendar feed: a private link you can subscribe to in any calendar app that puts your pull list and wishlist release dates on your actual calendar.

Search stopped being literal-minded

Four specific ways search used to fail, now fixed:

• The publisher word. marvel black panther omnibus used to search for the word "marvel" in descriptions — which dropped Marvel's own books and let in other publishers' books that happened to mention Marvel. The publisher is now read off the record.
• The half-typed word. absolute batman inc now finds Absolute Batman Incorporated, instead of nothing.
• Compound words. xmen and x men and x-men are the same query now. So are peacekeeping and peace keeping.
• The same book twice. A printing that exists under two ISBNs used to take two of your top ten. Those collapse into one result — but a query that specifically names the variant still finds it.

Plurals, possessives, accents and dotted acronyms all got the same treatment.

What we do with your data, written down

There's a real Privacy page and Terms page now. The privacy inventory isn't hand-written marketing copy — it's generated from the actual list of things the site stores, so it can't quietly drift out of date as features get added.

Alongside it: you can export everything the site holds about you (the export file names its own omissions rather than pretending to be complete), account deletion actually erases rather than hides, and there's a measurement opt-out that stops the analytics script before it's fetched rather than after.

Everything else

The forums grew per-board permissions and delegated moderators. Anything user-posted — listings, posts, messages — can now be reported, and all reports land in one moderator queue. Marketplace buyers and sellers get notified as a transaction moves through its stages. Discord roles sync to site roles, so what you have over there works over here. Books carry star ratings. And covers got better again — flat cover art now replaces the 3D mockups publishers use in solicitations, so a book you're looking at is a book, not a render of a book.

Underneath, a long month of unglamorous reliability work: an external check that watches the site from outside our own network (every internal signal was green during an outage in August, which is exactly the problem), a hard ceiling on how long a slow response can hold a connection, and a much faster recovery after each deploy. None of that is visible when it works, which is the point.

The next thing on the bench is a daily comics puzzle. It's built and in review — you'll see it when the boards are ready.