Data sources and credits

Publishers, series, issues, editions, creators, characters and teams in our catalog come from:

• Metron (metron.cloud), a community comic database with a public API. We use its series, issues and variants, credits, characters, barcodes, release and final order cutoff dates, and cover images. Metron is our first source when the two disagree.
• The Grand Comics Database (comics.org), the long-running volunteer index of the world’s comics. We use its publishers, series, issues and variants, story credits, characters and groups from its data dumps, mostly to fill in what Metron doesn’t have.

Every catalog record keeps which source and source id it came from, and each issue page credits its sources. A few records were added by collectors when a comic wasn’t in either source yet; they are marked provisional until a source confirms them.

Catalog data on The Collector is adapted from Metron and the Grand Comics Database and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0). Full terms: the license’s legal code.

What we changed. We normalize titles and issue numbers, split barcodes into the main code and the add-on, read variant names into cover, printing and distribution, combine records from both sources that describe the same comic, merge duplicates, and add barcode knowledge confirmed when collectors scan their books. Our changes and additions to the catalog are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 as well.

The license covers catalog data only. It doesn’t apply to cover images (below), your private collections, or the app’s own text, design and code.

You may copy and build on our catalog data, including commercially, as long as you:

• credit Metron, the Grand Comics Database and The Collector, with links;
• link to the CC BY-SA 4.0 license;
• say that you changed the data, if you did; and
• share alike: release what you build from it under CC BY-SA 4.0 too, so the next person can reuse it the same way.

That share-alike rule is why our own changes to the catalog are under the same license: we received the data on those terms, and pass it on with them.

The public catalog pages show every series and issue we hold, with credits and editions, and can be reused under the license above. A bulk download of our version of the catalog isn’t available yet. The original data is available from both sources:

• Metron offers a free public API; create an account to get access.
• The Grand Comics Database publishes regular data dumps to signed-in users.

Comic covers are © their publishers and creators. We show them at reduced size to identify each issue and edition; they aren’t covered by the catalog license. Covers in the catalog come with Metron’s issue records, except for the issues featured on our home page, listed below.

The covers on our home page were retrieved from Wikipedia’s file pages, where they’re published with a fair-use rationale. Each one, with the credit given on its source page:

If you hold the rights to a cover and want it removed, we’ll take it down. A contact address for these requests is being set up and will be listed here.

The Collector is built with these open-source projects, among many smaller ones, each under its own license:

• Next.js, web frameworkMIT
• React and React DOM, interfaceMIT
• Supabase client libraries, database, sign-in and storage accessMIT
• Base UI, accessible interface primitivesMIT
• Tailwind CSS, stylesMIT
• TanStack Query and Virtual, data caching and long listsMIT
• Vercel AI SDK, AI requestsApache-2.0
• zxing-wasm, barcode reading, built on ZXing-C++ (Apache-2.0)MIT
• Lucide, iconsISC
• Zod, input validationMIT
• Recharts, value chartsMIT
• Papa Parse, reading spreadsheets for importMIT
• Motion, Lenis and NumberFlow, animation and scrollingMIT
• GSAP, home page animationGSAP Standard License (no charge)
• qrcode.react, phone pairing codesISC
• Sonner, notifications on screenMIT
• next-themes, light and dark themesMIT
• Stripe Node library, billingMIT
• jose, token verificationMIT
• sharp, image conversion on the serverApache-2.0, with libvips (LGPL-3.0-or-later)
• Archivo, Inter, Geist Mono and Bangers, typefacesSIL Open Font License 1.1