ComicsPRO’s working group on metadata, the data retailers use to place orders, record sales, and monitor their business, has set a goal of significantly improving the comics data stream by the end of 2025. The aim of the new standard (see “Comet Metadata Standard”) is to make the data consistent and more accurate across distributors to streamline ordering and record-keeping and, in the future, to improve sales reporting as well.

Katie Pryde, owner of Comics With Pictures in Portland, OR, and leader of the metadata project, reported on its progress at the ComicsPRO Open House on September 13, 2024. The chief task at the moment is helping distributors and publishers comply with the standard. ComicsPRO has set up a helpline where retailers can report problems and errors (see “Comics Metadata Helpline Launched”), and Brian Garside of Manage Comics and Django Bohren of ComicShop Assistant, two members of the metadata team, have been responding to these reports. “We have specialists within distributors and publishers who have all committed to fixing the problems,” Garside said during the presentation, “and then we track and quickly identify those problems to solve systemic issues through education or systems improvements.”

Garside said that of the 46 reports they have received so far, the most common errors are incorrect formatting of UPC and ISBN codes, problems with issue sequence numbers, missing fields, incorrect FOC dates, and missing series codes. Retailers can report problems on the Comet Standard website.

Pryde reported on the distributor efforts. Diamond has created a new system for vendors to input their data to ensure that it will be complete and correct. Lunar has added a Series Family field that will allow all Batman or My Little Pony titles, for instance, to be grouped together. PRH Comics has a dedicated team working on implementation of the standard and have been holding meetings throughout August and September with the goal of the Comet Standard file format in November 2024.

Pryde outlined the next steps:

  • Distributors will convert their current files to the new standard by the first quarter of 2025
  • Publishers continue working toward providing complete and correct data to distributors
  • All parties will report problems to the Comet rapid response team
  • Point of Sale system providers will revise their systems to work with the new standard
  • Publishers and distributors will coordinate on ensuring that all Comet data fields are supplied.

“One of the real goals here is not just to get the data clean and unified, but rather to get the data clean and unified so that we can improve sales reporting, which is in a lot of ways, the real goal,” Pryde said as she concluded her update. “But we're not there yet.”

“I really think that when we have cleaner data, the whole industry is going to feel more professional,” she added.