Thread:Hatebunny/@comment-25012939-20140813160012/@comment-3361105-20140813160755

The dates printed on the covers of comics are not actually the release dates. They are the "sell-by" dates - which means that a comic that comes out in October should be shifted from the racks to the long-boxes by the end of December. Most magazine-type publications use that same method. If they didn't follow this practice, the racks would just fill up with more and more unsold issues, and there'd be confusion about which issue was newest (even with the numbers).

Because the date on the cover is reliably present and the most prominent date associated with a comic, we list them prominently so that people can easily identify or discover comics on the site that they have in their collections.

The actual release date is kind of trivial, in that respect.

However, we still keep track of that. Not every case is two months behind the release date, but we have it set to automatically shove it into the category for two months beforehand unless an override is used (which I can tell you about, if you'd like to know).

For collections, we don't use the same dating system, and the actual month of release is the month that we fill the template with.