Keydate

• Required.
• A 10 character code in the form YYYY.MM.DD, unique to every distinct issue in a series and used to represent the publication date of the comic for sorting purposes. This field is required for easy chronological sorting of issues, but is not shown in searches on the website.
• The YYYY represents the four-digit year the issue was published. If the publication date spans two years (e.g. December 1968-January 1969), use the first year.
• The MM represents the month. For bimonthly publications that list more than one month in their indicia (e.g. January-February 1955), the KeyDate should be based on the first month. For quarterly publications, “Spring” issues may be indexed as “04”, “Summer” issues may be indexed as “07”, “Fall” issues may be indexed as “10”, and “Winter” or “Holiday” issues may be indexed as “00” or “13”, depending on whether they were published early or late in the year. If the month of publication is not known, either “00” or “13” may be used for MM. 00 is used for an issue published before issues for which a month is known, 13 is used for an issue published after issues for which a month is known.)
• The DD represents the day. For a monthly series, DD is represented as a standard value of 10. If a series is published with a frequency greater than monthly, then the exact day of publication is indicated. For example, two consecutive issues of a biweekly publication might have the KeyDates 2002.01.09 and 2002.01.23. If the exact day of publication is not known, any combination of dates that allows the issue published earlier to sort first may be substituted.
• Some series such as Dell's Four Color have the keydates entered in by pattern, since the months of the individual issues are generally unknown.
• Examples:

* 1980.02.10 (for February 1980) 
* 1945.01.10 (for January 1945) 
* 1960.00.00 (for unknown date in 1960 or unknown date in the 1960s) 
* 1953.04.76 (for Four Color issue #476) 

(end of definition)

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Definition currently under review by the Senior Editors (April 11, 2008)

Current Schema: Issues table, Key_Date field