Cover date: Difference between revisions

In the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, the standard practice is to display on magazine covers a date which is some weeks or months in the future from the actual publishing/ or release date. There are two reasons for this discrepancy: first, to allow magazines to continue appearing "current" to [[consumer]]s even after they have been on sale for some time (since not all magazines will be sold immediately), and second, to inform newsstands when an unsold magazine can be removed from the stands and returned to the [[publisherPublishing|publishing company]] or be destroyed (in this case, the cover date is also the '''pull date''').<ref>{{cite web|author=Cecil Adams |url=http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/780/why-are-magazines-dated-ahead-of-the-time-they-actually-appear |title=Why are magazines dated ahead of the time they actually appear? |publisher=The Straight Dope |date=1990-06-22 |access-date=2013-06-28}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |last=Head |first=Will |date=June 2000 |title=Letters |work=[[Personal Computer World]] |pages=67 |volume=23 |issue=6}}</ref>

Weeklies (such as ''[[Time (magazine)|Time]]'' and ''[[Newsweek]]'') are generally dated a week ahead. Monthlies (such as ''[[National Geographic Magazine]]'') are generally dated atwo monthto three months ahead, and quarterlies are generally dated threehalf monthsa month ahead.

In all markets, it is rare for monthly magazines to indicate a particular day of the month: thus issues are dated ''May 20052016'', and so on, whereas weekly magazines may be dated ''17 May 20052016''.

The general practice of most mainstream [[comic book]] companies since the creation of the comic book in the 1930s was to date individual issues by putting the name of a month (and much later the year as well) on the cover which was generally two months after the actual release date. For example, a 1951 issue of ''[[Superman (comic book)|Superman]]'' which had the cover date of July would have been published two months earlier from that date in the month of May, generally speaking. In 1973 the discrepancy between the cover date and the publishing date went from two months to three months.<ref>{{cite book|author-link= Paul Levitz|last=Levitz|first= Paul|title= 75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Mythmaking|publisher= [[Taschen|Taschen America]] |year=2010| ISBN= 978-3-8365-1981-6|page= 516 |quote= Cover dates on comics didn't match magazine dating norms, and by 1973 Marvel's cover dates made them appear newer than DC's, so DC decided to skip using May 1973 and go straight to June.}}</ref> In 1989 the cover date and publishing date discrepancy was changed back to two months, though generally each comic book company now uses its own system.

Of the two major American comic book publishers, [[DC Comics]] continues to put cover dates on the [[Book cover|cover]]. [[Marvel Comics]] stoppedopted against putting cover dates on the cover in October 1999; instead, the "cover" date was moved to the [[copyright]] [[fineIndicia print(publishing)|indicia]] on an interior page.