The COMET Standard
COMET is an open metadata standard for the comics industry — a common language for describing comics products (periodicals, graphic novels, and related items) across publishers, distributors, and retailers.
This site is the always-current human-readable reference. Every field and picklist page you see is generated directly from the standard's YAML source at build time, so it can never drift from the canonical data.
Start here
- Data Dictionary — a searchable, sortable table of all 125 fields. This is the page most people use.
- Fields by tier — full detail for every field, grouped Essential → Core → Extended.
- Picklists — the 15 controlled vocabularies referenced by Pick List fields.
- Implementation Guide — how to adopt COMET in practice.
- White Paper — the background, rationale, and industry context.
The three data tiers
Every field belongs to one of three tiers, which also determines who owns it.
| Tier | Owner | Fields | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essential | Publisher | 6 | The minimum to identify a product: title, primary identifier (UPC/ISBN/EAN), price, category. |
| Core | Publisher | 77 | Everything that describes what the product is. |
| Extended | Distributor | 42 | Everything that describes how to order it. |
Current composition: 6 essential, 77 core, 42 extended — 125 fields total, of which 23 are always required and a further 14 are conditionally required (e.g. for comics, for books, for variant covers).
How to contribute
The standard is living. Anyone can propose a change — see CONTRIBUTING. In short: open an issue using one of the templates, or submit a pull request. All changes are reviewed and merged by the COMET Standards Committee.
The COMET Standard is © ComicsPRO, released under CC BY 4.0. The marketing site lives at cometstandard.com.