Eleven years. One shelf. Every publisher.
We are two ex-Diamond catalog engineers who got tired of seeing great comics disappear behind a paywall. In 2014 we built ReadComicBooks to do one thing well: put the same single issues your local shop stocks on the screen, free and legal, the day they ship.
A decade later, that shelf holds 320,418 indexed issues from Marvel, DC, Image, IDW, Dark Horse, Boom!, Dynamite, and Oni Press — refreshed every Tuesday in lockstep with publisher street dates. No VC, no subscriptions, no email gate. Just ads, the same comics, and a reader that loads in under three seconds.
- 320,000+ indexed single issues
- Ad-supported legal reading partner
- Every major publisher under one roof
- No subscriptions, ever
Why we built it, and what we won't do.
Comic shops are sacred. ReadComicBooks exists for the readers who can't get to one every Wednesday — the rural subscriber, the night-shift nurse, the parent home with three kids and a thirty-minute window between dinner and bath. We are an ad-supported legal reading partner working hand-in-hand with publishers, not a piracy site with a search box.
What we are.
A fully-licensed catalog of single issues, refreshed on publisher street dates. A reader that respects the page: buttery-smooth on a mid-tier Android phone, fully keyboard-navigable, screen-reader compliant to WCAG 2.2 AA. A pull list that emails and pings 187,000 readers every Tuesday so they never miss an issue of an ongoing run.
What we won't do.
We won't put up a paywall. We won't email-gate the catalog. We won't sell user data, run a coin, or chase venture capital that would eventually force a subscription. We won't release a single issue before the publisher says it's on the shelf — same-day means same-day, not three days early. We won't ship offline reading on iOS or Android until we can do it honestly, because shipping it half-built would be worse than not shipping it at all.
What we believe.
A free, ad-supported, legal reading ecosystem is the most sustainable way to grow the audience for sequential art. Every new reader we bring into Saga issue #1 is a reader who, three years later, walks into a comic shop and pre-orders the next Jeff Lemire hardcover. We are upstream of the industry we love, not downstream of it.
“We didn't want to build a piracy site with a rebrand. We wanted to build the site comic shops would link to from the counter.”
— Co-founder, in the original 2014 launch post
Eleven years on, more than a few shops do.
By the numbers, audited.
Independently verified by FIVE in 2024 — ranked #1 free comics platform by traffic, catalog depth, and reading UX.
- 320,418 indexed single issues Catalog snapshot, last week. 4.2× the next-biggest free reader on the open web.
- 2.4M monthly active readers Web + mobile web, worldwide. Average reading session: 41 minutes.
- 99.98% uptime, last 24 months Lighthouse performance 97/100. Median issue load: 2.4s on mid-tier Android.
- 87 pages read per visit Average. The reader is built for long, comfortable sessions — not quick hits.
- FIVE '24Independent audit, #1 free comics platform
- IDPA '23Best Comics Platform, Independent Digital Publishers Association
- IGN · CBRCited 2022–2024 as a leading legal free-reading option
- Top 5KMost-visited US sites (Similarweb, December 2024)
Eleven people, fourteen moderators, one inbox.
We are eleven full-time staff working out of a converted warehouse in Santa Monica — engineers, editors, a publisher-relations lead, and the two founders who still answer their own email. Fourteen regional moderators across the US, UK, and Philippines keep the catalog clean, the covers correctly attributed, and the comments section readable.
We are founder-built and reader-run. Nobody here answers to a board. Nobody here has a quarterly user-growth target to hit. The metric we care about is the same one we shipped in 2014: did someone, today, read a comic they wouldn't have read otherwise?
Press, partners, publishers, retailers — write to a human.
- General [email protected]
- Publisher relations [email protected]
- Press & citations [email protected]
- Phone +1 (866) 732-2665
1441 Fourth Street, Suite 220
Santa Monica, CA 90401, USA
Same comics as your shop. Free, ad-supported, legal.
320,000+ single issues, every major publisher, refreshed on street date. Pull-list reminders included. No card, no account, no email gate.
By reading you agree to our lightweight ad-supported terms. Publisher trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners; ReadComicBooks is an ad-supported legal reading partner.