The Haunted Leaderboard

Every character file on this site starts the same way: an earliest recorded appearance. The record holds 25,264 canonical first appearances, each pinned to a specific issue. Which raises a question I have wanted to ask the database since the derivation first ran: which single issues introduced the most characters at once?

The answer is a leaderboard full of ghosts. Not one of the books at the top created the characters it is credited with. Each one is wearing somebody else's debuts, and each one exposes a different gear of the machine that produced it.

I could have quietly filtered them out. Instead, here they are, because a record is an instrument and instruments have optics. I would rather show you the bend in the light than retouch the photograph.

Issue	Year	Firsts on record
New History of the DC Universe #4	2025	153
Heroes #2	2009	81
Captain Britain Omnibus	2021	55
Avataars: Covenant of the Shield #2	2000	41
The Action Bible	2010	37
Graphic Fantasy #1	1982	32
New History of the DC Universe #3	2025	32
The Transformers #1	1984	30

Canonical first appearances only. Covers, advertisements, profile pages and marked reprints are classified out before counting.

The champion is a 2025 DC retrospective: a history of the DC universe that name-checks everyone. It did not create 153 characters. It is simply the earliest indexed appearance for scores of minor figures whose actual debuts have not yet been indexed at the story level.

A record can only be as complete as the indexing underneath it, and a retrospective that mentions everybody becomes a net that catches every gap at once. Summer Pickens, Thunder, Neon the Unknown, Frost: real characters with real older debuts, all credited to a book published last year.

The 2021 Captain Britain omnibus carries 55 first appearances, among them Jacko Tanner, Doctor Ramsey and Dr. Synne.

Those characters debuted in British weeklies of the late seventies, which are thinly indexed. The collection that reprints them is well indexed. So the collected edition wears debuts that happened four decades before it was printed, and every one of those credits is technically accurate and historically absurd at the same time.

This is my favourite, because it is caused by nothing more than a missing digit.

Marvel Age Annual #1 carries the key date 1985-00-00: a year, and a blank month. A blank month sorts before January. So when the record looks for the earliest appearance of any character who debuted anywhere in 1985, that annual wins, because it is dated to a moment before the year began.

It collects 27 first appearances that way, Phoenix among them. Its siblings do the same: Annual #2 takes 16 including Harpoon and Throg, Annual #3 takes 13 including Bucky and The Captain, Annual #4 takes 13 including Speedball and Archangel. Four books, 69 debuts, all produced by date fields that record a year and shrug at the month.

Now the ghost that is not a data quirk at all, and is the most interesting thing on the board.

In August 1992 WildC.A.T.s #1 launched Jim Lee's corner of the Image universe, and every reference book will tell you Grifter, Zealot, Spartan and Voodoo first appeared there. The record disagrees. It credits the cast to Wizard: The Comics Magazine #12, cover-dated the same month, which ran an indexed preview story ahead of the launch. Fifteen firsts, including Grifter, Voodoo, Maul, WarBlade, Spartan and Zealot.

The receipts are on the board itself. WildC.A.T.s #1 is credited with three firsts, Pike, Helspont and Providence, the characters the preview did not spoil. The rest of the cast had already been printed elsewhere.

Wizard does it again five months earlier: issue #7, March 1992, holds the first appearance of Aric Dacia and X-O Manowar, ahead of the Valiant launch. A magazine about comics kept beating the comics it was about.

Wizard #12 on eBay ›

Graphic Fantasy #1, June 1982, published by "Ajax Comics," which was three young men including a twenty-year-old Erik Larsen, with a print run in the hundreds. It sits sixth on the board with 32 recorded firsts, ahead of most corporate launches in the database.

This one is real in a way the others are not: Larsen genuinely did print the cast he had been drawing since childhood, including the Dragon, a decade before Savage Dragon reached Image. Whether those count as the professional first appearances is a live argument among collectors, and the record takes the position that printed is printed.

It is also a useful caution against reading the board as a ranking of importance. Most of those 32 characters never appeared again.

The Transformers #1, 1984, with 30 first appearances, is the only book in the top eight that introduced its characters the ordinary way: by publishing stories about them for the first time.

Even that comes with an asterisk, because the cast already existed on a toy shelf. Licensed comics are the record's great roster machines. When the characters are designed before the script is written, issue one arrives with the entire universe walking through the door at once.

Transformers #1 on eBay ›

Four mechanisms produce this entire leaderboard, and every one of them is worth knowing if you use comic databases at all:

• Indexing depth beats chronology. The earliest indexed appearance is not the earliest appearance. Thoroughly indexed modern books inherit debuts from thinly indexed old ones.
• Collections wear their contents' birthdays. An omnibus reprinting 1970s material can hold 1970s first appearances if the originals were never indexed at story level.
• Date precision is a ranking input. A key date with a blank month sorts before every dated issue in its year, and quietly wins first-appearance credit for the lot.
• Previews print before launches. Sometimes the ghost is not an artifact at all. Sometimes a magazine really did publish the characters first.

Every issue page here shows the context and confidence of each first-appearance claim, and where an independent reference disagrees, both claims appear side by side. That is the same argument our cover-date piece makes from a different direction: what a comic says about itself and what the record says about it are two different facts, and this site's job is to keep both.

Every figure above was computed from the record on the day of writing and can be checked on the linked pages. If the indexing underneath improves, and it does, constantly, some of these ghosts will quietly disappear. That is not a flaw in the record. That is the record working.