Hybrid GCD Scraper for ComicRack — first look and user guide preview
Hey everyone! Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on **GCD Scraper**, and I wanted to share a first look through an early beta of its English user guide.
As many of you know, **I’m not a developer**, although I’ve been making ComicRack plugins by hand for years. AI has helped me take on much more ambitious projects like this one. **The coding for this adaptation has been done entirely through GPT and “vibe coding,” using my ComicRack plugin development skill**, which I’ve also been testing and improving along the way.
GPT writes the code, but I’ve been directing every workflow, design choice, idea and change, then testing the results and working through revisions. It’s been a very hands-on process, with a lot of time and effort going into getting things to behave the way I wanted.
This is the little “secret project” I’d been keeping under wraps. I’m still working on it every day, pretty much nonstop in hyperfocus mode, haha.
**The starting point was Comic Vine Scraper, originally created by Cory Banack**, and full credit for that foundation belongs to him and its contributors. This has grown into **much more than a scraper pointed at a different website**: I’ve added and changed a lot of functionality, run hundreds upon hundreds of tests, and, by my estimate, ended up changing more than 90% of the original code.
Throughout those changes, I’ve deliberately kept the **familiar interface and workflow already tested and embraced by the ComicRack community**. Building on that foundation makes the transition easier for existing users and saves me from reinventing the wheel.
For anyone unfamiliar with **Grand Comics Database (GCD)**, it’s a community-maintained catalogue of comic publications, editions, credits and covers. The original scraper uses Comic Vine; this adaptation uses GCD. **Both plugins can coexist and complement each other**, with your settings determining which fields get updated or preserved.
I know other GCD projects exist, and I appreciate the work behind them. My motivation was to build a solid scraper around my own preferences and bring the features I wanted together in one tool. Hopefully, that combination will be useful to others too.
Some highlights:
* **Online and Offline scraping**, using live GCD records or a downloaded SQLite catalogue. * **Manual and automatic matching**, with language/country filters and priorities. * **Variants and alternate covers**, with configurable grouping and separate cover options for each mode. * **Control over imported metadata**: standard or custom destinations, per-field writing policies, prefixes and normalization. * **Re-scraping previously matched comics** and **Missing Issues reports**, with date ranges, “last X days” and series/publisher scope.
I’d put the project at **around 80% complete**. Everything described in the document has already been developed—it covers existing functionality, rather than planned features. I’m continuing to test, fix bugs and polish it before sharing the plugin.
**For now, I’m only sharing this beta tutorial as a preview.** It covers setup from zero, getting a GCD account and local database, the main workflows, which options to choose, and what’s inherited or different from Comic Vine Scraper.
**If there’s a feature you’d like, a workflow you wish a scraper supported, or anything else you’d like to see, now is a good time to suggest it!** I’m still finalizing the overall direction, so this preview is also an opportunity to help shape the project before the first public beta.
Soon, I’ll release a beta stable enough for anyone interested to help test. I’ll also be sharing the GPT skill and the other project I previously mentioned.
The tutorial preview is attached. Feedback on the guide is welcome too, especially anything that could make it easier for someone starting from scratch. Thanks for taking a look!
PDF -> [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pb9u2J\_auEuWhgrGyivQBBz4Blnu0JbL/view?usp=drive\_link](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pb9u2J_auEuWhgrGyivQBBz4Blnu0JbL/view?usp=drive_link)