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Comic Vine Scraper

Apify Actor for scraping the Comic Vine comic book database. Search and extract detailed information about characters, issues, and volumes/series using the Comic Vine API.

Features

• Search by characters, issues, or volumes/series
• Full detail mode extracts creators, powers, teams, story arcs, and more
• Paginated results with configurable limits
• Built-in rate limiting to respect API limits (200 requests/hour)
• Structured JSON output ready for analysis

Requirements

You need a free Comic Vine API key. Get one at comicvine.gamespot.com/api (requires a free GameSpot account).

Input

Example Input

{
"apiKey":"your-api-key-here",
"searchQueries":["Batman","Spider-Man"],
"searchType":"character",
"maxListings":20,
"scrapeDetails":true
}

Output

Character Output

{
"type":"character",
"id":1699,
"name":"Batman",
"realName":"Bruce Wayne",
"aliases":["The Dark Knight","The Caped Crusader"],
"publisher":"DC Comics",
"gender":"Male",
"origin":"Human",
"powers":["Genius Level Intellect","Martial Arts","Stealth","Gadgets"],
"teams":[{"name":"Justice League","id":31815}],
"enemies":[{"name":"Joker","id":1702}],
"creators":[{"name":"Bob Kane","id":2643}],
"firstAppearedInIssue":"Detective Comics #27",
"issueCount":15234,
"description":"Bruce Wayne witnessed the murder of his parents...",
"imageUrl":"https://comicvine.gamespot.com/a/uploads/...",
"url":"https://comicvine.gamespot.com/batman/4005-1699/",
"searchQuery":"Batman",
"scrapedAt":"2026-04-25T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Issue Output

{
"type":"issue",
"id":110729,
"name":"The Court of Owls, Part One",
"issueNumber":"1",
"volume":"Batman",
"volumeId":42721,
"coverDate":"2011-11-01",
"writers":["Scott Snyder"],
"artists":["Greg Capullo"],
"characters":[{"name":"Batman","id":1699}],
"storyArcs":[{"name":"Court of Owls","id":55766}],
"description":"Batman investigates a series of murders...",
"imageUrl":"https://comicvine.gamespot.com/a/uploads/...",
"url":"https://comicvine.gamespot.com/batman-1-the-court-of-owls/...",
"searchQuery":"Batman",
"scrapedAt":"2026-04-25T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Volume Output

{
"type":"volume",
"id":796,
"name":"Batman",
"publisher":"DC Comics",
"startYear":"1940",
"issueCount":713,
"firstIssue":{"name":"The Legend of the Batman","issueNumber":"1"},
"lastIssue":{"name":null,"issueNumber":"713"},
"description":"The original ongoing Batman series...",
"imageUrl":"https://comicvine.gamespot.com/a/uploads/...",
"url":"https://comicvine.gamespot.com/batman/4050-796/",
"searchQuery":"Batman",
"scrapedAt":"2026-04-25T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Search Types

Rate Limits

The Comic Vine API allows 200 requests per hour. The scraper automatically:

• Adds 1.1s delays between API calls
• Retries on rate limit errors with 10s backoff
• Retries failed requests up to 3 times

For large scrapes (100+ results with details), expect ~2 minutes per 100 results.

How It Works

1. Sends search queries to the Comic Vine API search endpoint
2. Parses paginated search results (up to 100 per page)
3. Optionally fetches full detail pages for each result via the API
4. Extracts and normalizes data into clean JSON structures
5. Pushes results to the Apify dataset

Quick Start

$apify run --purge

Deploy to Apify

apify login
apify push

Run on Apify

This scraper runs on the Apify platform — a full-stack web scraping and automation cloud. Sign up for a free account to get started with 30-day trial of all features.

Try Apify free →

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