I’m Adam Kinney, and I built Comic Scry because the secondary comic market is hard to move through. Hard to know what you’ve got. Hard to inventory it. Hard to sell it without either getting fleeced or accidentally fleecing someone else. That friction keeps a lot of good books stuck in boxes.
I want to make that easier — for everyone standing over one of those boxes trying to figure out what’s in front of them.
So here’s the app, plainly: point your phone at any cover, get a tier (Bulk, Modest, Solid, High, Major), a value range, and a source you can check. Decide — keep, sell, bulk-lot. Move to the next book.
This is the first post. No launch theater. Just where the app actually is, what I’m obsessing over, and how to reach me.
The thing I care about most: getting the ID right
Identification is the whole game, and I’ve spent this week doing almost nothing but scanning comics and making it smarter.
Here’s the rule I’m building around: if we can’t tell, we don’t guess.
That’s why the latest build added an edition picker. When a cover doesn’t show its year and there’s more than one printing it could be, the app stops and asks you which one — instead of quietly picking and hoping it’s right. A confident wrong answer is worse than an honest “which of these?”
Your phone remembers a book it’s already identified, so the second scan of it is instant. And every cover the app gets wrong is something I can learn from — the more we all scan, the more I see where it’s weak, and the better it gets. That feedback loop is the engine right now.
The cover artwork it matches against comes from the Grand Comics Database — a nonprofit, volunteer-built archive going back to 1994 that the Library of Congress mirrors. Where they archive, we triage.
Variants: This part is still early
The gap between a $1,500 first printing and a $7 facsimile reprint is exactly the kind of mistake that costs real money. And telling those two apart, every time, is genuinely hard.
Right now, sometimes the app catches it. Sometimes it doesn’t yet. There’s a lot more for us to learn before I’d call this solved — and it’s where a big chunk of my attention is going next.
Pricing: a foundation, not a finished answer
Pricing is the second thing I’m building up, and I think of it as a foundation we keep pouring, not a number carved in stone.
The number you see is the Scry Value. Its core is our own independent research — I check what comparable copies actually sell for and work it into a sharper triage signal over time. It’s built from current eBay listings — what other collectors are asking for the same book, labeled as asks (updated June 2026 — more on the change). It’s a fast “keep, sell, or bulk-lot” read, not an appraisal.
And when the data’s old, the app says so: “Treat it as a starting point — the market may have moved.” When there’s no good comp at all, it tells you that too, rather than inventing one.
This gets better as we aggregate more data. I’m still building out how raw sales become a number you can actually trust — it’s a moving target, and I’d rather show you the seams than fake a precision I don’t have.
What’s in the app today
- Point, scan, decide. A tier — Bulk, Modest, Solid, High, Major — plus a value range and the source behind it.
- The edition picker. When the year’s ambiguous, the app asks instead of guessing.
- Slab-aware pricing. Reads the CGC grade off the label and prices for it.
- Honest provenance. Source name, how recently it was verified, and a “starting point” warning when the data’s stale.
- Report a wrong price. One tap, straight to me. I read every one.
- A heads-up when we don’t know yet. If a book’s price isn’t ready at scan time, the app pings you once when we’ve worked it out. No setup, nothing to manage — and that’s the only notification you’ll get for it.
- Stats. Total value of what you’ve saved, scan streaks, your top find.
- No account, no sign-in. 5 free scans to try it.
- Comic Scry Pro — $19.99 once, 500 lifetime scans, CSV export. No subscription.
Where it stops, for now
A few honest limits, so nobody’s surprised:
- It’s not a collection tracker. No account, no want-list — you save the scans worth keeping, and that’s it.
- It won’t grade a raw book for you. That’s a human call. If a book’s already slabbed, it reads the grade off the label.
- It won’t promise the price is right. Markets move; the app tells you when its number might be stale.
That’s today. There’s more I want to build from here — but I’d rather ship the part that works than promise the part that doesn’t.
Tell me what’s wrong — and what you want
I’m a solo founder, and I’m genuinely open about how this should grow.
If the app misses an ID, quotes a price that’s clearly off, or you’ve got an idea for a feature — tell me. Feature ideas are welcome. The wrong-price reports are how the app gets sharper. None of this is finished, and I’d rather hear it from you than guess.
I’m @comicscry just about everywhere, so pick whichever’s easiest: X, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Bluesky. There’s a build-in-public thread on LinkedIn, and a quiet little newsletter at comicscry.beehiiv.com for when the app gets meaningfully better. My DMs are open — send me a misfire or a feature idea.
Reach out. Or follow along here via RSS — I’ll write when something ships, something breaks, or something I assumed turns out to be wrong.