I think the accepted standard for cover dates in magazines was that the date is when the magazine is to be removed from the stands for returns, back when most comics were sold returnable (that's also what those colour bars across the top of some comics are for).
Bob | 03.14.05 - 7:24 am | #

What, no love for the people who pasted it across the top of their website?
LGP | Email | Homepage | 03.14.05 - 8:40 am | #

Bob is correct. The practice started in the 1800's when magazines began to get distributed nationally. The reason the date was so far ahead is that similar publication publishers tried to get one up on the competition by having their books on the newstands for longer so they would sell more. It obviously would only work once because the competitor would follow suit within a few months. Since comic books were considered magazines in those days, they followed the same convention.

Also in the past on newstands, the cover date was the expected date the next issue was to come out, so you took the old one off the shelf and replaced it with the new one.

There is no real reason why there is a cover date needed in the direct market these days, that is why Marvel has eliminated them from their covers.
Tim Stroup | Email | 03.14.05 - 5:54 pm | #

Additionally:

The reason for the stamped/written arrival dates on the covers of comics is because of the confusion of varying cover dates and some comics were not published monthly, but bi-monthly and quarterly. So if you had limited space on the spinner rack of comics, and you had to remove the oldest comic because you had more new ones to put on it, you wanted to get rid of the oldest comic book first.

Usually only the bottom comic book of a stack had the cover stamped as most people used to take the top copy as there were no collectors looking for mint copies. Just readers.

The date stamping went out of use in the late 1960's and early 1970's when better record keeping by distributors came into use. You will find very few comics with cover dates after the mid 1970s.
Tim Stroup | Email | 03.14.05 - 6:03 pm | #

I remember around 1989 (during the Invasion! crossover issues for DC, as I recall) when DC had "Winter 1990" and another fake month the next month to catch the dates up slightly to real time.
Steve Mohundro | Homepage | 03.15.05 - 11:23 am | #

Yeah, DC added two virtual months at the end of 1988 (Winter and Holiday) to close the gap somewhat. Of course, one of the reasons the gap had gotten so large was that DC skipped May 1973 for some reason (so if your birthday was May 1973, you don't exist in the DC universe).
Bob | 03.15.05 - 1:02 pm | #