Well, the thing I noticed was that keywords in the description do come up. Such as if you were to search for Walt Kelly, Peter Wheat comes up.
So I was rather thinking, say a user is reading a book and goes, "oh wow. I didn't know Bob Kane did a comic called Peter Pupp" and that wasn't part of the "meta-data" already attributed to the comic. In this case, the meta-data being the "description" field where the uploader would have put it in.
So, I was thinking perhaps a system of user submitted open tags where this hypothetical user could add a "Bob Kane" tag to the comic, so the next guy that does a search for Bob Kane will get this book, too. Kind of like on Hulu. Then users could maybe add other things they think important too, like if say a particular issue of a horror comic had gorillas they could add a "gorilla" tag - so then over time people would be able to effectively search by contents as well.
Of course, I don't know anything about the CMS used here at CBP. So perhaps just a forum for suggesting changes to individual titles, although that would get tedious for the admin, and I really wouldn't wish that on them.
And unfortunately, even though I do a lot of that stuff as part of my profession, I'm not particularly versed in SQL or else I'd volunteer to implement it. I operate more in the front-end (CSS & XHTML.)
Also. Thanks for telling me about Grand Comics Database. I'd actually never heard of it before, but now that I have, I suspect that I'll be using it a lot, as I keep coming across new artists all the time that I'd like to research.