Anna’s Archive has so many magazines/fanzines about comics available — who knew there were this many people enthusiastically scanning their magazines! — but it’s impossible to find anything there unless you know the names of the books you’re looking for.
So I’ve been searching for “lists of comics fanzines” and the like, and there is, of course, The Poopsheet Foundation, but it lists so many things that were published in three copies by some guy in a basement in Nova Scotia that it’s useless for my purposes.
And there’s Wikipedia, which is surprisingly unhelpful — I mean, it lists a lot of magazines there, but half of them are comics magazines, not magazines about comics, and there’s an awful lot of magazines it doesn’t list. Hasn’t comics fandom properly descended upon Wikipedia yet?
Tom Brevoort’s overview here was, on the other hand, very helpful, and so was this comic book shop.
OK, so what I’ve added this time around is about 20K pages spread over a dozen titles.
Yikes!
The biggest haul (issue wise) is Comic Shop News, which I’m not actually sure is that interesting for research purposes? But I mean, it was there, so why not add it… I found about 400 (of the 1400) issues. It’s an 8 page magazine (give or take), but it’s large format, so there’s actually a lot of text here…
(This was a bit annoying to import — over the last couple years, I’ve written scripts that handle 99% of the grunt work, but this one required a lot of manual interventions because of irregularities in how the scans were arrange. Yeah, bitch bitch, whatever.)
Next up is Comic Book Marketplace at about 120 issues, and this is a pretty complete collection. I’m not familiar with the magazine at all, and assumed it was some kind of price guide thing. It’s not — there’s a lot of ads in here, but also lots of articles about (older?) comics. Here’s a random contents page:
Hey! Interview with Ty Templeton?
The confusingly-titled Overstreet’s Comic Book Market magazine has a much shorter run. And changed its name to Overstreet’s Comic Book Monthly mid-run, presumably because it had a confusing name? And was then cancelled within the year.
DC Coming Attractions was another one of those “what they hey” additions — it’s about a dozen four page pamphlets from the late 70s. Why not.
I’ve also filled in some holes in the runs of some mags. I found some Nostalgia Journal issues, so I put them in the The Comics Journal index. I also found some Wizard, Borderline, Mediascene and Comics Interview issues, but more importantly, I really fleshed out the The Comic Reader run:
I previously only had #78 and up, but I found most of the older issues, including #48-72 when the magazine was called On The Drawing Board for a couple of years.
Comics: The Golden Age was a magazine that didn’t last long.
Neither did Comics Fandom Quarterly.
Or indeed Comics Fandom Monthly.
The Comic Times/Media Showcase was another mag that changed its name, but it didn’t last long, either.
Neither did Marvelmania.
I jammed The X-Men Companion volumes into the Focus On… index.
And I found the Fantaco Chronicles run.
OK, that’s it! Now I’m taking a break.
[five minutes pass]
Oops! I stumbled upon this thread, and now I found some more magazines to add. Drat!
OK, so six more mags. And about 5K more pages.
Comics Source is perhaps the heftiest of these new ones…
Marvel Comics Index was published by Pacific Comics in the late 70s, and I’m not sure it’s all that interesting at this point — it mostly just lists all the issues with a brief description?
LOC: Fandom’s Forum is an early 80s series… It actually looks pretty interesting? But only ten issues.
Collector’s Dream is another short-lived mid-70s fanzine.
Comics Collector is a short-lived mid-80s magazine.
I was excited when somebody mentioned The Barks Collector — there’s so many super-hero fanzines and magazines, anyway. But wouldn’t you know it — Anna only had a handful of the 40+ issues. Typical! I almost didn’t add it, but I guess it works as a placeholder. I did a cursory search elsewhere, but I didn’t see any collections of scans of this anywhere, though.
OK. That’s it. For real!
[five minutes pass]
OK, there’s now so many fanzines and stuff that I have to reorganise the magazine chooser — it overflows the screen. Erm… OK, perhaps I should take this opportunity to introduce more categories, too.
Currently, I only have ALL and FAN(zines)… But perhaps I should have ALL, and then magazines, fanzines, indices and promotional material as separate categories?
I’ve been leery at adding indices and promotional material because it might “pollute” the searches. If you search for “wolverine”, the page with the most matches shows up first. So if I index a price guide that has the word “wolverine” 40 times on one page (it happens), it’ll show up first. But if I put those in a separate “indices” category, than I can keep them out of the results when you search magazines and fanzines…
OK, I think I’ll do that…
And break the list into several columns.
OK, but that’s it! I’m done now!
[you know the drill]
Yeah, I added Diamond Previews (only issues 300 and up). Oops! That’s unexpectedly porny… I included the Previews Adult, too, but I had no idea that they were that sleazy. *grips pearls*
DC Releases was an 80s promotional pamphlet. I was looking for Kitchen Sink Pipeline, but no luck — the indie promo pamphlets would be more interesting, really. (This is added to the “promotional” section, so don’t worry — they won’t pollute your magazine searches.)
Neither will DC Nation. (How many different titles did DC have for their promotional mags, anyway?)
The biggest haul in this promo/index batch is Comics Values Monthly, with 74 issues.
It’s unexpectedly kinda interesting — it has regional mood reports and stuff?
DC Currents? What’s that then? Oh, it’s another name for the DC promotional pamphlet? Perhaps I should just put all these in under the same title… Nah; they’re all under “promotional” anyway, so they’re already grouped.
And that’s it. No more! I mean it!
[*sigh*]
Oh, I added keystroke navigation, too. Left and right keys to flip through pages.