Send Me Your Magazines About Comics

After a bit of a break, I’ve been futzing around with kwakk.info (the comics research site) again. I’ve been trawling the various archives for more stuff to add, and I’ve also randomly happened upon various web sites that have collections of scanned magazines, like this great site that has all the issues of Comixscene/Mediascene (which was pretty significant historically — Jim Steranko was the editor, after all). And what about this site, which collects the first decade of the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins? And, of course, Ink Stains, which has a whole lot of early fanzines about comics. And… this one… this one and… I’ve already forgotten.

In addition to all of that, I’ve also been scanning magazines myself, and… tada!

12K issues indexed now! Almost a million pages of blathering about comics!

But… it seems like the pack rat scanning people are a dying breed — very few magazines and fanzines about comics have been added to the major archives (archive.org and libgen.li) over the past year. It seems like the major spurt of activity basically ended a decade ago, and it’s been tapering off lethargically ever since.

Which isn’t totally odd — the heyday of the magazines we’re talking about here were published between 1970 and (say) 2004. And I’m guessing fewer and fewer people have access to scanners, since there’s less and less being printed on paper, anyway.

While the two most important magazines have been fully scanned (The Comics Journal and Amazing Heroes) (I did the latter myself), there’s many interesting magazines that haven’t received that attention — like Comics Interview. So perhaps there’ll never be a complete run of that magazine scanned, which is a shame, because there’s lots of interesting stuff in there — things that are useful when doing research.

Worst coverage of all is the most popular comics magazine of them all — The Comics Buyer’s Guide. Out of the 1699 issues published, only two hundred have been scanned. This is paradoxical in a way, but also natural: This was a (for most of its run) a newspaper sized magazine, so you need an A3 scanner to scan it. And very few people have those.

The other problem is, I think, the sheer ubiquitousness of the magazine: It was a weekly rag that people would look at and then throw away. That about two thirds of each issue was taken up with ads doesn’t help.

I guess Comics International had vaguely the same place in the UK comics ecology as CBG?

So while you can indeed find some delusional people trying to sell issues, these magazines are basically worthless, and while there are a couple people trying to sell lots of them for a dollar a piece or whatever, there just isn’t much going on.

I’ve got an A3 scanner. I’ve got a pedal. I can scan stuff. I’m out of stuff to scan. If you have any issues not listed on this web page, drop me an email at lars @ ingebrigtsen.no and tell me what you have, and I’ll send you my forwarding address (I’ve got one in the US and one in the UK). I’ll scan the issues, upload them to archive.org and then put them in the recycling.

What a deal! You help save the history of comics fandom, and you get er nothing in return! Except scans. After a while.

Of course it would be better if you scanned the magazines yourself… or if it already exists out there somewhere, drop me a note to tell me where to find it… But if you don’t have a scanner, send the zines to me.

(And some magazines/fanzines are, of course, valuable — don’t send any of those to me.)

The updated list of what magazines/issues that are on kwakk.info is here — I’m interested in basically all magazines/fanzines about comics, in any language. (And just to reiterate, because some people — I’m talking about magazines/fanzines that are about comics. Not comics magazines.)

But for now, my couch is scanner free! Freeeeee

Somebody on the Internet is wrong

I was listening to all of Barbara Morgenstern’s albums chronologically today (she’s fantastic), and as usual when Night-Time Falls started, I paid extra attention, because I just can’t believe those lyrics.

I mean, Morgenstern usually does a mix of earnestness and bizarre, almost psychedelic dead-pan humour in her lyrics — constant shifts between reality and fantasy — but this is just… even more so.

So once again I googled for what the lyrics actually are, in case I’m mishearing, and once again, nobody has transcribed them. So now I’m going to. You can listen to the song and read along:


Night-Time Falls

I was in a club
In Marseilles (?)
And I spent the night
With a promoter

He looked like me
‘K (?), but better
In the morning
My bad conscience raised
And I wanted to go back home
And be with you
There’s no lies between us

Night-time falls upon my brain
Makes up the secret of my days
Subconscious calls from an inner place
And reveals (?) my secret spaces

I decided
To escape from
The dilemma
I was trapped in

So I mixed an
Overdose drink
Gave it to you
You died
And everyone was full of grief
And my tears melted into relief

Night-time falls upon my brain
Makes up the secret of my days
Subconscious calls from an inner place
And reveals (?) my secret spaces

Mmmm

So — she sleeps with a guy, but feels it’s too embarassing to tell her partner about it. So she kills him, and is relieved. Happy ending!

But what did I find on the Internet? This article from 2012:

The lyrics don’t get much deeper than the song titles imply.

[…]

“Spring Time” is about spring time.

“Night-Time Falls” is about wanting to go home at night.

How… how is that even possible. Didn’t this complete moron even listen to the song before writing this reviews? I AM OUTRAGE

For an artist who released seven records I have to assume there’s someone out there who is going to buy this and perhaps more importantly, inadvertently encourage Barbara to make another one. I tried far too many times over repeated agonizing listens to find something to appreciate here and I have to say that with complete honesty there is only one positive thing I can write about this record. Like the song titles relative to their content, the title of the record is equally literal. You knew this was coming. By the time you reach the end of these 13 tracks… [Dramatic Pause] The silence is sweet, indeed.

Rating: 1

There’s opinions and there’s opinions, but then there’s this article. It seems to reach an entire new level of villainy and idiocy, don’t you think?

(Morgenstern’s subsequent album had German lyrics, presumably to avoid the ignominy of having to suffer reviews like this.)

But I’ve now done my duty and pointed out that somebody on the Internet was wrong. You’re welcome. And here’s some more songs by Barbara Morgenstern:

barbara morgenstern: we're all gonna fucking die
Barbara Morgenstern ‎- Come To Berlin (Telefon Tel Aviv Mix)

Web Page Cleanup Redux

I’ve written previously about the problem of screenshotting web pages (which I think is a bit important for web preservation) and how my solution was to use the Easylist/Ublock block lists to remove annoyances like cookie banners (that often just obscure the entire page).

And it seemed to work pretty well… except on sites like Twitter, where the banners stubbornly remain. I assumed that the HTML was just so obfuscated there that things didn’t work at all, but after thinking about it some more, that just seemed unlikely to me: These lists are updated pretty often, and these are big sites, so you’d think the list people would be handling it.

Less than ideal, eh?

So I started debugging, and it turns out that there are two kinds of selectors — normal DOM selectors, and extended selectors, and my code was just ignoring all those extended rules.

Now, writing code to emulate Ublock Origin here sounded like a lot of work, so I just asked ChatGPT to do it, and after prodding it to really do it a couple times, it apparently did. It spat out 830 lines of code, and after hooking that up to the screenshot thing:

It works! I’m sure it plagiarised a bunch of code to do this, but…

I’m kinda starting to understand how people end up in LLM psychosis — you can just do things that would take you so long to do manually that you wouldn’t bother to even attempt doing them…

Rah rah LLMs?

Calm and in the Centre

I’m still tweaking my Easter project a bit.

Beau Travail (from where I gratuitously stole some frames) is in 1.66:1, while my sideways TV is 9:16. Fortunately, Denis Lavant mostly keeps to the middle of the frame, but sometimes he dances off to the edges. I briefly contemplated editing this myself, manually, by using video editing software…

But then decided that that sounded too much like actual work. Most of the work would be getting the video editing software working again; I haven’t used it for many years.

So I asked an LLM whether it could script something up for me. The results are above.

But the shifts are kinda abrupt and mechanical, right? So I asked it to make things more natural, and:

I think… that’s OK? It also fixes an issue I was pondering: Since I’m basically displaying a grid — even if most of the blocks are “off” — perhaps there would be further burn-in on the blue blocks? Burn-in was what made this TV ready for being dumped in a river somewhere anyway. (I mean recycled. Recycled!)

So perhaps I should just declare this project done. (Which means that I’ll think of something else to tweak in 3… 2…)

Smooth Pixels

While falling asleep yesterday, I was thinking about frame rates for the hall er installation. I was playing the pixilated imaged at a six frames per second frame rate, and it does look kinda cool. But I wondered — the original film is 24 fps. Would it be possible to interpolate the images and then run the resulting mp4 at a higher frame rate? Make things less jittery?

Now, interpolating film usually looks pretty bad — artifactey and smeared — but in this case I have a 200×100 grid of monochrome pixels, so interpolation means “just move these blocks around a bit to be more in the position they should be in the next frame”, right? So perhaps it’ll look interesting?

I asked ChatGPT to write the script, and the (no doubt horrible) results are on Microsoft Github, if you’re curious. But this kind of hobbyist tinkering with one-off scripts is something that LLMs have gotten pretty good at. They know the syntax for ImageMagick commands much better than any human in the history of computing, so you just have to correct certain things like “no, -threshold 5% means the opposite of what you think” and then you have something that works for you.

(Unless the LLM suddenly decides to put in a supply chain attack into your script — you never know. And remember to stop before slipping into an LLM psychosis!)

Anyway, after running the script for six hours…

It works! I think?

Heh, and Denis Lavant’s pixels look good in the hall mirror, too:

And finally, for no reason at all:

Corona - The Rhythm of the Night (Official Music Video)

A music video.