Random Comics

Hey, I read some comics over the past few days.

I bought the previous Attilio Micheluzzi collection from Fantagraphics last year, but I bounced hard — I abandoned it after reading a few stories. But I still bought Petra Chérie, because I really like Micheluzzi’s artwork.

And I found this one to be a lot more readable than the other collection. I forget what it was called… That one was more of a straightforward Guy On Adventure strip, while this is, er, Gal On Adventure strip, which apparently makes a difference? Anyway, this is an almost 300 page long book that collects stories that are mostly 12 pages (or less) long, so there’s plenty of opportunity to get really repetetive.

But Micheluzzi somehow avoids this, although some of the stories tend towards being vignettes more than actual stories. And then, halfway through, he goes for continuity, ditches the sidekick character, and has the heroine go from being captive by one force to being captive of another force, all throughout the Balkans.

She still gets to do heroic stuff, but she stops flying her plane and stuff. It’s an odd turn.

And then there was a one year break, and Micheluzzi continued the series (in black and white now) with a different magazine, and the stories are totally different in tone — and in one of them, he has her encountering Lawrence of Arabia. And after a couple more chapters, the story just ends, and not in a good place, really.

So — this doesn’t really work as “a book”, but it’s very entertaining to read on a story by story basis. And man, the artwork and the storytelling… With twelve page stories you’d think there wasn’t much place for character development and stuff, and you’d be right, but Micheluzzi has more character in one silent panel than most people have in a hundred pages of dialogue.

Top Shelf is kinda hit or miss, right?

I just couldn’t get into this. It’s all the stuff I don’t like — fake drama and clichéd storytelling.

I ditched it after fifty pages or so.

I’ve been a fan of Joe Sacco since the 80s, and I’ve liked all of his books, even the heaviest of the “reportage” books.

This one is about a massacre in India, and it’s really good. It’s structured around being an investigation into what actually happened, and Sacco encounters one official after another that just lie them straight to their faces, no matter how ridiculous the lies are.

It really works — you get involved as a reader in their righteous indignation toward being lied to this way.

(Apropos India and the legal system there — I was apparently part of a farce of a lawsuit along with Google and Yahoo, and I’m assuming I’ll be arrested if I go there. Darn! Seems like such a lovely country.)

Anyway, this is a good book, and Sacco has even continued to get even better (artwork wise) while still sticking to his very distinctive style.

I saw a recommendation for Charlotte mensuel in a Norwegian magazine, so I popped off a subscription order, and I got my first issue this week.

And what a surprise! Based on the title I assumed that it would be a humour magazine, but it’s not at all. Instead it’s something that I think you could compare with Mome or Now? That is, it’s a 120 page collection of shorter post-indie comics from France and the US. That is, narrative and depressing comics (i.e., not “art comics”) in a 90s tradition. Like the Chris Ware piece above, which I haven’t read before.

But mostly French stuff, and mostly newer stuff, even if they drop in older stuff, too.

Mostly serious things, but even the “funny” stuff is emotionally wrenching.

So of course there’s also some Julia Gförer here, too.

And… Andy Capp!? Oh those French people! But putting Andy Capp (and Hagar the Horrible) in this context seems to make a lot of sense — there’s a slight whiff of edgelordism about the magazine (I didn’t snap any of the worst offenders here), but it’s a tonally coherent magazine that’s really impressive.

You can get a subscription here.

Speaking of anthologies…

The new Heavy Metal is a successful Heavy Metal iteration. The enthusiasm of the editor is palpable — he’s willing this project to succeed.

It’s a good mixture of French and American stuff, too, and while there’s many stories that are a bit naff, there’s as many that’s solid (like the anti-AI story above). My only complaint is structural, really — it’s 230 pages long, and almost all the stories are between five and twenty pages long, which isn’t ideal. With that length, you could drop in a sixty page story at least, and sprinkle some one-pagers here and there for more variety.

But it’s a surprisingly good Heavy Metal, if you like Heavy Metal.

Speaking of anthologies…

This Spirou issue is special. It has three Au coin de la rue, and apparently the concept here is that you have three different creators (or teams) presented with the same setup.

So here you have three different men that have different reasons for not ringing the bell at a house.

It works. But it makes for a very odd issue of Spirou, especially since none of these stories are funny — mostly kinda depressing. But good.

I love me some Bill Griffith, so even though I’m not into biographies, I got this book.

And it starts off delightfully — Griffith’s artwork is so on point here, and the storytelling flows in a most pleasant way.

But then! After 43 pages, we get “Early Days” because it turns out that the first bit was just the introduction.

And then the rest of the book is apparently mostly an adaptation of the autobiography of the subject of the book (a photographer and painter who was Griffith’s arrière-grand-père), and… I’m sorry to say that I just lost interest. Sorry! I think if you’re into this sort of thing, this book is probably awesome? But I’m not, so I started zoning out.

Hm… it wasn’t on many people’s best of 2025 lists? That surprises me…

And there’s reproductions of some of his photos at the end (on glossy paper).

OK, that’s it.

Random Comics

I read some comics over the last week or so.

Mafalda used to run in the papers when I was a child, but I’m not quite sure whether I remember liking it or not. I like the artwork, but I think I found the humour to be rather annoying?

But I really liked Mafalda now — it’s funny and endearing.

The translation here, though, isn’t very good. I mean, there’s tons of puns in Mafalda and those are just a pain to translate, but frequently the strips (in English form) are more “eh? eh?” than “heh heh”, and I think that’s down to the translation.

It’s also a bit confusing that there’s not a hint of explanation of what we’re reading. I mean, I hate introductions and all of that jazz, so I’m happy that they let the work speak for itself, but there’s not even a date anywhere in the book — and that’s pretty important, since Quino speaks a lot about current affairs. But I’m guessing this book reprints work from about… 1966?

A new batch of minis from Kuš. I didn’t find this batch as strong as usual.

This one was overly didactic.

I liked this one.

And this one was funny.

And I have no idea what was going on in this one.

I read another Corto Maltese album in French (because reading works translated into French is easier than reading works written in French).

I’m not sure the colour palette chosen for this is totally successful — there’s a whole lot of beige and tans and not much else. I mean, I’ve got these comics in black and white, too, so that’s why I bought these French editions in colour.

In any case, these stories (there’s five more 20 page stories in this album) are still a delight to read. They’ve got such a mood going on.

Tegnehanne has done these books for a while now — they’re strongly autobiographical ones, and the worry is, of course, that she’d run out of stuff to write about.

Have no fear! This is as good as anything she’s done before — it’s funny and heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time.

She depicts her neighbours in rather, er, frank terms…

… so if these bits are true (and they certainly feel that way), I’m wondering whether there were strained relationships in the ‘hood after this was published.

I’ve been diligent with my French and read four issues of the Spirou magazine.

How current affairs-ey! Kid Paddle’s family takes in a Ukrainian refugee (from Chernobyl). (It turns out (on subsequent pages) that everything isn’t fun about a nuclear disaster anyway.)

Of the new serials, The School For Bad Parents has promise — very funny, but is he going to run out of ideas?

I love the Seccotine serialisation.

And of course, Les Fabrices are always hilarious.

And there aren’t too many series like the above (which I just find to be pretty dull), so this was a good batch of Spirous.

Galago is a long-running Swedish anthology. Lots of good stuff, but these two stood out:

This reminds me a bit of Lynda Barry’s late-80s artwork? And that’s high praise indeed.

This is very 2026, on the other hand, but also good.

Yes, I read some Marvel comics, too.

Planet She-Hulk is the worst of the bunch.

Venom (written by Al Ewing) is the best.

And some Image/Dark Horse/IDW books.

James Stokoe is insane (complimentary).

And so is Jake Smith (ditto).

Oh, and that’s it? I guess so…

Screenshotting Web Pages Without Cookie Banners

I was blathering on yesterday about how hard it is to screenshot a web page these days. I mean programmatically, because my use case is to make links on a blog have the same life span as the blog itself — taking screenshots in your browser manually is usually pretty easy.

But if you use, say, shot-scraper from a non-US IP address you usually get something like the above. Which sucks.

Today, though, I though — there are things like the Ublock “annoyances” list. For instance here we have some nice lists made to remove annoying things like cookie banners (and other modals). Why can’t shot-scraper use those lists, huh?

Why not indeed:

So what I did was I forked shot-scraper to add a syntax to load a Javascript file:

def _evaluate_js(page, javascript):
    try:
        if javascript.startswith("file "):
            path = javascript[5:].strip()  # everything after "file "
            return page.add_script_tag(path=path)
        else:
            return page.evaluate(javascript)
    except Error as error:
        raise click.ClickException(error.message)

And then I just generated a JS file that uses all those selectors to remove elements, and there you go. Kinda hacky, but…

The code lives in the Emacs WordPress library. But somebody should take this idea and integrate it with shot-scraper proper — a switch like --remove-annoyances that just downloads those block lists and uses them would be ideal.

It’s not like this is a panacea, though, because there’s so many other stumbling blocks. Like:

You’d have to work harder to get around those… And:

Some sites have so obfuscated HTML that it’s nigh impossible to just remove the offending elements.

But still! While this doesn’t work on all sites, it works on a whole lot of them, so that’s some progress, at least.

Hack off:

Hack on:

See? Better.

Screenshot All The Links

I’ve talked about this before, but to recap: As someone who does quite a bit of research into somewhat obscure topics on the web, there’s nothing as annoying as when you read an old web page that says something like “and you can read that really interesting interview on this page“, and then you follow that link, and discover that that site disappeared a decade ago.

And the Wayback Machine didn’t archive it.

So, ideally, whenever you link to something, a copy of what you’re linking to should be stored on your own site — so what you’re writing and what you’re linking to has the same lifespan. That’s kinda difficult to do, though — lots of issues with “safely” mirroring a site in a useful manner. But what’s trivial is to do is to screenshot what you’re linking to.

It’s a 90% solution: No, it’s not ideal to read a screenshot of a page instead of the page itself, but it’s a lot better than nothing:

But… Actually taking a screenshot of a web page and then manually uploading it to your blog site would be an insane amount of work. But computers are pretty good at automating stuff, so my Emacs-based WordPress interface does this automatically… as well as it can, because even screenshotting things from your own machine is getting to be pretty hard.

Because not only are there cookie banners and various other blockers, but even “nice” sites like the above somehow feel the need to plaster some modal over the page contents. *sigh* And that’s not the worst, really — there’s so many “anti scraper” tools that trigger for even the most innocent of automatic usages like the above that you may end up being permanently banned if you try to use anything other than the newest of the newest actual real browsers to visit a web site.

It’s not that I blame them — it’s an arms race against out-of-control AI scrapers, but the use cases that are most affected by all of this are use cases like this — the AI scrapers have infinite resources and use residential VPNs and heavy automation to seem like real people, and don’t care one whit one way or the other. Well, I’m guessing that playwright (which is what I’m using for this) will come with an LLM extension soon to click through all the modals, right?

[Slight digression: While typing this blog post, it occurred to me that Cloudflare had announced APIs for doing stuff like screenshots, so I wondered whether they’d come up with something fun in this area. So I pointed that API at an imdb page and viola:

A big fat nothing, because imdb uses the Big Amazon Firewall to block everything from data center IPs and browsers that don’t pass a human-like check.]

So I don’t really have a solution here for all of that. I just wanted to mention that I’ve cleaned up the code to actually display the linked screenshots and made it into a WordPress plugin. (Hover over that Microsoft Github link to see the plugin in action. And possibly click on that thumbnail you get when hovering, too.)

(Note that this isn’t one of those annoying “preview” things that some web sites put on URLs — I find that to be the most annoying thing ever, and totally useless. What you’re seeing here is a screen capture of the linked site taken the same date I posted this post — so you’re seeing exactly what I linked to when I linked to it.)

Unfortunately, there is no way to do automatic screenshots from the server — Cloudflare blocks/challenges all access from known data center IPs, so that’s just not feasible. So if you want to do something like this, you have to find your own way to get the screenshots of what you’re linking to.