I’m still prattling on about Anna’s Archive and how to download magazines about comics from that thing, even though I said the last time I was going to stop.
The main difficulty is to just know what the magazines are called, because there’s absolutely no useful organisation of the information there, and apparently no comics nerds have written a web page called “The 200 Most Important Magazines And Fanzines About American Comics”.
Whyy! Nerds! You have failed me!
(Or perhaps more likely — somebody wrote that web page in 2013, but the site is now dead.)
But then I thought: I literally have a magazine search page myself , so I can just look for names of fanzines there?
And so I found Graphic Story World. Er. Looking at this snap, I seem to have mixed up that magazine with Graphic Story Magazine? *sigh*
And the very short-lived Fandom Annual from the late 60s.
But… clicking through all those pages is a pain, so I wondered: Surely there’s an LLM for this!
Yes! This looks promising!
Er… Street Enterprises Comics Review?
Yeah, it doesn’t exist, because LLMs suck.
But searching Anna made me wonder whether a similar thing existed?
No, the Menomonee Falls Gazette is just a comic strip reprint magazine.
Comico Magazine!? Did that exist?
No.
But it led me to find Comico Attractions, which I can add..
That sounds like a great magazine, but it’s apparently another hallucination.
Anyway! Using three different LLMs, I got on the trail of a number of mags and fanzines.
The Overstreet Price Update, for instance.
Overstreet’s Fan is perhaps more interesting.
And of course the price guide itself.
Marvel Vision? I have no idea what that is, but that’s basically because I’m doing these imports after having a nice dinner at a nice restaurant and I’m so drunk now I can hardly type. So this is going to be a really high quality batch!
Inside Image is a promotional pamphlet, I guess?
Inside Comics looks more interesting
Funnyworld is an animation and comics fanzine…
Clay Geerde’s Comix Wave is a long-running sheet (mostly two pages per issue).
Comico Attractions is the thing I was talking about above!
Advance Comics is Capital Comics’s pamphlet, I guess?
Fanboy! Journal of Comics Fandom was a short-lived 90s magazine?
Comic Book Profiles is er something.
See? AI is so er smart.
But now I’m done for sure I promise this time.
[five minutes pass]
Perhaps I should ask about fanzines, too?
Nemo: The Classic Comics Library is certainly not a fanzine, but that’s LLMs for you. And that’s a mag I knew about very well, but I remembered it being a magazine that reprinted classic strips, and not a magazine about classic strips. But looking at it now, I see that I misremembered, so I’ve now included it.
Marvel: The Year In Review isn’t a fanzine either — it’s a promotional book from Marvel summing up what “happened” in the previous year? Yeah, why not, but it’s marginal for kwakk.info…
Finally! A honest to goodness fanzine! Comixscene was a short-lived newspaper size thing from the early 70s.
And even more fanziney is Newfangles, which was Don Thompson / Maggie Thompson pre-CBG thing.
Hey… that Fanac site looks interesting. It doesn’t separate fanzines by theme, though — and it’s mostly SF/F zines? Hm. Perhaps I should take a look, anyway.
The only thing I found while browsing quickly was Xero, a fanzine I’ve seen mentioned several times (mostly by the LLMs), but Anna didn’t have it. Fanac did, though.
OK, now I’m done!