I’ve got a cold, so I was feverishly wondering whether I’d forgotten some European languages when expanding the search engine for magazines about comics to other languages.
And then it hit me: Holland exists! And also that bit of Belgium where they speak kinda Dutch-ey!
So I asked ChatGPT to cough up the names of a few Dutch language magazines, and there we are.
But while I was at it, I tried to torture more magazine names in other languages out of ChatGPT, and … well, you know LLMs, right?
Yes, yes, they’re evil and are plagiarism machines and should be forbidden etc, but on the other hand, if there’s one area an “AI” would be handy, it’s in doing exactly this sort of thing: It’s virtually impossible to search for “list of Dutch language magazines about comics, but not comics magazines”, while ChatGPT … kinda sorta gets it?
Of course, there’s all the hallucinations to wade through. For Japanese, ChatGPT insisted that there was something called “Comics Journal Japan” with 200+ issues in existence, and Reader, you may be shocked to hear this, but that magazine doesn’t exist.
It also said that there’s a magazine called Wizard Edge with 50+ issues… but that magazine actually existed! It was Wizard’s “indie” edition, but only had a handful of issues.
But iterating on the “prompt engineering” (tee hee hee) across various languages, I did find a number of mags; list included below.
While verifying the results, I happened upon this fun site, last updated in 2013. Seems kinda useful, but dead web sites are always sad.
As usual, I’ve tried to shy away from magazines that actually have comics themselves, or are so new that they can still be bought. For the French magazines, the former proved a bit dicey: There’s a number of magazines that are a mixture of news articles, interviews and actual comics, often serialised albums. I’ve added a few that were like 50/50; I may remove them again later…
But here’s the list.
Mangajin. This isn’t actually a comics magazine I discovered after I’d done the import: It’s instead a general “introduction to Japanese culture” magazine… But it does have some comics-relevant articles, so what the hey.
Comic Box. This is one of the more problematic French magazines — it’s a magazine about US superhero comics, but it also has a lot of comics content. So it might have to go…
