A month and a half ago I was getting into adding non-English language magazines about comics to kwakk.info, the research site about comics. After that, I’ve been lethargically poking at various sources of finding out names of mags/fanzines, like this nice list on the French Wikipedia.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any good lists like that for other languages (that is — that list a significant number, and isn’t just yet another list of comics magazines).
But last week I happened upon the brilliant strategy of just searching for “fanzines” and “fanzine” on Anna’s Archive, Scribd, The Internet Archive etc. That gives an overwhelming number of things, but I’ve been wading through in moments of boredom, and the results are now uploaded.
Most of them landed in the Miscellaneous Fanzines section. Of course, it’d be cleaner to give each title it’s own URL, but it’s not practical interface wise (all the micro titles would swamp the larger, more interesting ones) or technically (giving each title its own search index would make things too slow). So: “Misc”.
Some of the titles ended up in the Miscellaneous Magazines section, and there’s also one for French magazines, and so on.
But now you can include vital fanzines like this in your research.
And this, or course.
I may be moving some of the smaller (i.e., less than ten issues) mags over to the “misc” categories to help with the speed issue — if you include all magazines and all languages, there’s a noticeable delay. Let’s see…
See? It takes 0.7s! TSK TSK!
But we’ll see.
Anyway, this latest spurt has to an increase from this:
To this:
Eh? Eh?
I also went wild at the local used comics shop and bought a bunch of Norwegian and Danish magazines about comics, and spent a few night scanning. And while scanning, I couldn’t help notice that in the late 70s, the entire idea of comics being a serious thing worthy of study seemed to hinge on two people:
Will Eisner, and…
… Hugo Pratt.
It’s understandable, of course, but it’s amusing of how much a thing that was in Scandinavia before the 80s arrived and opened the floodgates (Maus, Love & Rockets, etc).
Anyway. Go ye forth and re/search.