The magazines are still trickling into the search engine for magazines about comics, but I guess it’s mostly done now. I mean, it’s by no means complete — it has about 10% of the Comics Buyer’s Guide issues, for instance — but I guess all of the most important magazines are basically there.
The search engine has only magazines about comics, and not comics magazines themselves. But there are some magazines that are 90% comics, but then has some text features that might be interesting in the context. The one that comes immediately to mind is Heavy Metal, since it was running for so long, so there’s just a lot of issues. (And besides, I’d already downloaded it from the torrents.)
But I don’t want to have actual comics on the site, because that’d be way too copyright violationey (that’s a word) for little gain.
So I pondered using an LLM to categorise pages into comics pages/non comics pages, and then went “eh, nope”. But a pretty solid rule of thumb is that text pages have, like, more text than comics pages, so what about just filtering out all pages that have less text than, say, 2K?
The results are here — I guess it’s about 8 pages per issue that made the cut?
It works!
See?
I mean, it’s a fairly crude way to segment — I’m sure there’s some Byron Preiss-packaged comics pages that were included (heh heh), and some pages that had a huge illustration with a text box under saying “this art sucks” that were excluded, but whatchagonnado?
Hm… are there any other long-running magazines like this? I mean, that are mostly comics, but also have some interviews/reviews/etc?