*gasp* The number of digits went up!
The vast majority of the magazines and fanzines about comics on kwakk.info are sourced from various, er, sources out there, but I was idly wondering a couple weeks ago whether it would be cheap to buy some of these magazines in bulk from ebay and do some scanning myself.
The answer is… yes and no. There are some really cheap lots of Comics Buyer’s Guide to be found, for instance, but there’s not a lot of them. Presumably because they’re so worthless, people don’t bother to even try to sell them — it’s not worth the bother.
And, really, the shipping costs dominate, so I’m not sure I’m going to repeat the experiment.
But I do think it’s kinda fun to do the actual scanning. Well, perhaps “fun” is the wrong word… But with my process, it’s something I can do totally mindlessly while watching TV and having a few beers. Or rather, lots of beers. So it’s like knitting, except that you can presumably not do knitting while drunk, but scanning magazines? No problem whatsoever.
I’ve got an A3 scanner, so I scan two pages at a time, and my throughput seems to be about ten seconds per two-page spread, so that’s *counts on fingers* about five seconds per page.
One new thing I had to do this time around — it wasn’t sufficient to have just a pedal as input unit to do scanning. (I stomp it to scan the next couple pages, because I have to use my hands to hold the magazine down on the scanner. (No, using the scanner lid would take 2x more time.))
But The Comics Buyer’s Guide has both runs of black and white and colour pages, so I had to have a convenient way to flip between the two modes (scanning in grayscale makes things crisper, so scanning in colour and then post-processing doesn’t give as good results). I remembered that I’d bought this single key USB “keyboard” for something else, but never used it, so I just glued it to the side of the scanner.
Efficiency!
So what did I scan?
A bunch of Wizards.
Scanning these Wizards from 2001-ish was fun — I was reminded of this colouring style, presumably developed specifically to highlight boobs. But applied to non-boob surfaces, with hilarious results.
With these (about a dozen issues), the Wizard search engine is almost complete.
I got some very old issues of The Nostalgia Journal (the magazine that turned into The Comics Journal when Fantagraphics bought it).
I also filled in some missing Comics Interview issues, and almost found myself reading some of them.
It’s a pretty interesting magazine, really.
But the big batch (which I’m not done with yet — I need another evening, I think) was The Comics Buyer’s Guide. kwakk.info only has about 10% of the issues, which is a shame, because it was a weekly magazine with a lot (I mean — a lot) of stuff.
I mean, not all of it’s … very deep.
And there’s pages and pages and pages of stuff like this, which I can’t imagine is very interesting even for historical reasons. Some issues are almost three hundred pages long! My god! Is this a good use of anybody’s time? I can see why people out there haven’t been very active in scanning these issues (besides people just throwing them away).
But there are articles that seem at least marginally worth preserving, so…
Anyway, as always — if you have scans of magazines/fanzines/catalogues about comics that aren’t listed here, drop me a note, and I’ll get them on the site.
(Note: No currently running magazines, and no comics magazines — just magazines/etc about comics.)