After a bit of a break, I’ve been futzing around with kwakk.info (the comics research site) again. I’ve been trawling the various archives for more stuff to add, and I’ve also randomly happened upon various web sites that have collections of scanned magazines, like this great site that has all the issues of Comixscene/Mediascene (which was pretty significant historically — Jim Steranko was the editor, after all). And what about this site, which collects the first decade of the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins? And, of course, Ink Stains, which has a whole lot of early fanzines about comics. And… this one… this one and… I’ve already forgotten.
In addition to all of that, I’ve also been scanning magazines myself, and… tada!
12K issues indexed now! Almost a million pages of blathering about comics!
But… it seems like the pack rat scanning people are a dying breed — very few magazines and fanzines about comics have been added to the major archives (archive.org and libgen.li) over the past year. It seems like the major spurt of activity basically ended a decade ago, and it’s been tapering off lethargically ever since.
Which isn’t totally odd — the heyday of the magazines we’re talking about here were published between 1970 and (say) 2004. And I’m guessing fewer and fewer people have access to scanners, since there’s less and less being printed on paper, anyway.
While the two most important magazines have been fully scanned (The Comics Journal and Amazing Heroes) (I did the latter myself), there’s many interesting magazines that haven’t received that attention — like Comics Interview. So perhaps there’ll never be a complete run of that magazine scanned, which is a shame, because there’s lots of interesting stuff in there — things that are useful when doing research.
Worst coverage of all is the most popular comics magazine of them all — The Comics Buyer’s Guide. Out of the 1699 issues published, only two hundred have been scanned. This is paradoxical in a way, but also natural: This was a (for most of its run) a newspaper sized magazine, so you need an A3 scanner to scan it. And very few people have those.
The other problem is, I think, the sheer ubiquitousness of the magazine: It was a weekly rag that people would look at and then throw away. That about two thirds of each issue was taken up with ads doesn’t help.
I guess Comics International had vaguely the same place in the UK comics ecology as CBG?
So while you can indeed find some delusional people trying to sell issues, these magazines are basically worthless, and while there are a couple people trying to sell lots of them for a dollar a piece or whatever, there just isn’t much going on.
I’ve got an A3 scanner. I’ve got a pedal. I can scan stuff. I’m out of stuff to scan. If you have any issues not listed on this web page, drop me an email at lars @ ingebrigtsen.no and tell me what you have, and I’ll send you my forwarding address (I’ve got one in the US and one in the UK). I’ll scan the issues, upload them to archive.org and then put them in the recycling.
What a deal! You help save the history of comics fandom, and you get er nothing in return! Except scans. After a while.
Of course it would be better if you scanned the magazines yourself… or if it already exists out there somewhere, drop me a note to tell me where to find it… But if you don’t have a scanner, send the zines to me.
(And some magazines/fanzines are, of course, valuable — don’t send any of those to me.)
The updated list of what magazines/issues that are on kwakk.info is here — I’m interested in basically all magazines/fanzines about comics, in any language. (And just to reiterate, because some people — I’m talking about magazines/fanzines that are about comics. Not comics magazines.)
But for now, my couch is scanner free! Freeeeee