Random Thoughts

kwakk.info has been carrying Previews catalogues for some time now. The usefulness of these things can be discussed (which is why they’re not included in the /all/ search), but having this data can sometimes be useful. (Say you’re doing research of an artist and you see that the last time they’re mentioned is doing an alternate cover for Boom! and you go “ah”, for instance.)

I’ve sourced most of the catalogues from Anna’s Archive, but even they don’t have everything. But then a comment pointed me towards DCBS’s download page (thanks, Jonathan), and they had some stuff, and I incorporated that.

But then I started googling for more, and, tada:

Alternate Worlds (in Australia) had All The Catalogues going back six years!!!

So we went from:

To:

Those Diamond Previews issues are long, man.

It was also interesting to look at the very last issues of Diamond Previews — Diamond was soliciting comics as late as October this year! When surely everybody had to have known that the new owners were stone cold crooks who’d just keep any stock sent to them and not pay anybody anything…. Allegedly! Allegedly! Did the trial(s) end yet?

Here’s a link to this historic artefact.

I guess it’s a fitting end to Diamond, in a way — I mean, the American comics industry was mainly financed by organised crime when it started…

In non-catalogue news, I stumbled upon Ken Meyer, Jr.’s zine page, which has hundreds of zines about comics — many of them chock full of early interviews with interesting comics artists. So I put them into the index.

In other tweaks, I’ve now made language-specific links from the front page to make it more obvious how to get at those — they used to be hidden behind rather obscure menus.

So there you go — kwakk.info is the link.