Random Thoughts

I’ve been updating kwakk.info, the search engine for magazines about comics a bit, because:

Anna’s Archive finally updated their libgen.li mirror. So now we can see vital things like

turn into

and thousands of people with OCD rejoiced.

Now, doing searches for Cartoonist PROfiles #35 on Anna’s is easy enough — you just search for it. (Oh, and also 035, because the search engine isn’t smart enough to understand that 035 and 35 are the same issue. And that’s even more fun with single digit issues, so you have to search for 3, 03, 003 and why not 0003, too.)

But what about Comic Shop News?

That’s a lot of stuff to search for, dude. So I refashioned my search tools a lot this weekend, and I’ve now got an Emacs mode for doing this stuff:

So I can just hit s to search for the title in question, and then after parsing the results, it filters and sorts the results so that I can easily download the missing issues:

It’s bare bones, but I’m the only one that’s going to use this, so that’s fine. With this setup, I think I can keep things up-to-date as people keep scanning old magazines and fanzines about comics and uploading them to libgen and other Anna sources — I think I can go through the list of magazines in less than an hour with this setup.

The horror!

So now you can read about Thomas’s new series debut!

In addition to these search updates, I’ve also been testing to see if LLMs (boo hiss) are able to cough up names of more obscure magazines and fanzines. This is the prompt I’ve been using:

List 30 magazines and fanzines focused on discussing comic books in any language, and also list approximately how many issues the magazine published. Order by number of issues, descending. Exclude magazines that are predominantly comics magazines — list only magazines that are about comics instead. Prioritize magazines with long runs. Exclude magazines from this list:

And then follows the list (now) 572 magazines and fanzines that I already know the names of.

I’ve tried various LLMs — most of them seem to understand the question and do indeed avoid listing comics magazines, but include magazines from the list of magazines to be excluded, and of course all the hallucinations.

The only one that seems even partially helpful is ChatGPT o1, which gave me about 60 magazine names I didn’t know before (and used over ten minutes to think! probably used more electricity than Sweden). Many of these are more recent magazines that are still commercially available, so I’m not including them in kwakk.info, but it also found some interesting magazines that I’ve now added.

After the third iteration, though, most of what it’s outputting is now hallucinations — or it’s just stuff that I’m unable to verify has ever existed. Like:

1. Crimestoppers Gazette

Approx. Number of Issues: ~200
Country/Language: USA (English)
Focus: Long‐running fanzine from a Dick Tracy fan club, offering deep dives into Chester Gould’s strips, detective‐comic history, fan letters, and collector resources.

Or:

4. The Avengers Files

Approx. Number of Issues: ~80
Country/Language: USA (English)
Focus: A long‐time fan/club newsletter (later compiled into a fanzine) on Marvel’s Avengers, including issue‐by‐issue retrospectives, continuity notes, and fan‐theory debates.

Or:

30. Hiperdraw

Approx. Number of Issues: ~6
Country/Language: (English)
Focus: A small hobbyist zine analyzing bold art styles in superhero comics; includes “how‐to” columns for aspiring artists, plus short reviews and fan letters.

You get the idea. But for all I know, I now have a list of all magazines and fanzines about comics that have ever existed, and I’m asking it for more, so I get what I get.

Anyway — new total:

Go forth and research.

Voici quelques bandes dessinées que je lis depuis quelques semaines. I mean, here’s some comics I’ve read during the past couple weeks.

Spirou continues to be somewhat entertaining, but it depends on the serials they are running, of course. But it’s fun when they put some efforts into launching a new Natacha serialisation.

So we get a short recap, and then about ten pages.

But there’s more! We get a look at the Natacha movie…

… and also a behind-the-scenes reportage from the film shoot in comics form. That gets some rah rah going.

The most moving story in these issues is this “what if” short which is “What if Fantasio chose to run after this woman instead of helping Spirou?” *sniffle* Caters to the older crowd, I guess.

This is apparently the final Acme Novelty Datebook from Chris Ware. And as usual, just holding this object in my hands is a thrill — it’s so well-made. Perfect paper choice, perfect binding so that it stays open on its own, perfect everything.

Except that some of these are drawn very very very small, so I have to really put some effort into reading these strips, and I’m sorry to say the reward isn’t commensurate with the effort: Many of these are over the border into Kids Say The Darndest Things territory.

But the artwork’s nice, and there are indeed some strong pieces (mostly dealing with his grandmother).

This isn’t a very sketchy sketchbook.

He’s presumably ending this series so that he can go back to sketching in his sketchbook without having to fear that it’ll be reproduced.

I’ve read almost all of Tommi Musturi’s Future series before — this book collects the ten issues that Musturi published over the past few years.

But in a larger format, and on matte paper, and both choices work really well.

The binding isn’t as good as on the Ware book — you have to hold it open forcefully while reading.

Musturi uses a bewildering number of different art styles, and there’s several different narratives we follow over the issues. I’m a bit surprised that they chose to collect the series in this manner — it’s basically a facsimile version of the original comics, including editorials, “letters pages”, covers and all. I’m not saying they should have rearranged the different serials or anything, but I think getting rid of a lot of the single issue artefacts would have helped with reading this: Instead of feeling like a cornucopia (which I guess is what they were going for), it feels like a grab bag, and I got rather impatient with it towards the end.

(Which didn’t happen when I read the individual issues — I really enjoyed reading them in that format.)

F’murr is best known for Le génie des Alpages, but here takes on Spirou, sort of.

It’s half rumination on Spirouness, half slapstick, and half sex comic, and you kinda need that many halves for this sort of thing.

I love his cartooning — it’s so fun to look at.

And yes, tout le monde aime les gragrattes.

And of course Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn shows up to chase down Baby, I mean the leopard.

Since my French is very, very bad (I haven’t finished Duolingo yet), I’m estimating that 90% of the jokes went over my head, but it’s still fun. Something to re-read once I’m actually able to read French.

I bought this because I like Michael Allred’s artwork, and didn’t know anything else about this. I imagined it would be fun space age Superman adventures drawn in Allred’s cartooniest style.

But no! Instead it’s Yet Another Fucking Superman Origin Story, and this time around it’s replete with Pa Fucking Kent being a soldier and bravely shooting children, because that’s what you have to do when saving the world.

And what the fuck is going on with Allred’s artwork here? In the next to last panel, it looks like Superboy (he’s supposed to be 18 here, I guess) not only looks 65, but has a stache like John Waters. Until you look at it closely, and it’s just his lip.

The artwork is so weird — it looks like it’s printed off register until you look closely at it, and there’s just some additional lines that don’t seem to fit. And everybody is staring off in random directions.

I understand why people want to do origin stories — they’ve been taught that A Real Story has to have a person going through something and coming out the other end changed — but that was never the appeal of super-hero comics back when lots of people read them: Back then, it was one fun story each month in basically a static milieu. But now we have to suffer through an endless number of dull origin stories.

And, of course, you have to have All The References in a book like this, because that makes the fans go wild. But as someone who’s only semi-aware of all this stuff, I’m going like “eh? Anti-Monitor? is that a Crisis thing no wait I don’t care”. I lasted 30 pages on this before I ditched it, because it’s lethally dull.

So this is the floppy haul…

I’m this close to ditching Uncanny X-Men — it’s just so choppily told.

The best of the bunch is All-New Venom — Al Ewing brings the fun.

I had a brain fart and started a subscription to Casemate — I did know that it’s not a comics anthology, but I just forgot.

It’s a magazine about comics, and I don’t really read those even in languages I’m more proficient in.

But! Casemate is kinda fascinating in its approach. This is the only issue I have, so I don’t know whether it’s the same each issue, but the first half of the issue was news and interviews; very traditional. And then the last half is like the picture above: We get multiple complete pages from comics along with commentary from the creators.

And that’s pretty fascinating — to drill down to this extent on a page by page basis about what they’re doing. I love it! I especially enjoy actually getting complete comics pages, because that’s something that most comics publications, to this day when everything is online and there’s infinite space, mostly avoids doing.

Instead we get the cover, a couple of splash pages or single panels (preferably without any dialogue), and then the article will talk exclusively about the plot (instead of the actual pages — rendering, colours, dialogue, transitions).

Reading comics critique, I sometimes get the feeling that comics fans don’t actually like comics, but would prefer to just have a recap of the plot along with some big kick-ass “iconic” illustrations. Oh, and 75 different covers.

I kinda like comics myself.