Comics Daze Micro Edition

I’m leaving for London tomorrow, so I don’t have time to read comics all day today. But I got the most eagerly anticipated comic of the year in the mail yesterday (no, not that one), so I just have to read it before going away.

Even though it’s apparently not meant to be read in one session. (I avoid reading articles or interviews about something I’m going to read, but I got that detail off of the Xitters.)

Anyway… it’s readin’ time!

Colin Newman: Provisionally Entitled The Singing Fish-Not To

12:52: Sunday #1-X by Olivier Schrauwen (Colorama)

Heh… he starts with a helpful reading guide. As usual with Schrauwen, the book is presented as being about one of his relatives, and as usual, I’m assuming the book is total fiction.

So I guess this is riso printed? It looks really great.

So it’s this sorta stream of consciousness thing — we get a bit of Thibault’s internal monologue in most every panel.

As internal monologues go, this is a lot more convincing than most.

I love the rhythms of the storytelling…

Heh heh.

With the second issue, things take off — we start following a number of different characters (while the internal monologue continues throughout). There’s perhaps a dozen different characters, and at least half a dozen storylines, and it’s not immediately clear how they relate to each other, but thing become clear very fast.

It’s amazing, and it’s utterly engrossing. I mean, this sort of thing has been done before, of course, but here it’s so flabbergastingly fluid — it seems almost effortless, and I don’t know how he manages to do that. All the shifts seem logical and… interesting? There’s some slight befuddlement to keep the reader on their toes, but it’s just exciting throughout.

Every issue is printed in two colours. The blue is constant, but the other colour shifts between issues, which adds visual interest. However, I think perhaps they should have gone with a darker yellow? It’s just hard to make out what’s happening in some of these panels.

And, yes, two of the characters we’re following the storylines of are animals.

Heh heh. Chthonic.

Heh heh. Such Tintin.

Talking Heads: The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads

I don’t wanna go all excessive and stuff here, but this comic book is absolutely amazing. It’s utterly thrilling. All the different storylines are exciting; they all have such tension. And you want to strangle several of the characters; they’re so frustrating… but in a good way! For the story!

And it build and builds and becomes more and more dense as everything ties together (on many different levels), so I wasn’t expecting things to ever resolve.

But then, in issue X (the eight, which I didn’t snap pics from), Schrauwen changes storytelling approach, and it’s like *phew*. We get an entire issue to unwind from the tension and the stress of reading this book, and it’s just perfect.

This was apparently serialised over a number of years? I’m impressed that Schrauwen was able to keep things as consistent and structured; it reads as one complete work.

Reading it is an amazing experience. It’s 100% comics; this couldn’t have been done in any other art form.

I’m guessing a bigger publisher will pick up the book now and publish it all over the world? Probably in one volume? I’d recommend reading it in one setting, although I can see why Schrauwen says you shouldn’t: It’s a really dense and tense book, and it’s exhausting to read. But reading it slower might make you lose the thread(s), which would be a shame.

These books are still available from Colorama.

It sounds like they might be overwhelmed by people ordering them, though.

Peter Gabriel: Peter Gabriel 4

15:07: The End

And now I have to start packing.

The Mysteries of Google

Is this good or bad?

OK, let me explain.

I google with site:ingebrigtsen.no a lot because I use this blog as a way to externalise my memory. (I’m forgetful.) Half a year ago, I noticed that I was getting weird results. After fixing that problem, I eventually signed up for the Google Search Console to see whether anything else should be fixed (I mean, just because of curiosity on my part, I guess).

My first question was: I have 151K pages!? Of which 60K aren’t indexed?

There’s about 4K “real” pages in this domain, spread over two blogs, basically. But since this is WordPress, there’s a lot of URL duplication. Every page has a /feed/ page, and there’s a “short code” version of every URL, and there’s another “short code” that comes from WordPress.com, and probably an AMP URL, and and… I’m forgetting a lot.

But now Google is saying there’s 151K pages not indexed, and 3.6K pages that are indexed. The latter is fewer than the actual number of pages.

So:

So… that all looks sensible, except the “crawled — currently not indexed”, which is what’s grown, I think. Yeah:

Yup.

So what are these URLs?

OK, there’s a couple /feed/ pages, which is nice, but there also seems to be some actual blog posts? So let’s google for one of them:

And… it’s there!?

*sigh*

So is the Google Search Console just nonsense? The only help the help pages have to offer on this issue is:

I mean, none of this matters very much. I’m just curious.

And no, I’m not really expecting Google to index every silly little blog in existence — the search engine is theirs, and they are entitled to do whatever they want. But it’s a nice, convenient service when it works.

And while I’m whingeing about the Google Search Console, I might as well whine about this mystery, too: Google seems to think that all of the Gnus manuals that exist on the gnus.org domain exist under www.ingebrigtsen.no, too. They’re both hosted on the same web server, so they resolve to the same address. So I thought this might be due to a misconfiguration on the server — it wouldn’t be the first time, since Apache amusingly defaults to using the “default” directories when you forget to set up domains properly.

But clicking on that gives you the expected result — that the document doesn’t exist.

Anybody have any idea what’s up here?