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.
