A Simple Archive.Org RSS Feed Creator

I’ve been trolling archive.org for magazines about comics sorta regularly (sorting by date added). Yesterday, for instance, I found that somebody had uploaded a bunch of issues of Wizard Magazine that were missing from kwakk.org, the search engine for magazines about comics:

But… manual processes are so tedious, so I wondered whether there was an RSS feed for these things, so that I could just put it on Gwene.

But nope? So I wrote one and put it on Microsoft Github. It uses Emacs, of course.

The results can be read in the gwene.org.gnus.archive.comics newsgroup on the news.gmane.io NNTP server:

So there you go.

[Edit five minutes later:]

There is a built-in way to get an RSS feed:

So never mind!

Book Club 2025: Doctor Sally by P. G. Wodehouse

I’m reading Wodehouse sorta chronologically, and I’ve now reached 1931. This is a short novel based on one of Wodehouse’s plays.

And it is, of course, very witty, but like all of the books that Wodehouse wrote that were based on his plays, it’s just not as good as his other novels. It retains the shape of a play extremely clearly — most everything taking place in two rooms, and a lot of people entering and exiting doors to those two rooms.

So it’s fine, but it’s definitely one of his lesser books.

Doctor Sally (1931) by P. G. Wodehouse (Buy used, 3.69 on Goodreads)

A&R2015: Cerebus Archive

Cerebus Archive (1977) #1-10 by Dave Sim

Back when I was doing the mop-ups for my Aardvark Vanaheim/Renegade Press blog series, I just couldn’t find my copies of Cerebus Archive — not the original Cerebus Archive series, but the series of portfolios that followed afterwards. I looked everywhere I could think of — these things are pretty big, almost tabloid size, so they should be easy to find, after all — but I had obviously stashed them Somewhere Special™, so they were lost for all eternity.

But last week, I got a shipment from Mile High Comics… and in that shipment was Cerebus Archive Number Ten! What the fuck! But but but

And then I realised what must have happened: I had a subscription to the original Cerebus Archive series, and that must somehow have “carried over”, and they’d ordered my a copy of the most recent portfolio.

*sigh*

But since I finally got my hands on one of these, I thought I might do one final A&R blog post… and now that I had a copy in my hands again, I was reminded of how they looked like, and what do you know:

I found the two issues I already had! They were half a meter from where I was sitting! Pffft!

OK, enough with the comicsplaining… let’s have a look at the three issues I have, which is #2, #3 and #10.

They come in very sturdy envelopes, but not sturdy flaps, and I seem to have a habit of tearing the left flap when opening them.

This is the second portfolio, but they all follow the same format: There’s ten large reproductions (I think they’re done in actual size drawn? I may be mistaken) of the first pages that Sim still has in his possession from whatever volume we’re looking at. So here we get ten pages from High Society.

But what pages are in Sim’s possession? Sim would sell off his original artwork, so the most popular pages are gone, of course. Left are the, er, how to put it: Less iconic pages. Ahem. There are many text heavy pages, and many pages that are plot dense.

They’re printed in colour, so you get to see the bluelines that Sim hasn’t erased.

And also paste ups and stuff. The reproduction is pretty nice, but the less-than-thrilling selection of pages makes these very niche items.

There’s nothing on the back of the ten pages.

But! Then there are notes!

So many notes. We get three of these oversized sheets with text on both sides, so we’re getting a lot of text.

And Sim goes through the ten pages and gives an in-depth talk about each one, explaining what he’s doing and what he thinks about what he did and stuff. If you’re into reading Cerebus liner notes, these are really good.

But what about the tenth portfolio, the one that I got the other week? I think the first handful of portfolios were released over a few years (starting in 2015, using Kickstarter, I believe), but then they petered out. I don’t know how big a pause there’s been before this one, but:

Somebody’s scribbled on my portfolio!

And *gasp* I got copy 100 out of 150. I bet this one is worth all the money.

I’m more surprised that they’re selling this many copies, really…

The pages are now in a plastic zip-lock-bag inside the cardboard envelope.

The format is the same as before, but Sim has apparently kept more “key” pages, or people had stopped buying his artwork by this time. Because there’s more striking pages here.

On the other hand, there’s some that perhaps people won’t be framing and putting on their walls.

And instead of three sheets densely filled with information about the pages, we get one sheet that is, er, less densely filled.

There’s some talk of what we’re seeing in these pages, but it’s trending towards gibberish if you don’t already know what Sim is talking about.

And much of the text is about Sim’s religious beliefs, which have something to do with particle physics and the bible, apparently.

So… it’s not very interesting, is it? Nope. At least the first portfolios had some pretty interesting texts…

And now dawn is approaching, and I really should send an email to Mile High Comics so that this subscription is cancelled once and for all. (How many copies were sold by mistake, I wonder… probably, er, not all of them.)

Ah, this one was done via Kickstarter, too.

This blog post is part of the Renegades and Aardvarks series.

Book Club 2025: Mitt Abruzzo by Pet Petterson

I’ve been reading this book for over a year before falling asleep, and it works well as that. Er, I mean, it’s not that it’s boring or anything, but it’s a journal and I can read a couple of pages, or read a dozen pages, and it’s fine — I don’t have to remember much of what’s gone one before.

And now I finally finished it! So how is it?

Petterson’s most famous book is definitely Out Stealing Horses, and that is indeed a very good book, but I’ve read all of his books (I think?) and they’re all pretty spiffy.

This book was written over about six months in 2021, during Corona, and happened because Petterson doesn’t know whether he can write anything any more. It’s a solid diary/journal thing, but written with publication in mind, so it’s not overly diarish. (That’s a word.)

The thing that got most attention when it was published was that it includes a couple pages where Petterson is annoyed with his US publisher, Graywolf, who had some comments about his then-latest book, I Curse The River Of Time. There’s a passage there about how the protagonist used to play Cowboys And Indians as a child, and he always preferred playing Indian; and more than that, he wanted to be an Indian. Graywolf wanted to add a parentheses saying something like “but of course that’s impossible, since he’s Norwegian”, and Petterson thought that was a pretty moronic thing to add.

Which it was. The past (i.e., 2021) was a different country, eh?

This book has not been translated, and Petterson says in the text that he doesn’t want it to be, either.

Mitt Abruzzo (2021) by Pet Petterson (3.9 on Goodreads)