Random Thoughts

To keep the number of separate titles down in the kwakk.info search engine, I’ve avoided adding (most) fanzines about comics that only had a couple of issues, or where I could only find a very small number of the issues.

But… why not stick them in a “misc” category? Why not indeed.

And:

Yes, there’s also a category for miscellaneous promotional material, but it’s very sparsely populated at the moment.

Now I’m kicking myself for not saving the various smaller fanzines/mags I’ve encountered while searching for stuff over the last couple years…

While doing another spelunking through things at Anna’s Archive this morning, I’m finding some pretty surprising things. Like:

“It Magazine & Comics”!? From 1994!?

Unfortunately, whoever scanned it was only interested in the Gaiman interview. *pout*

And the Internet hasn’t heard of the magazine at all.

And I’ve been doing extensive searches for 90s comics magazines, including using All The AI, and Arena Magazine never came up. (The first two issues were called “Comics Arena”, even.) It looks kinda interesting and had almost two dozen issues?

I guess the 90s really are a lost decade… I mean, to computers. I betcha this magazine had a web site dedicated to it in, say, 1999, but it’d be long gone and forgotten by now.

Oh well.

It’s a lovely day, but I need a break from doing all the stuff with magazines about comics, so instead I’m going to read comics magazines. Makes sense.

And for music today: Coil. Just Coil.

By the way: The Ignatz Award winners were announced… and there’s good winners, of course, but I’m amused to see that absolutely nobody I voted for won (I voted for the first time ever this year). 100% miss rate! I’m the best!

Coil: Scatology (Vol 2)

14:17: No Future by Anders Fjeld & Esben Slaatrem Titland

This book is a collection of mostly shorter pieces — some illustrated text…

… and some comics. I really like the artwork here. The stories deal with climate change etc, but in an 70s science fictional dystopian/utopian way? It’s fun.

Coil: Horse Rotorvator

14:42: Crysanthemum: Under the Waves by Maggie Umber

I got this from here.

This is a collection of stories…

… but it’s amazingly unified in mood.

Many of these seem to reference old movies, or at least how people were dressed back then. They’re all narrative pieces, but (mostly) wordless, and it’s a bit vague what the story actually is — which works wonderfully, really. There’s like a despair emanating from these pages. Excellent work.

15:07: Les aventures d’Hergé by Boquet/Fromental/Stanislas (Cobolt)

I thought I’d already read a comics biography of Hergé (drawn in his style), but I guess this is a new one?

No, this looks very familiar… Oh, it’s from 2017 originally, even though this edition is from this year? Doh! I’ve read the Drawn & Quarterly edition! I should search my blog before buying stuff, really.

But I guess I’ll re-read it…

Uhm… or rather — no. This just isn’t good enough, and I’m not really interested enough in Hergé’s life. Oh well.

15:21: Cheat Sheets by Tiger Teteishi (50 Watts)

This is a book of one or two page visual gags, many playing around with comics stuff itself. Some of it’s (like the page on the left) a bit too reminiscent of old Road Runner cartoons, and some of it relies on absurdity (on the right).

It’s a fun, inventive book, but it’s not really my sort of thing? I mean, a page or two in an anthology would be refreshing, but to me, it gets a bit repetetive… There’s like nothing deeper going on here than just having fun on a comics page? Which is fine, but…

Coil: Gold is the Metal

15:45: Into the Cosmos by Stathis Tsemberlidis (50 Watts)

Well, this is an odd book.

It’s mostly a collection of illustrations Tsemberlidis did for a Danish edition of Solaris, and we get many of the same illustrations repeated, in black and white and in colour. I guess it’s got a kind of rhythm to it…

And then we get a short comic. I love Tsemberlidis’s comics, so that’s fun, but it’s a pretty odd book.

Coil: Windowpane

15:51: Ne lâche pas ma main by Cassegrain/Duval/Bussi (Mellemgaard)

Hm… this art style is generally pretty attractive… those big angular cheeks. It’s like… Oh, I know — it’s like somebody took Hugo Pratt’s general stylisations and applied them to commercial art? Does that make sense?

Bu there’s something seriously off. The book is told as if it’s a TV series.

And the angles are often way bizarre — like if they’re working from photo reference for each character, but they’ve take the pics with a camera that’s really close to the subject, and using odd angles. Like that right bottom panel on the left hand page — the arm is shooting off towards us. Which would be a fun effect in an action scene, but here’s it’s just disturbing.

And also the sheer copy-pastiness of the artwork. In four of the panels with the police woman on the left hand page, they’ve C-c/C-v’d her head while drawing the body in different postures. And, of course, the copy paste of the square-headed guy in the bottom left two panels.

Oh, and the story? It’s a really, really convoluted crime thing, with several twists and turns, and more withheld information than you can shake a stick at.

Did they write this as a pitch for an eight episode Quality TV series? I think it might have been more successful as that.

Coil: Unnatural History: Compilation Tracks Compiled

17:04: We Are Hungry/Bunworld/Pretzel by Maggie Umber

Three books with different formats. The first one is A4, probably screenprint? And read sideways. It’s a pretty brutal story.

The second is very cute, but it’s not quite clear what’s going on? It’s issue #1, so I’m guessing things will develop; it’s interesting. And the way it’s printed is interesting, too: I’m guessing the paper is multicolour, and then the black parts are screenprinted? Never seen anything like it — it’s a wonderful effect.

And the third little book has some artwork I like a lot.

17:16: Golem Pit 224 by Julia Gootzeit (Fieldmouse Press)

Hey! This comes with a four nice little paintings!

You can get the book from here, I think.

This starts off with a classic sci-fi-ish setup: Two people go to investigate a new mysterious phenomenon.

But then everything turns into a relationship thing, which is then further reflected in the Big Mysterious Object. I’m not quite sure it works? It, like, needs… more. Of something.

Coil: Love’s Secret Domain

17:39: Psychodrama Illustrated #8 by Gilbert Hernandez (Fantagraphics)

It’s been a while since the previous issue, hasn’t it?

This is another one of those “movie adaptations”, I guess? We get three of those movies in just 24 pages — one on the left-hand page there; very compact.

And one sci-fi one running along the bottom of the pages, as well as the main story, which is mostly rape, and is a really depressing one — even as Hernandez’ movie adaptations go.

17:59: Game Over by Yves H./Hermann (Faraos Cigarer)

This is a dozen years old — I’m not much of a fan of Yves H, but older Hermann can be really good stuff, even if written by others.

This is a classic home invasion story (with the requisite twists), and it works? It’s pretty good. It’s not big or clever, but it’s well done.

Hm… I should make dinner, I think? But one more comic first.

Coil: The Snow EP

18:22: Sainted Love by Orlando/Giopota/Andworld (Vault Comics)

Eh… this art style isn’t my thing. So digital.

And the storytelling is kinda choppy. There’s some fun pages here, but I’m not really feeling it, so I ditched it about half way through.

Perhaps I’m just hangry.

*dinner*

Coil: Stolen and Contaminated Songs

19:22: Yoko Tsuno – L’aigle des Highlands by Roger Leloup (Cobolt)

I haven’t read a Yoko Tsuno in years — I used to read it as a child, but wasn’t much of a fan back then, either. But I’ve read at least a couple dozen of these over the years, and Roger Leloup is still plugging away — but these days, there’s several years between each album. Leloup is over 90 now, so it’s impressive that he’s still doing these albums.

As usual, the castles and scenery look great — I really like that castle — but Leloup’s faces have deteriorated somewhat.

I mean, look at the Yoko’s sidekick in the two panels at the top of the right-hand page there — that’s awfully wonky. Leloup is much better at drawing the female faces, which I’m guessing he enjoys more anyway? Yoko Tsuno was, I guess, part of that 70s French(ey) comics movement towards bringing in more female main characters, but in stark contrast to series like Natacha and and Franka, she wasn’t an excuse to feature more boobs, but was instead an old-fashioned hyper competent main character with amusing (and male) sidekicks.

In this albums we barely see those sidekicks, and we instead get a bewildering array of female supporting characters that Yoko Tsuno has picked up over the years — from several planets and different time periods.

The story in this album, though, is… wow. Just wow. It’s incomprehensible while also nothing actually happens? A confusing void.

Oui — toujours confus. And the visages are difformes! Did I write that review!?

19:49: The Uncanny X-Men #1 by Simone/Marquez/Wilson (Marvel Comics)

I like having a handful of monthly comics going, but since it’s Marvel, they all end so soon, and then I have to find another set. So here I’m testing the new X-Men…

… and it’s OK? I missed the end of the Krakoa thing (did those series get cancelled half a year or so ago or something?), so I have no idea how we ended back in this status quo, but it doesn’t really matter.

I think I’ll stick with this one — it’s got that repartee and things seem to be moving along without the entire issue being a long fight scene.

20:05: Nyx #1-2 by Kelly/Lanzing/Mortarino/Angulo (Marvel Comics)

Oh, brain fart — I saw “Kelly” in the credits, and I bought it because I thought it was that Kelly I quite liked, but I’d forgotten that that was her first name — Kelly Thompson. Duh!

This is quite, quite bad. Not the artwork, but the storytelling and the basic plot is just one big mess. Ditchin’.

Coil: presents Black Light District – A Thousand Lights in a Darkened Room

20:23: Š! #52 (Kuš)

That was quick. Didn’t #51 arrive just a couple months ago?

This issue’s theme is “Elastic Spaces”, with the artists interpreting that somewhat literally in many cases — about a third of the pieces are photos of different spaces. They’re nice pieces, but not really gripping. But there’s really strong stuff here, too, like the above.

And some silly ones.

I liked this one.

Coil: Time Machines

20:37: Spirou et la gorgone bleue by Dany & Yann (Cobolt)

This is another one of those “extraordinary adventures of” albums, and some of these have been a lot of fun.

This one drags a bit. It sometimes reads more like a Spirou parody — sex jokes, Trump references, somewhat racist depictions, etc — and I don’t have anything against parodies, but at 80s very chatty pages, with a low hit/miss ratio, I got a bit bored by the end.

I was thinking — “this really reminds me of those 80s parody albums, like… that’s it called… Bob Marone?”

And those were written by Yann!!! Like this one is!

Wow. I amaze myself!

The people at bedetheque weren’t much impressed either.

21:41: The End

And now I think I’ve read enough comics for one day.

I thought it might be interesting to provide a simple list of what the kwakk.info site has, so I whipped up this page. Hey, if you have any missing issues, I’m right here… Feel free to mail scanned issues to lars@ingebrigtsen.no or whatever.

I also found some stuff to add, likeMarvel Previews. I mean, I don’t know how useful that is, but perhaps somebody’s into doing Marvel research?

Also of somewhat questionable utility is Factsheet Five — it does list (and review) comics, but the vast majority of the text isn’t about comics, so…

Comic Heroes was a British glossy comic book magazine?

Ditkomania looks fun.

And I think that’s it, and I’m now totally done for sure this time I mean it.

I’m still prattling on about Anna’s Archive and how to download magazines about comics from that thing, even though I said the last time I was going to stop.

The main difficulty is to just know what the magazines are called, because there’s absolutely no useful organisation of the information there, and apparently no comics nerds have written a web page called “The 200 Most Important Magazines And Fanzines About American Comics”.

Whyy! Nerds! You have failed me!

(Or perhaps more likely — somebody wrote that web page in 2013, but the site is now dead.)

But then I thought: I literally have a magazine search page myself , so I can just look for names of fanzines there?

And so I found Graphic Story World. Er. Looking at this snap, I seem to have mixed up that magazine with Graphic Story Magazine? *sigh*

And the very short-lived Fandom Annual from the late 60s.

But… clicking through all those pages is a pain, so I wondered: Surely there’s an LLM for this!

Yes! This looks promising!

Er… Street Enterprises Comics Review?

Yeah, it doesn’t exist, because LLMs suck.

But searching Anna made me wonder whether a similar thing existed?

No, the Menomonee Falls Gazette is just a comic strip reprint magazine.

Comico Magazine!? Did that exist?

No.

But it led me to find Comico Attractions, which I can add..

That sounds like a great magazine, but it’s apparently another hallucination.

Anyway! Using three different LLMs, I got on the trail of a number of mags and fanzines.

The Overstreet Price Update, for instance.

Overstreet’s Fan is perhaps more interesting.

And of course the price guide itself.

Marvel Vision? I have no idea what that is, but that’s basically because I’m doing these imports after having a nice dinner at a nice restaurant and I’m so drunk now I can hardly type. So this is going to be a really high quality batch!

Inside Image is a promotional pamphlet, I guess?

Inside Comics looks more interesting

Funnyworld is an animation and comics fanzine…

Clay Geerde’s Comix Wave is a long-running sheet (mostly two pages per issue).

Comico Attractions is the thing I was talking about above!

Advance Comics is Capital Comics’s pamphlet, I guess?

Fanboy! Journal of Comics Fandom was a short-lived 90s magazine?

Comic Book Profiles is er something.

See? AI is so er smart.

But now I’m done for sure I promise this time.

[five minutes pass]

Perhaps I should ask about fanzines, too?

Nemo: The Classic Comics Library is certainly not a fanzine, but that’s LLMs for you. And that’s a mag I knew about very well, but I remembered it being a magazine that reprinted classic strips, and not a magazine about classic strips. But looking at it now, I see that I misremembered, so I’ve now included it.

Marvel: The Year In Review isn’t a fanzine either — it’s a promotional book from Marvel summing up what “happened” in the previous year? Yeah, why not, but it’s marginal for kwakk.info…

Finally! A honest to goodness fanzine! Comixscene was a short-lived newspaper size thing from the early 70s.

And even more fanziney is Newfangles, which was Don Thompson / Maggie Thompson pre-CBG thing.

Hey… that Fanac site looks interesting. It doesn’t separate fanzines by theme, though — and it’s mostly SF/F zines? Hm. Perhaps I should take a look, anyway.

The only thing I found while browsing quickly was Xero, a fanzine I’ve seen mentioned several times (mostly by the LLMs), but Anna didn’t have it. Fanac did, though.

OK, now I’m done!

Anna’s Archive has so many magazines/fanzines about comics available — who knew there were this many people enthusiastically scanning their magazines! — but it’s impossible to find anything there unless you know the names of the books you’re looking for.

So I’ve been searching for “lists of comics fanzines” and the like, and there is, of course, The Poopsheet Foundation, but it lists so many things that were published in three copies by some guy in a basement in Nova Scotia that it’s useless for my purposes.

And there’s Wikipedia, which is surprisingly unhelpful — I mean, it lists a lot of magazines there, but half of them are comics magazines, not magazines about comics, and there’s an awful lot of magazines it doesn’t list. Hasn’t comics fandom properly descended upon Wikipedia yet?

Tom Brevoort’s overview here was, on the other hand, very helpful, and so was this comic book shop.

OK, so what I’ve added this time around is about 20K pages spread over a dozen titles.

Yikes!

The biggest haul (issue wise) is Comic Shop News, which I’m not actually sure is that interesting for research purposes? But I mean, it was there, so why not add it… I found about 400 (of the 1400) issues. It’s an 8 page magazine (give or take), but it’s large format, so there’s actually a lot of text here…

(This was a bit annoying to import — over the last couple years, I’ve written scripts that handle 99% of the grunt work, but this one required a lot of manual interventions because of irregularities in how the scans were arrange. Yeah, bitch bitch, whatever.)

Next up is Comic Book Marketplace at about 120 issues, and this is a pretty complete collection. I’m not familiar with the magazine at all, and assumed it was some kind of price guide thing. It’s not — there’s a lot of ads in here, but also lots of articles about (older?) comics. Here’s a random contents page:

Hey! Interview with Ty Templeton?

The confusingly-titled Overstreet’s Comic Book Market magazine has a much shorter run. And changed its name to Overstreet’s Comic Book Monthly mid-run, presumably because it had a confusing name? And was then cancelled within the year.

DC Coming Attractions was another one of those “what they hey” additions — it’s about a dozen four page pamphlets from the late 70s. Why not.

I’ve also filled in some holes in the runs of some mags. I found some Nostalgia Journal issues, so I put them in the The Comics Journal index. I also found some Wizard, Borderline, Mediascene and Comics Interview issues, but more importantly, I really fleshed out the The Comic Reader run:

I previously only had #78 and up, but I found most of the older issues, including #48-72 when the magazine was called On The Drawing Board for a couple of years.

Comics: The Golden Age was a magazine that didn’t last long.

Neither did Comics Fandom Quarterly.

Or indeed Comics Fandom Monthly.

The Comic Times/Media Showcase was another mag that changed its name, but it didn’t last long, either.

Neither did Marvelmania.

I jammed The X-Men Companion volumes into the Focus On… index.

And I found the Fantaco Chronicles run.

OK, that’s it! Now I’m taking a break.

[five minutes pass]

Oops! I stumbled upon this thread, and now I found some more magazines to add. Drat!

OK, so six more mags. And about 5K more pages.

Comics Source is perhaps the heftiest of these new ones…

Marvel Comics Index was published by Pacific Comics in the late 70s, and I’m not sure it’s all that interesting at this point — it mostly just lists all the issues with a brief description?

LOC: Fandom’s Forum is an early 80s series… It actually looks pretty interesting? But only ten issues.

Collector’s Dream is another short-lived mid-70s fanzine.

Comics Collector is a short-lived mid-80s magazine.

I was excited when somebody mentioned The Barks Collector — there’s so many super-hero fanzines and magazines, anyway. But wouldn’t you know it — Anna only had a handful of the 40+ issues. Typical! I almost didn’t add it, but I guess it works as a placeholder. I did a cursory search elsewhere, but I didn’t see any collections of scans of this anywhere, though.

OK. That’s it. For real!

[five minutes pass]

OK, there’s now so many fanzines and stuff that I have to reorganise the magazine chooser — it overflows the screen. Erm… OK, perhaps I should take this opportunity to introduce more categories, too.

Currently, I only have ALL and FAN(zines)… But perhaps I should have ALL, and then magazines, fanzines, indices and promotional material as separate categories?

I’ve been leery at adding indices and promotional material because it might “pollute” the searches. If you search for “wolverine”, the page with the most matches shows up first. So if I index a price guide that has the word “wolverine” 40 times on one page (it happens), it’ll show up first. But if I put those in a separate “indices” category, than I can keep them out of the results when you search magazines and fanzines…

OK, I think I’ll do that…

And break the list into several columns.

OK, but that’s it! I’m done now!

[you know the drill]

Yeah, I added Diamond Previews (only issues 300 and up). Oops! That’s unexpectedly porny… I included the Previews Adult, too, but I had no idea that they were that sleazy. *grips pearls*

DC Releases was an 80s promotional pamphlet. I was looking for Kitchen Sink Pipeline, but no luck — the indie promo pamphlets would be more interesting, really. (This is added to the “promotional” section, so don’t worry — they won’t pollute your magazine searches.)

Neither will DC Nation. (How many different titles did DC have for their promotional mags, anyway?)

The biggest haul in this promo/index batch is Comics Values Monthly, with 74 issues.

It’s unexpectedly kinda interesting — it has regional mood reports and stuff?

DC Currents? What’s that then? Oh, it’s another name for the DC promotional pamphlet? Perhaps I should just put all these in under the same title… Nah; they’re all under “promotional” anyway, so they’re already grouped.

And that’s it. No more! I mean it!

[*sigh*]

Oh, I added keystroke navigation, too. Left and right keys to flip through pages.