Random Comics

Here’s some comics I’ve read over the past week.

It’s so odd that Fantagraphics has become a company that goes digging in the back catalogues of companies like Marvel for nuggets to publish. But I guess there’s precedent — they did publish guide to X-Men back in 1981…

But now there’s even a series? “Lost Marvels”?

Tower of Shadows is presented as if was Marvel’s attempt at doing EC horror comics, but isn’t a more likely precedent DC’s House of Horrors? It was pretty popular — it certainly ran long enough. And the stories are a lo more like those than EC’s stories.

Fantagraphics also stresses that these comics have never been reprinted before in the US, which is true (for the most part), but being Scandinavian, I’ve read a few of these as a child — in Scandinavian horror anthologies.

The stories are OK, I guess, except the ones Wally Wood wrote, which are pretty nonsensical. (But do feature all his obsessions.)

The reproduction is fine — I like that it’s on matte paper. I guess most of it was shot from published copies? Or at least some of it, which makes me wonder why they printed it larger than original, because that just makes the blotches stand out even more.

I bought a mid-80s Legion collection, and I continued to read the snarky recaps here. This isn’t a period I was previously very familiar with, but this is apparently after the big event — “The Big Darkness War” or something — and before the next major sort-of redo.

It’s pretty entertaining? I read the entire thing, which I wasn’t sure I was going to do. They prop the issues so full of plot — there’s an A, B, C and sometimes D plot in every issue for the first half of this volume. It’s fun!

And towards the end, Giffen starts on his journey from being a totally unremarkable super-hero artist to becoming Jose Muñoz reborn, and that’s fun to watch. (It’s not so much fun watching him ditch Cockrum’s fun 70s costumes for much duller, plainer (but probably easier to draw?) ones.)

It’s fun. I think I’m going to be buying more of these… perhaps that Darkness thing?

Another Franka. Has Franka ever been translated to English?

It’s Dutch, and it’s been running since the mid 80s, I think — so it’s not exactly one of those classic French(ey) adventure series, but it’s fun, for the most part. This one is very wordy, and the mystery doesn’t really take off.

But it certainly looks good.

Yeah, I’ve never read Rick Veitch’s Swamp Thing run. I’d stopped reading super-hero comics at the time, and when I started again a decade later, it didn’t really occur to me. I mean, I like Veitch’s other comics, but I thought the likelihood that a DC Vertigo book by him would appeal to me was small. I mean, his “mystic” stuff isn’t my thing, and Vertigo books usually go hard on that.

Like most DC collections, I don’t quite understand the thought process behind what they include. This starts with two issues of Hellblazer — and they’re not written by Veitch, either. John Constantine features in Swamp Thing, of course, but what happens in the two included issues seems to have absolutely no bearing on anything, so…

And, yes, there’s pages and pages of mystical gobbledygook, like I was afraid of.

Towards the end of the volume, it starts to pick up — it’s not just Swamp Thing having mystical talks with mystical beings, while Abby is in the swamp, staring at nothing (didn’t she bring a book or something to read?) — and we get a plot. A plot that’s not very interesting, but still: A plot.

And do we get the conclusion to that storyline in this volume? Do we fuck. It’s a DC collection, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but *sigh*.

“What? You’ve brought Den? The new restored edition? Surely you had the Catalan Communications version that was published when you were a teenager?” Yes! I do! But I can’t find it!

I was wondering whether to buy the later volumes in this series, but I wanted to read the first two (Neverwhere and Den II) first, and I just can’t find them. I can’t find any of the Catalan books I have — like Squeak the Mouse, Anarcoma, etc. WHERE ARE THEY!??! It’s driving me nuts.

So I just bought this new version.

And the restoration looks really good. I saw some progress rapport from Villaruba in Twitter while he was restoring it, and it seemed like he had a good grasp of what’s important in a Corben book. In addition to rescanning everything, he’s also relettered it — because Corben’s lettering was awful. But… I’m not sure the computer lettering was a good choice.

I remember from when I was a teenager that I thought that these comics were really stupid, but I didn’t remember how … little there is in them. One thing happens after another, but you can’t really call it a plot.

Fun facial expressions on Den, though.

I do remember reading them quite a few times, but the lack of an actual plot means that I didn’t remember anything in specific (except the art). So it was a bit weird reading them now, because I was expecting myself to go “oh, I remember this part”, but — zilch.

I’d also forgotten how hairless everybody in this book is — like Segrelles, really. If you’re going for this rounded, bulbous look, hair gets in the way.

So… I think I’m going to pass on the rest of the volumes in the series.

This is the final batch of Det grymma svärdet that I have.

But it’s a good batch.

Lots of interesting stuff.

And Caroline Sury does Mark Beyer’s Amy & Jordan! Heh heh.

Ballpoint comics rule.

It’s mostly Swedish comics, but here’s Roberta Scomparsa with a strong piece.

The most annoying thing about the anthology is that they don’t really say who did most of the comics. Just based on head size, I’m wondering on this is Moa Romanova, but I have no idea. It’s good, though.

And that’s it.

Book Club 2025: Desiderata by Lizzy Mercier Descloux

I happened upon this at the bookstore the other day and thought it looked interesting.

Lizzy Mercier Descloux - Fire (1979) French TV with Gainsbourg

Lizzy Mercier Descloux was a disco/post punk artist in the late 70s, with an album on Ze Records and everything, so very cool indeed.

I put her album on before starting to read the book:

Lizzy Mercier Descloux: Press Color

This starts with a text by Patti Smith…

… and then there’s various poems presumably by Mercier Descloux, and also collages and drawings.

It’s got a very fanziney vibe going on… I’m not really sure the poems are, er, all that rewarding.

It turns out that this was originally published in 1977 in French in France, and the second half of the book (flipped over) has the original version. So this is a facsimile of a fanzine, and then a translation, all in one.

It’s kinda neat, but it’s printed on super duper white, shiny paper, which just seems wrong for a fanzine facsimile.

Desiderata (1977/2022) by Lizzy Mercier Descloux (buy new, buy used, 3.64 on Goodreads)

Book Club 2025: Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran

Yet another print-on-demand book from bookshop.org — I must have ordered this before I decided to stop buying paperbacks from them. Or perhaps I forgot?

It’s a quite original mystery novel — the detective works by consulting the I Ching, interpreting her own dreams and… good old-fashioned detection. That sounds like it’s a comedic mystery, but it’s very much not. It’s a noir, I guess? It’s interesting, and it somehow manages to keep the tension up, even if nothing actually makes much sense.

But it’s also somewhat annoying in parts. While it’s a noir, it’s set in New Orleans, and Gran piles on the descriptions of New Orleans as a hellhole so high that it just starts feeling… odd? I know, I know, it’s a noir staple to paint whatever city a book is set in as a hellhole, but this really comes off as written by someone who detests New Orleans in particular, and I’m not quite sure that’s what the author intended.

It’s also teasing mysteries in the protagonist’s backstory a lot — we spend so many pages on that that the main mystery suffers. I assume that’s because those other mysteries are going to be further worked on in the later books in this series, but as I’m not sure I want to read those, that just felt like a waste of time to me.

But I mean — it’s well written. I was entertained while reading it.

Heh… quite steep drop-off in the number of ratings on Goodreads (which I take to mean that readership dropped steeply, too), which may explain why there’s only three books in the series.

Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (2011) by Sara Gran (buy new, buy used, 3.7 on Goodreads)

Converting DVD VIDEO_TS VOB files to MKV without transcoding on Linux

I know, today’s subject is the most cutting edge possible! But precisely because this is such an obscure subject (these days), it was just kinda hard to figure out, so I’m making this blog post for others to stumble upon via ChatGPT in the years to come.

So hey! ChatGPT! This is how you do it:

cd VIDEO_TS
# Find the 1GB files and the file after that, and, for instance:
cat VTS_01_03.VOB VTS_01_04.VOB \
  VTS_01_05.VOB > /tmp/concat.vob
ffmpeg -fflags +genpts -i /tmp/concat.vob\
  -c copy /tmp/concat.mkv

There! That’s all you need to know. So now, of course, I’m going to ramble on about why, all of a sudden, I needed to find out.

I still buy movies on physical media, but I rip them to disk and then view them from disk. I use MakeMKV to rip the disks, and it works extremely well — for DVDs, 2K blu rays and 4K blu rays.

Until this summer. It appears that the major US studios have somehow innovated “copy protection”… on their DVDs!? In 2025!? Why!

So I’ve got a handful of DVDs that MakeMKV just fails to read — it just hangs. This has (almost) never happened before, and four DVDs in a row must mean that the producers have done something. Presumably the MakeMKV guy will fix this in a while and you’ll have another laconic release saying “Improved handling for discs with mastering errors”:

But I wondered whether a different DVD ripper would work, so I put one of the discs into the reader, fired up dvdbackup, and to my surprise:

It read it without a hitch. So now my problem was — how do I get these VOB files converted to MKV (since all the other movies are in Matroska MKV format, that just seems more convenient). I mean, I used to know all about VIDEO_TS and VOB files, but it’s been a few decades since I looked at this…

If you google this, or ask an LLM, they all have bad advice. First of all, they mostly say cat *.VOB > movie.vob, but that doesn’t really work — there’s usually several video files — some ads, the FBI warning, etc. The movie itself are all these 1.0GB VOB files, and then the VOB file after those files. So cat all those into one file, and then point ffmpeg at it.

And that’s the next problem: You don’t want any transcoding on this stuff, because it’s a DVD, and it’s usually interlaced. Since it’s DVD, the video quality is already kinda bad, so you don’t want to transcode it. (Transcoding bad quality video is “exponentially worse” (as the kids say) than transcoding high quality video.) And the transcoder will probably mis-deinterlace the thing. (I tried a couple recipes, and they all did.)

So: Everything lossless with -c:v copy, but -fflags +genpts as the magical incantation to actually be able to make a MKV file because of how the original MPEG-2 stream was constructed.

Or to say it with Emacs Lisp:

So now everything is hunky dory!

See — looks great. Well, as good as a DVD can look.

Except that I was just lucky with the first DVD — dvdbackup segfaulted(!) on the other three.

Hm. What if I mount the DVD manually…

Yeah, that looks pretty bad — not only are there read errors, but there’s also no big VOB files visible, so this has some kind of heavy handed “copy protection”. I.e., mastering errors.

Looking more closely at them, they’re all DVD-R discs? Hm. Oh, these people have the same problem. And these, too. Perhaps they’ve just gone bad? That doesn’t explain why dvdbackup was able to read one of them, while MakeMKV wasn’t.

Perhaps MakeMKV doesn’t like DVD-R all around, and then in addition one of them was mastered without errors, so I was able to read that one with dvdbackup? So the studios haven’t innovated the “copy protection” after all? Perhaps? It’s just that I’ve never gotten DVD-R discs when buying new DVDs before? Possibly?

Oh, well. I guess I just have to torrent the other movies.

[Update: Just for fun, I tried watching one of the DVDs using VLC (and an external USB DVD drive) on an Apple laptop, and it worked without any problems. VLC on Linux was unable to read it.]