kwakk.info is a web site dedicated to doing research into comics.
Here’s why I created it:
Over the years, I’ve done a few blogs about old comics. Invariably, there’s always something I want to check — but that’s next to impossible, since virtually everything written about old comics (reviews, news items, interviews) were done for the print magazines of the time.
Like The Comics Journal, Amazing Heroes or Marvel Age. (Ahem.)
So back in 2016 (my god, time flies) I ran The Comics Journal through OCR and used that. But then I started writing about comics that weren’t much covered by the Comics Journal, so I bought and scanned the entire run of Amazing Heroes.
And then I thought, “hang on, this is getting silly. If I’m doing all this work, surely I should make it public so that other people can use it, too?”. But therein lies a problem: I don’t have the rights to anything, really, so I thought I’d ask the rights holders first, and… *crickets*. Not that I’m complaining — people are busy.
So I thought that an OK compromise might be that magazines, like The Comics Journal, that are still available, I’d only allow reading five pages per search. (Which is how it works — try it here: You get five pages and if you try to see more, it shouts at you “GO BUY IT ALREADY.)
And… so I sat on the thing for a few more years, until I made it public in 2022, containing just The Comics Journal and Amazing Heroes.
And then I started wondering whether collections of other scanned magazines about comics might be available… from various “copyright liberation sites”, and torrents, and The Internet Archive, etc. And there were!
Long story short, there’s now more than 80 titles in the search index, and more than four thousand issues:
I’ve not kept that five page limit on these other magazines, but I’ve avoided adding magazines that are available commercially. If somebody who owns the rights to magazines like this would like to have them added to the index, I can do that, and I can do that with a five page limit (per search) or not — it’s up to the rights holder.
Again: It’s a site geared towards doing research, not towards reading magazines in full. That’s why there’s no way to specifically select issues: You have to search first to find an issue.
Anyway, I hope that it’s useful, and if you know of magazines that should be added (excepting those that are commercially available), or you have magazines that you’ve scanned: Please do get in touch, and I’ll do the grunt work to add them.