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Library > Old News (2007) |
Back in London for some of the holidays as I am, I bought four new comic books last week and was given one on Christmas day; The ACME Novelty Library 18, Chronicles of Wormwood: The Last Enemy, Kabuki Vol. 7 No. 9, 100 Bullets: Once Upon A Crime and The Manga Bible - New Testament.
I also worked out what was going on with the far-too-dark covers for the last four comic books I bought; Photoshop had "Convert to sRGB" checked in its "Save For Web..." window. Unchecking said option has sorted the colours right out.
Visited London this weekend just gone and bought; Empowered Volume 2, Iron Man: Hypervelocity and The Walking Dead, Volume 7: The Calm Before. Am sick as a dog.
Just the one new comic book since getting back to England; Iron Man: Hypervelocity No. 6. Adam Warren ends the series with his trademark poignant-tale/high-contrast-art combo, making me wish for a sequel I know will not come.
Also, I'm back at university. No internet connection in my house just yet, will get one eventually. The studying starts soon.
826 comic book covers (plus 45 "extra" ones), all straightened and cropped, and five weeks early into the bargain! Once I got started it was very easy to process 20+ a day, rather than the twelve I had originally planned on, hence the accelerated pace. In the end, the average file sizes are ~295KB for the large covers and ~29KB for the small ones.
Anyway, the final batch of honkin' huge covers was for; Lady Death II: Between Heaven and Hell #3, Lazarus Churchyard: The Final Cut, The Legend of Mother Sarah: City of the Children #1 and #2, all the rest of Lenore, Loop, all of Maison Ikkoku, The Malice Family, Manga Monthly Vol. 1, No. 2, Manga Vizion Vol. 2, No. 11 and No. 12, Mangazine Volume 2, #30 and #31, The Mechanic, all of Mek, Memories: The Collection, Menz Insana, Mermaid Forest, Part One and Two, Mermaid's Gaze, Part Two, The Micronauts Vol. 1, No. 37, Mr. Tickle, Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind Part 2, Book Three of Four, The Complete New Statesmen, all of Nightmares & Fairy Tales, The Nine Rings of Wu-Tang #0, Number Issue Two, all of Oh My Goddess!, Old Master Q 61, Orion, Outlanders Epilogue, Outlaw Nation Preview, Painkiller Jane / Darkchylde Preview Book, all of Plastic Forks, Poe Volume One, all of Preacher, Project A-KO 2 #2, Promise, all of Ranma 1/2, Razor: Burn #5, all of Red, The Return of Lum * Urusei Yatsura Part One, No. 6 and Part Three, No. 2, all the rest of Rising Stars, Sanctuary Part Two, No. 7, The Sandman: The Dream Hunters, The Savage Dragon #6, Manga! Shi 2000 #2 and #3, Ship of Fools: Death and Taxes, Sidekicks: The Transfer Student, Treehouse Of Horror #7, all of Sin City, Slab III, all of Slow News Day, Something At The Window Is Scratching, Species, Squee's Wonderful Big Giant Book of Unspeakable Horrors, all of Strange Kiss and Stranger Kisses, SuperPatriot #1, all of They Were 11, 3x3 Eyes Vol. I: House of Demons, 3 Very Small Comics, Trigun #1, Union #1, V for Vendetta, all of Wigu, WildStorm! #1, Wonder Woman: Lifelines, Zeet and Zero Girl.
Now that is all finally finished (just over two years is okay) I suppose the next logical step for this place, other than finally turning it into a real-live-database, would be to write comments for every comic book, like I intended back when I started work on it in 1998. The tricky thing with that would be all my comic books living in London whlst I am either in Germany or at university... I shall see what I can do when I'm back in September.
Straight and true covers for; all the rest of DV8, The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist and The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist #3, Everything Can Be Beaten, The Fall, Fathom Swimsuit Special Vol. 1 Issue 1, The Filth, Flight Volume One and Two, all of Freak Force, From Hell, Gambit and the X-Ternals Vol. 1, No. 4, Geisha and Geisha one-shot, Gen12 #2, #3 and #4, all the rest of Gen13 Bootleg, Ghost Rider Vol. 2, No. 25, all of Global Frequency, Glory Vol. 1 No. 3, Gon, Green Lantern: Ganthet's Tale and Green Lantern Annual 3, all of Gunsmith Cats, Hansel & Gretel, Hell Baby, all of Hellblazer, I Feel Sick #1 and #2, Impulse 14, Iron Man: Extremis No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Johnny The Homicidal Maniac: The Director's Cut, Justice League: A Midsummer's Nightmare and all the rest of Kabuki. 657/169.
Hoo-hah! I have got the search engine over at my comic book library to sort its results alphabetically. I've been looking for a way to do this, on and off, since I started using it, but had not had much luck until now, it seeming to be a feature no-one has ever seen fit to document.
However, today I decided to upgrade to the latest version and in looking through its code, that I might apply my own personal modifications, I came across a buried sort function that is not called by any of the parameters you are told to include in your search form.
All that's needed is a variable named "sort" with the value "title". This results in the comic books being listed alphabetically by title rather than according to some random "weighting" algorithm. However, it is rather a simple sort, placing books beginning with "The" in amongst the Ts and ordering numbers as 1, 10, 11, 12, 2, 20, 3, 4, 5 etc.
Simply instructing the aforementioned sort function (on line 454 of the search.pl file) to use the "docs_db" database instead of the "titles_db" one means that it sorts by filenames instead, which I purposefully structured two years ago that they would be pretty darn close to both alphabetical and chronological.
Also, I added four lines of Perl that let the results page use the singular term instead of the plural if only one matching comic book is found. Studying for a Computer Science degree has taught me things!
Huge big covers for; all of Batman, Battle Angel Alita, Blade of the Immortal #5 and #6, Bone: One Volume Edition, Brigade Vol. 1, No. 0, Brooklyn Dreams Volume 2 and Brooklyn Dreams, Burn Up! #1, Captain Marvel #0, Caravan Kidd Part 2, Issue 6 and Caravan Kidd Holiday Special, Cinderella, Clerks. (The Comic Books), Codename: Stryke Force Vol. 1, #5, D'Adventures of I.S.R.A.E.L.I.: Consequences, all the rest of Danger Girl, Daredevil Vol. 8: Echo - Vision Quest, all of Dark, Domu: The Dreams of Children, Doom's IV Vol. 1, No. 3, Dream Big Dreams, Dumped, DV8 #0, #1, #2 and #3, and all of Fillerbunny as well.
I've also given up on using 800x1220 as the base for all the covers other than those "extra" ones as it means having to decide on suitable dimensions for all comics larger / smaller than the standard 6 ⅝" x 10 ¼" (16.83cm x 26.04cm). All covers are now simply scaled from their scanned-in-300ppi to an online-reasonable-120ppi.
So, a fair amount of image processing this week but I shall limit myself to uploading new covers on Fridays from now on, rather than every other day.
469/357
The last of the new scans for those comic books with "extra" covers; Gen12 #1 and #5, all of Heavy Liquid, Iczer 3 #1, Kabuki Gallery Vol. 1 #1, Lady Death in Lingerie #1, Rising Stars Vol. 1, Issue 0, Sei: Death & Legend, Vol. 1 #1 and all of THB. 425/401.
Nice huge scans, including alternate/extended covers, for Bunny Town no. 2, The CFD Book of Lingerie, all of City of Silence, Danger Girl #7 and DV8 Rave #1. Resampled all such "extra" covers to a fixed 800x1220 so as to avoid any possible misalignment. 410/416.
I've finished straightening the remaining large online covers that needed it, and have resampled them all to glorious ~800x1220 pixels. As each image now averages ~300KB, this necessitated the reintroduction of thumbnail versions of each cover for use on the actual data pages themselves; else load-time would be something fierce for those on slow connections, not to mention dial-up. Said thumbnails are a much more manageable ~200x305 pixels, weighing in at just ~30KB on average.
Now all that is left to do is straighten and crop the 423 covers I scanned last summer and which are not yet online in any large kind of form...
403/423
A couple of new-ish pictures on the splash page; a moustachioed one of myself for the journal and the end of Gen13 for this here comic book library. (If you like the look of Adam Warren's artwork, buy his new book and pre-order the second!)
Also, at long last, I have finally started the post-processing of the covers that still need rotatey-crop fixing; all set to finish on Thursday 6th September 2007! Once they are done I also plan to increase the dimensions of all the covers from the current 480x740 to something approaching 750x1150. Means they shall appear at 1:1 ratio on my MacBook! And almost certainly somewhat larger on most other people's displays...
289/114/423
Before I run off to Germany for the next three months, here are the data pages for six new comic books I bought on Thursday; Girls: Extinction, Iron Man: Hypervelocity No. 4 and No. 5, Shaolin Cowboy Issue #7, The Walking Dead, Volume 6: This Sorrowful Life and Y: The Last Man: Motherland. 241/162/423.
As I probably shan't be updating this website until late September / early October, if you want to read more current words by myself, I write at least a few times a month in my Journal.
Not living in London means for months between new comic books... Oh well, now that I am in Germany, I write pages for seven new books I bought a few days ago; Empowered Volume 1 (the new book by Adam Warren, yay!), Ex Machina: Smoke Smoke (very well done, but I hope it starts going somewhere soon...), Iron Man: Hypervelocity No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 (Adam Warren writes so good, over pretty sleek artwork), Kabuki Vol. 7 No. 8 (it will hopefully seem more coherent when I re-read it all...) and Watchmen (read it years ago, but didn't buy until it was £7.50, ho ho ho). 235/162/423.
Large straight covers for all three issues of Ministry of Space. 228/162/423.
Five new comic books, finally completing the replacement of the floppies I sold back in April of last year; Planetary: The Fourth Man, Transmetropolitan: Lonely City, Transmetropolitan: Dirge, Transmetropolitan: One More Time and Y: The Last Man: Unmanned. 225/162/426.
I also finished up a bunch of work on the website:
And now that is all done, perhaps I will do some revision for my coming exams...
One comic book for the new year, 100 Bullets: Decayed. 220/162/426.
