Monday 17 January 2005

Fame and Fortune are Mine!

Well, okay, at least fleeting fame...



Yes, tis I who managed to upload the 75,000th cover to the Grand Comic Book Database over the weekend. The cover in question was The Agents #6; not the most exciting cover in the world, but you take your fame where you can get it.



I've actually only been uploading covers to GCD for a couple of weeks. Near the end of the holiday break I hauled my old (8+ years) scanner out of the closet and set to work getting it running. It's a SCSI scanner, so I had to take a SCSI card out of my old Mac and put it in the new one, find all the proper cables, and it worked! The more difficult part was getting driver software, as the manufacturer (UMAX) no longer supports this model on the Mac. I tried a couple of free, open source solutions but nothing worked terribly well, and I wasn't willing to put in the time it would take to figure out how to get things working. So I ended up paying a chunk of money for a thrid-party scanning solution which has way more features than I need and is a bit pricy, but worked on the first go and cost less than getting a whole new scanner.



So after a period of trial and error I've finally got it down to a system for getting decent scans of covers. I've been going through my boxes of recent comics (and by recent I mean within in the past 5 years), filling in holes in the GCD cover galleries. I contributed about 500 covers so far--here are a few of the more interesting ones:



Amelia Rules #3

Aquaman #8

Blue Monday: Absolute Beginners #3

The Books of Magick #3

Box Office Poison #20

Buffy, the Vampire Slayer: Spike & Dru #3

Eightball #21

Ex Machina #3

Fallen Angel #4

Galaxion #11

Girl Genius #8

Hawkman #21

Iron Man #59

JSA: All-Stars #4

Kabuki Agents: Scarab #3

Legion Lost #4

Liberty Meadows #7

Palooka-Ville #14

Patty Cake & Friends #2

Strangers in Paradise #44

Starman #73

Superman Adventures #58

Superman: The Man of Steel #112



More to come, I'm sure!

2004 Reading Lists

Yes, I keep track of everything I read. Isn't that sad?



Here then are all of the prose and graphic novels I read in 2004:



Books Read, Winter 2004

Books Read, Summer 2004

Books Read, Fall 2004



Graphic Novels Read, Winter 2004 (part 1)

Graphic Novels Read, Winter 2004 (part 2)

Graphic Novels Read, Winter 2004 (part 3)

Graphic Novels Read, Winter 2004 (part 4)



Graphic Novels Read, Summer 2004 (part 1)

Graphic Novels Read, Summer 2004 (part 2)

Graphic Novels Read, Summer 2004 (part 3)

Graphic Novels Read, Summer 2004 (part 4)



Graphic Novels Read, Fall 2004 (part 1)

Graphic Novels Read, Fall 2004 (part 2)

Graphic Novels Read, Fall 2004 (part 3)

Graphic Novels Read, Fall 2004 (part 4)

Graphic Novels Read, Fall 2004 (part 5)





The best book I read in all of 2004 was probably The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon, which turns the detective novel on its ear and uses the structure of a mystery novel to explore life with autism.