On reviewing graphic novels in PDF review-copies

08 Saturday Sep 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Unnamable

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I’m pleased to say I’ve been sent a low-res PDF of the new Lovecraft graphic novel He Who Wrote in the Darkness, for review, and am currently half-way through savouring it.

When faced with a low-res PDF many reviewers might have preferred to have been sent a proper Kindle app store review-copy. Because that would have opened with the Amazon app — an app which offers a panel-by-panel ‘guided’ view of comics when reading. For the benefit of other reviewers of graphic novels who want such a ‘guided’ view, here’s what you do when you get an awkward layered PDF (i.e.: where the text is on a separate layer that sits above the art).

1. On your Kindle tablet, add a side-load install of the wholly free Comic Time Reader app as a downloaded .APK file. It does ‘panel detection’ (aka frame-by-frame viewing, aka ‘guided view’), just like Comixology and the Amazon Kindle Viewer do for purchased comics. Given this vital feature, seemingly unique among free apps not tightly tethered to a payments ecosystem, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Comic Time Reader is not present on the Amazon App Store where it would impinge on Amazon’s business model. But it works fine on the 2017 Kindle Fire HD 10″ tablet. The only problem is that the app can’t load PDFs.

2. Then convert your .PDF to .CBR with the Windows desktop freeware Comic Book Archive Creator, at maximum image quality and with .JPG output. Unlike its only free rival Comic Rack, Comic Book Archive Creator can correctly handle a PDF with layered text when converting. Also it appears to save pages at 600dpi, which means that ‘the jaggies’ are minimal on the flattened lettering, balloons and captions. Its only problem is that it works v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y and can be a bit of a system hog while it’s working.

3. If you left Comic Book Archive Creator on its default output type, rename its resulting .ZIP file to .CBR format. .CBR is just a bunch of numbered .JPG page-scans inside a re-named .RAR or .ZIP file, so it’s a very flexible format. Now send it over to your Kindle. You’re then ready to read your graphic novel in a ‘guided’ frame-by-frame manner in the excellent free Comic Time Reader. If Comic Time Reader occasionally has trouble detecting a frame edge in a complex layout, you just press and hold in one corner of the frame, then drag your finger to the opposite corner. That tells the app where the frame is.

If you end up with a ridiculously large 600Mb-to-multiGb comic, because the source input was actually high-quality at around 6800-pixels per page and/or a very long graphic novel, then do the following:

1. Simply unzip the page-images to a folder
2. Open the folder with Irfanview, shift-select all images and press “B” to run a batch reduction on them.
3. In the Batch window. selected Advanced and then set a pixel size, say 2400px on one side. Ensure you are setting your output directory to be different than the input directory.
4. Then re-zip the series of images output from Irfanview and re-name into a .CBR or .CBZ file.

Irfanview’s batch has the advantage over Photoshop here, in that it knows how to re-size the pixel dimensions of an image without needing to know the dimensions on both sides. It’s also much faster than Photoshop.

Accessing Mythlore

08 Saturday Sep 2018

Posted by in Scholarly works

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Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature has a two-issue rolling wall, meaning that you can’t download the full-text for the last couple of issues. But, as time goes by, the articles gradually become free and public. You can bypass this by accessing Mythlore at the Free Online Library, where the latest couple of issues are available and public.

This means that while their new article “”Love of Knowledge is a Kind of Madness”: Competing Platonisms in the Universes of C.S. Lewis and H.P. Lovecraft” appears to be locked down until April 2019, it’s actually free here. The same issue also has “”Letting Sleeping Abnormalities Lie”: Lovecraft and the Futility of Divination”, and again it’s free here.

“It must be true, I read it in the Bible…”

08 Saturday Sep 2018

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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Up for auction at Heritage Auctions, A Lovecraft family Bible, (apparently) owned by Lovecraft’s mother early in her marriage. This popped up in the news circa 2014, and there was some scepticism. It’s now up for auction with five days to go. Claimed to have been a wedding gift to Lovecraft’s mother, and with an apparent marriage certificate and a couple of other items in it.

Friday “picture postals” from Lovecraft: Benefit St. with ice-cream cart

07 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by in Picture postals

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Benefit St., Providence, with what appears to be a roving ice-cream pedlar and his cart.

Appears to be a view north along Benefit Street, from the point where Angell Street comes down the hill (from the right of the picture) and ends, and then drops down the hill as Thomas Street (the downward opening of which is seen on the left of the picture). See part of the name “Angell St.” written above the lamp-glass…

There’s a glass plate of the scene, at what appears to be an earlier point in time (1890s?)…

New graphic novel of HPL’s New York years – now shipping on Kindle

07 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

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I see that the new graphic novel of H.P. Lovecraft’s life is available now for the Kindle, titled He Who Wrote in the Darkness. The book is by Alex Nikolavitch and Gervasio-Aon-Lee, and is due in hardback 2nd October 2018 from Pegasus Books. $26 / £19 for 112 pages.

However, Amazon UK has a Kindle edition which is available right now. Nice to see a book get its Kindle edition first, although sadly the price is hardly lower than the hardback. I’ve asked the publisher if it’s possible to send my Kindle HD 10″ a digital review-copy.

“He Who Wrote in the Darkness” opens with a partial but factual recounting of Lovecraft’s New York City period. The reader also sees scenes from his earlier life and the stories, deftly woven into the pages at the points in time when Lovecraft dreams them up or remembers them. The art is simple but clear, and the faces are expressive in the samples. The toony style reminds me a little of the Dreamlands / Kadath comics adaptations which were nicely done in the 1990s by Jason Thompson and published in full in 2012. It looks very promising.

Incidentally, what is the short name for a comic book bio-pic? For movies it’s obviously bio-pic, for graphic novels… not sure. ‘Biography’ seems too grand for many rather slight and under-researched graphic novels, though some (such as the recent chunky Alan Turing one, The Imitation Game) do deserve the term. ‘Bio-comic’ is too clunky and also dismissive sounding. ‘Graphic novel biography’ is both clunky and too ponderous. ‘Life story’ is not going to cover all biographies, which may only cover part of the life. Comixology hasn’t cracked it, putting The Imitation Game under ‘biography’ and ‘historical’. Combining biography and comic as ‘biomic’ sounds like the name of a Saturday Morning Animation’s kid-robot. So I guess we’re stuck with ‘biography’.

Wormwoodiana interview on ‘Weird Fiction in Britain 1880-1939’

06 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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The Wormwoodiana blog has just posted a new long interview with James Machin, about his new book Weird Fiction in Britain 1880-1939. It’s the same book I had a quick look at yesterday. I must say that Machin makes the book sound much more interesting than the promo blurb and dry chapter-abstracts from the publisher…

The one thing I really lit on is the foundational and persistent influence of literary Decadence … Brian Stableford remarked somewhere that the Decadence of the 1890s never really died, it just moved to the U.S. with Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, etc. This observation really struck me, and in a way the entire book is more or less built on Stableford’s insight here.

… genre snobbery is of course still very much with us: I’m amazed at the contamination anxiety, and the pains some prominent contemporary writers will take to insist that their science fiction or fantasy novels aren’t science fiction or fantasy novels. They endlessly tie themselves up in knots, desperate to avoid the stigma of genre.

Yes, a recent Lovecraft Geek podcast had a question about why Asimov apparently disdained Lovecraft. Robert Price didn’t suggest what I think was the underlying reason — I suspect it was mostly a fear of genre contamination. Asimov had seen horror invading science-fiction in the cheap 1950s drive-in movies, and he and his fellows such as Arthur C. Clarke didn’t want the same thing to happen in the literary ideas-led world of science fiction as well. Thus, Lovecraft had to be kept out of the pantheon.

“The Human Fear of Total Knowledge”

06 Thursday Sep 2018

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“The Human Fear of Total Knowledge”, an excellent long article in The Atlantic for June 2016, which surveys the idea of “infinite libraries” in science fiction and fantasy.

Be warned that the article casually slips in a huge spoiler for two of the most outstanding episodes of the classic David Tennant years in Doctor Who, “Silence in the Library” / “Forest of the Dead”. These run a story back-to-back across the two episodes, and are well worth watching as your first-ever Doctor Who episodes.

The Whole Wide World on Blu-ray

06 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by in Censorship, Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts

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The Whole Wide World is set for release as a Blu-ray disc on 18th September.

“When a feisty teacher falls for an eccentric pulp writer [Robert. E. Howard], the two begin a tumultuous affair and find they have nothing in common but their passion.”

Currently only listing on Amazon USA, but the page there notes that “This item ships to the United Kingdom”.

For those expecting a depressive gloomy angst-fest about small-town small-mindedness, frontier violence and family illness, ending in tragic suicide… it’s a brighter movie than you might expect.

I read that the 106-minute DVD edition had vital scenes cut. In one Howard discusses his views on racial memory, and in another part Lovecraft is talked about. I hadn’t known about those scenes. It seems that many had seen these scenes in the big-screen version that screened at Sundance and in its cinema run, felt they were integral to the movie, and had expected to see them on the DVD. One hopes that it wasn’t the DVD distributor who demanded they be cut, to forestall a leftist twitterstorm about race. Back in 2012 Bobbie Derie’s blog commented that…

There are certain aspects of the film that make little sense without them [the deleted scenes]

The deleted scenes had been uploaded to YouTube in 2012, and were apparently available until 2015, but have now vanished from the Web. Nor does there appear to be a full script available online.

So we might hope that the Blu-ray has the five or six minutes of deleted scenes on it, which were not on the DVD.

However, I can nowhere find details of Blu-ray having any extras at all. None are mentioned by Multicom in its survey of its summer 2018 releases. It looks to me like it’s just a bare-bones Blu-ray, with the 106-minute cut-down movie shown in a higher resolution than it was on the DVD.

Lost Providence

06 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by in New books

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David Brussat’s Lost Providence, August 2017. A deep and well-researched book on the tragic destruction of “buildings of architectural merit” in Providence, and their replacement with various types of hideous concrete carbuncle. H. P. Lovecraft pops up in the story here and there, as an early pioneer of preservation in the city.