The Hots return – and need your help

Remember this comic strip Stephen Hersh and I did for King Features Syndicate in 2002 – 2003?sunhannahwrongcolorsm.jpg

Well, we’re releasing ALL of them to EVERYONE under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license!

But this project needs your help. I’ve assembled all the strips I could find and put them in two giant zipped folders (one for B&W dailies, one for color Sundays), which I uploaded here on archive.org. But someone – anyone – now needs to convert the TIFF files to PNG and upload them one at a time to Wikimedia Commons, where they can be read, shared, and enjoyed by everyone.

Feel free to come up with a better file naming protocol than the examples here. In order to convert the Sunday color files to PNG, they must first be mode-changed from CMYK to RGB.

dishrack640.png

The Black-and-white files should be converted from bitmap to greyscale before saving as PNG and uploading. We also need descriptions and welcome any other relevant data anyone wants to add.

UPDATE: Holly Duthie has done all the color mode and file conversions!  The new PNG files are here:

http://www.archive.org/details/HotsDailies.GS.PNGs.zip (dailies)
http://www.archive.org/details/HotsSundays.GS.PNGs.zip (Sundays in B&W)
http://www.archive.org/details/HotsSundays.RGB.PNGs.zip (Sundays in full color)

Thanks Holly!

Now we just need others to download the PNGs from archive.org, and upload them one at a time to wikimedia.org, with any relevant data.

Thank you for sharing!

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15 thoughts on “The Hots return – and need your help”

  1. I’m on it… let me just have some coffee and learn how to upload to Wikimedia.

  2. I’ll do it all for you if you mail me a packet of methamphetamine.

  3. There might be a way to upload all of these thru a script (write a script that uploads the png file and fills in the description/author/etc. automaticly then moves to the next file). Couple of things I see…

    Not all of the file names end in .png so that will need to be done. The descriptions are all non-sequencial (like TheHots0001.png, TheHots0002.png, etc.) but that’s not that big of a deal.

    Don’t let me stop anyone from uploading any of these (I wouldn’t want someone to be waiting on me for results) but let me see what I can come up with in getting these uploaded. I’ll do updates as to what I come up with here…

  4. would love to help – but there is no easy way to know what someone has uploaded already and hasn’t…

    You’ll need to provide some way for people to know this.

  5. Good point michael. If I’d named the original files consistently back in 2002/2003, that would have helped. But I didn’t. Indeed, cataloging these things is a mess, which is why I just threw everything out there.

  6. We can probably strip all the names off and rename the files TheHotsDailys0001.png but I don’t know what order the files should be in.

    Also, I’m not a web guy so trying to decipher the Wikimedia form to upload a file is proving to be a challenge.

  7. I saved these strips when they first ran and named the files- The Hots yyyy/mm/dd. If it would help I’d be happy to provide a copy of my archive.

  8. Nina, any chance of being able to come up with a list of which comics were published when?

  9. That’s what I was hoping the Crowd could figure out.

    Although we do have the same set of Hots strips from King Features’ digital archive, which have publication dates. Someone could match up my versions (which are slightly better in that none of the art is obscured by the “Dist. by King Features Syndicate Inc.” ) with King’s dated versions. But it will require looking at each and every strip. It’s a big project.

    Should I upload those for reference?

  10. I think you should.

    I apologize for not putting the .png on each one; I thought Photoshop would do that automagically but I was wrong. I do think it’d be easier for whoever works on those files to just fix it than for me to do it and re-upload the whole shebang, anyway.

    I wonder if it would make sense to break the three big files into smaller files so more people could work at once? Then we could “sign them out” here in this thread to avoid duplicating effort.

    But if someone is working on a way to automate the whole process, this step would be (happily) obviated!

  12. OK, I’ve fixed the missing .png problem. I just need to download the B&W and color Sundays to fix them and know where to upload them up back up to. We want to be careful of version control (and have some people working off of one set of files and another with a different set).

    Next is the file renaming. Did someone come up with a list of file names and associated dates?

  13. It looks like all of the color Sundays are fine. I’ve got the dailys and the B&W Sundays all fixed with a .png extension.

  14. Hi Nina!

    Do you still have that archive of King’s dated versions? (Doesn’t look like Olz ever did respond.) If you do, I know I’m over a decade late to the party, but I’d like to work on organizing these by their original run date!

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