After World War II, Jack Kirby and his partner Joe Simon began their first foray into the genre of crime comics. (Kirby would return to the topic briefly in 1954 and 1971.) Beginning in 1947 and tailing into 1951, the stories appeared largely in Headline Comics and Justice Traps the Guilty for Crestwood’s Prize Publications. In 2011, Titan Books published a selection of these stories in hardcover, but sixty percent of the stories from this time period aren’t included in the book, and at least 20 stories have never been reprinted. Unlike Simon & Kirby’s much more prolific romance offerings, all of the comics in question are in the public domain and available on Digital Comic Museum and Comic Book Plus sites, thanks to multiple volunteers. I set about creating my own collection of scanned pages.
When the downloaded .cbz files are extracted into a folder, the resulting image files have names like scan00.jpg, scan01.jpg, etc. In GNOME Files, selecting all the files for a given issue and pressing F2 brings up the batch rename dialogue.
Selecting the Find and replace text option, I replace “scan” with the book title and issue number, with “p” as a separator for the page number.
When all the stories have been added, the pages will be sorted by title and issue number. To enable sorting chronologically, a four- or six-digit prefix can be used to specify the cover date, in this case “4706” for June 1947. To add this I press F2 on the same selected files and use the Rename using a template option.
Using the Jack Kirby Checklist as a guideline, and discarding (very few) stories for insufficient Kirby content, my project yielded a folder containing 633 pages including covers.
