Archiving The Witches Cycle

I recently learned about The Witches Cycle, a French manga by Tony Concrete, thanks to a post by the author on /r/xbiking. It has similar vibes to Kiki’s Delivery Service – one of my favorite Studio Ghibli films – with the addition of sweet bikes. I’m not completely hooked on the story yet, but the art is great.

Thus far the English translations have only been published on The Radavist. Their Javascript gallery viewer leaves something to be desired in this application. If the English translations are ever published as a book, I’ll buy it. In the meantime, the manga is easy to liberate.

A quick inspection of The Radavist’s pages for chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, and chapter 4 shows that the chapters consist of sequentially numbered JPGs (though they are not consistent in their naming scheme, for shame). I’m a big fan of downloading JPGs.

$ mkdir witches-chapter-0{1..4}
$ wget https://media.theradavist.com/uploads/2023/11/Witches-Cycle-{1..76}.jpg --directory-prefix witches-chapter-01/
$ wget https://media.theradavist.com/uploads/2024/02/2024_Witches_Cycle_Chapter_2-{1..30}.jpg --directory-prefix witches-chapter-02/
$ wget https://media.theradavist.com/uploads/2024/03/2024_Witches_Cycle_Chp3-{1..38}.jpg --directory-prefix witches-chapter-03/
$ wget https://media.theradavist.com/uploads/2024/06/chap4{05..49}.jpg --directory-prefix witches-chapter-04/

The previously mentioned Kindle Comic Converter is happy to operate on a directory of images.

$ for i in {01..04}; do kcc-c2e --profile KoL --upscale --cropping 2 --splitter 2 --author "Tony Concrete" --title "The Witches Cycle, Chapter $i" witches-chapter-$i/; done

This results in 3 well-formatted EPUB files I can archive in my Calibre library and read on my e-reader.