comic.py example no longer working

[jonback]

due to comic vine no longer allowing image downloads this way (hosted behind Cloudflare)

[helgibbons]

I've poked at this a bit and managed to get some requests through by supplying more browser like headers, though I suspect that might not be a permanent solution :(

Looks like it's in early stages still, but I wonder if using this alternate comic book API instead might be the way to go?

https://metron.cloud/

They also have a handy Python wrapper:

https://github.com/Metron-Project/mokkari

[WayneStallwood]

One problem is that as the URL returned clearly works in my browser (from the same origin IP address), I noticed that the requests call in display_image_on_inky didn't include any headers, but even changing this to response = requests.get(image_url, headers=HEADERS) didn't work for me, even when I replicated the user agent header to the same as my browser.

What other headers did you add to get this working sometimes?, it seems that final call to get the image doesn't require API auth, but is also fussier about the headers included.

Interestingly even on my local machine, I can get an image URL like https://comicvine.gamespot.com/a/uploads/original/0/3125/2398078-bat2.jpg

But on the same machine wget will fail

wget https://comicvine.gamespot.com/a/uploads/original/0/3125/2398078-bat2.jpg --2025-11-26 13:11:31-- https://comicvine.gamespot.com/a/uploads/original/0/3125/2398078-bat2.jpg Resolving comicvine.gamespot.com (comicvine.gamespot.com)... 104.18.20.131, 104.18.21.131, 2606:4700::6812:1583, ... Connecting to comicvine.gamespot.com (comicvine.gamespot.com)|104.18.20.131|:443... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden 2025-11-26 13:11:31 ERROR 403: Forbidden.

[WayneStallwood]

Gave up with comicvine and me and claude wrote a slightly hacky alternative for comic.py that uses metron as you suggested @helgibbons

https://github.com/WayneStallwood/inky-comics

[WayneStallwood]

Pinoroni you are welcome to use my version (it'll need a good tidy up first as I threw it together because I was fed up with my display being stuck on the same comic for a month) I've put it on a MIT license but it's so untidy I haven't done a PR yet

Note the search on metron seems pretty slow, but reliable so far and eventually returns results.

[helgibbons]

Thanks very much for sharing this @WayneStallwood - it's been a frantic couple of weeks with Black Friday sales and whatnot.

Here's the most recent iteration of my Comic Vine code - it seems to be working and updating my display every 45 mins though, if I run it multiple times close together the image download still gets blocked.

I think switching to an alternate API might be better in the long term, so if you do get the chance to tidy up and PR your example then that would be gratefully received :)

[WayneStallwood]

@helgibbons PR here #251

Needs test approval but should be fine, I've left the (renamed) original there so people have a choice to use the original Comic Vine one or the Metron one and updated the requirements-examples.txt for the dependancy I've added.

[WayneStallwood]

Also it might be my imagination, but Metron seems to have better images, my Inky has never looked so good :D