Comics in Translation

Federico Zanettin

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317639909
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

Comics are a pervasive art form and an intrinsic part of the cultural fabric of most countries. And yet, relatively little has been written on the translation of comics. Comics in Translation attempts to address this gap in the literature and to offer the first and most comprehensive account of various aspects of a diverse range of social practices subsumed under the label 'comics'.

Focusing on the role played by translation in shaping graphic narratives that appear in various formats, different contributors examine various aspects of this popular phenomenon. Topics covered include the impact of globalization and localization processes on the ways in which translated comics are embedded in cultures; the import of editorial and publishing practices; textual strategies adopted in translating comics, including the translation of culture- and language-specific features; and the interplay between visual and verbal messages. Comics in translation examines comics that originate in different cultures, belong to quite different genres, and are aimed at readers of different age groups and cultural backgrounds, from Disney comics to Art Spiegelman's Maus, from Katsuhiro ?tomo's Akira to Goscinny and Uderzo's Astérix. The contributions are based on first-hand research and exemplify a wide range of approaches. Languages covered include English, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, French, German, Japanese and Inuit.

The volume features illustrations from the works discussed and an extensive annotated bibliography.

Contributors include: Raffaella Baccolini, Nadine Celotti, Adele D'Arcangelo, Catherine Delesse, Elena Di Giovanni, Heike Elisabeth Jüngst, Valerio Rota, Carmen Valero-Garcés, Federico Zanettin and Jehan Zitawi.

1 Comics in Translation: An Overview

FEDERICO ZANETTIN

University of Perugia, Italy

This article provides an introduction to comics, the translation of comics and the contents of the volume. It begins by offering a brief historical overview of comics, highlighting those aspects which may be especially interesting from a translation perspective, and an overview of different types of comics translation, from an inter-and an intra-semiotic perspective. This is followed by a discussion of the specificity of comics as an art form (the ninth art) and as a means of communication, and of its bearing on translation. The article ends with an overview of the literature on comics in translation, and of the contributions to the present volume.

In a socio-historical perspective comics have a precise time and place of birth: the end of the nineteenth-century, in the USA. While in many respects comics are not different from other forms of ‘sequential art’ (Eisner 1985) such as prehistoric graffiti, carved Roman columns, painted glass windows of medieval churches, eighteenth-century prints, or twenty-first century Web pages, “the history of comics is closely related to the emergence of mass-media, due to new means of mass reproduction and an increasing readership of the printed media” (Mey 1998:136). More specifically, comics ‘as we know them’, began to appear in Sunday pull-out supplements in large print-run newspapers. This is in fact where the word comics itself originated: “Because of their exclusively humorous content, [the Sunday pull-out] supplements came to be known as ‘the Sunday funnies’, and thus in America the term ‘comics’ came to mean an integral part of a newspaper. […] Later the word would encompass the whole range of graphic narrative expressions, from newspaper strips to comic books” (Sabin 1993:5). The birth date of comics is usually made to coincide with that of Yellow Kid, a character created by Richard F. Outcalt whose strips first appeared on the pages of New York newspapers in 1894 (see Figure 1.1, centre fold); this was not only one of the first comics to be printed in full colour and to contain dialogues within balloons in the pictures, but most of all “the first to demonstrate that a comic strip character could be merchandised profitably” (Olson, n.d.: online).

Within a few years ‘the funnies’ were joined by daily strips in black and white, and since the Sunday pages and daily strips created by early masters of American comics such as Winsor McCay and George Harriman (see e.g. Carlin et al. 2005), the history of comics in the world has evolved within different cultural traditions, but often bearing the mark of translation.

American comics rapidly travelled across the world and merged with other traditions of ‘drawn stories’. The most famous European ‘proto-comics’ are perhaps those created by the Swiss teacher and painter Rodolphe Töpffer (1799-1846) (see Groensteen 1999, 2005a), who in 1837 published the first of a series of illustrated comedies in the form of booklets, and the German Wilhem Busch’s (1832-1908) Max und Moritz illustrated stories in verse, which were published in 1865 and which directly inspired the American comic strip Katzenjammer Kids. However, most if not all European countries had a tradition of printed visual art (see Martín 2000 on Spanish protocomics, Pilcher and Brooks 2005 and Sabin 1993 on British protocomics. Bona n.d. and Gadducci 2004 on Italian protocomics), and drawn stories started to appear consistently in print at the beginning of the twentieth century, published mostly in magazines for children.

In the US, comic strips were not exclusively directed at children. Newspapers included both series which were read by the whole family, usually in Sunday pull-out sections, and others which were specifically targeted at adults, usually daily strips. In contrast, European drawn stories were perceived exclusively as children’s literature and often produced for educational purposes rather than for entertainment. They were mostly meant to provide young readers with an introduction to the written world, and images were given a strictly subordinate role in the narration. Drawings were merely meant to illustrate written stories, as was seen fit in a conception of education which strongly underlined the primacy of the written word (Detti 1984). Accordingly, the register of the language used was that of written rather than spoken communication and, in contrast with American comics, at first (proto)comics in the rest of the world did not contain balloons, but only narrations written underneath the pictures.

Speech balloons began to appear only later in the twentieth century outside the United States, and can thus be considered a distinguishing feature of comics as an American form of visual narrative. In Japan balloons were first used in 1923 in the Adventures of Shōchan by Oda Shōsei and Kabashima Katsuichi (Orsi 1998:28); in France in 1925 in Zig et Puce by Alain Saint-Ogan (Fresnault-Deruelle 1990:30); in Italy from 1932, most notably in the translations of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse and in those of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon (Laura 1997).

In the 1930s the United States witnessed an explosion of comic strips, which also featured adventure themes drawn in a realistic style, and the rise of the comic book form: cheap publications in a format smaller than newspapers and containing usually 16 to 32 pages in colours. Comic books first appeared as collections of daily strips and then as periodical publications containing original materials, most notably the new superhero genre featuring costumed people with super powers, heralded by Joe Siegel and Simon Shuster’s Superman (1938). For most of this and the following decade, translated American comics constituted the lion’s share of comics published in European, South American and Asian countries, and spurred the growth of the art form, so that American conventions for comics gave a primary contribution to forging national comics traditions and industries.

The ‘Golden Age’ of American comics drew to a close in the 1950s when, after the highlights of the 1930s and 1940s, comic strips and books began to wane in quality if not in quantity. Comic book readers became less interested in the superheroes that had accompanied them during the war effort and turned their attention to comics dealing with crime, romance, exotic adventures featuring scantily dressed heroines, and horror. A moral campaign directed at protecting the population, and the youth in particular, against the bad influence of comics, as most notably depicted in the book Seduction of the Innocent by the American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham (1954), produced considerable social alarm (on horror comics and the anti-comics crusade see D’Arcangelo, this volume). Fearing and anticipating legislative measures, American publishers established their own ‘Comics Code Authority’, which enforced a very strict policy of self-censorship on contents. As a result, the flourishing production of comic books in the US was curbed; it began to regain ground only in the 1960s, though mostly restricted to syndicated humorous strips and superhero comic books targeting male adolescents.¹ Whereas rules and legislation controlling comics were similarly enforced elsewhere in the world in the 1950s,² the outcomes were different. Many European countries reacted to the diminishing stream of American comics with a surge in the publication of works by national authors. For instance, new national comic strips and books for children flanked those created under the Disney imprint, whose production moved almost entirely outside of the US, most notably to Italy and the Nordic countries.³ European comic books and magazines contained not only the translations of American comics, but also stories by native authors which partly continued American adventure themes and genres and partly introduced new ones. In France, Belgium and Italy, which were perhaps the European countries where comics reached the widest readership as well as cultural recognition, comic books and magazines contained stories whose content and treatment of themes were not confined to child or adolescent imagery. In Italy in the 1960s, for instance, pocketbooks whose contents were crime, horror and explicit pornography became popular publications, joining classical adventure comic books, especially of the Western genre, on news-stands. Original comics, especially those in French, were also translated into other European languages, rivalling American ones.

The 1960s and 1970s witnessed also the establishment of a new type of comics addressed to educated adults rather than to a popular readership. This new type, most notably by Franco-Belgian, Italian and Argentinian authors, were usually first serialized in comic magazines and then collected in books. Such publications were characterized by a more pronounced authorial stance and the lack of periodicity, i.e. they were often complete stories rather than regular series, and the accent was on individual creators rather than standardized characters and plots. In the United States, underground comics (or commix) re-introduced adult contents (sex, drugs and politics being the main subject matters) in the late 1960s and 1970s, but comics fully resurfaced as a product for literate adults only In the 1980s. Since then, American mainstream publishers (DC and Marvel comics), together with a growing number of ‘independent’ publishers, began to produce new lines of ‘graphic novels’, a term adopted to create a new public image for comics and to signal that they had achieved ‘grown-up status’.⁴

Meanwhile, in Japan the comics industry had been growing exponentially since the period following World War II into the single largest comics industry in the world. Today the business volume of comics in Japan is 50 times as big as that of the United States (the second largest) and takes up about 40% of all the printed material published in the country – as opposed to approximately 3% in the US (Pilcher and Brooks 2005:90). While the influence of translated American comics was clearly felt in the earliest period, Japanese comics, or manga, have developed into their own variety, which comprises a vast range of diverse genres targeted at specialized readerships. Japanese comics currently fall into five main categories, shonen (‘boys’), shojo (‘girls’) redisu or redikomi (‘ladies’), seijin (‘adult erotica’) and seinen (‘young men’), subdivided into a myriad of sub-genres and covering just about every subject matter, from cooking to parenting for young hip mums, from table and computer games to business and sports, from religion to martial arts (Pilcher and Brooks 2005:93). Japanese comics have been translated in Asian countries since the 1960s, but remained practically unknown in the West until the 1980s. From the 1990s on they inundated Western markets. Currently manga represent around 50% of all comics published in translation in Western countries (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Credits
• Part I: General Aspects
• Part II: Case Studies
• Notes on Contributors
• Index