Tintin Forums

I'm continually astonished with how little work gets translated into English, especially given how popular comics and manga are in general. I'd love to understand the economics of it better, because I find it hard to understand why this is the case.

I live in Brussels and walking into a comic shop, and not being able to speak French (yet, nor anytime soon), really brings me to tears.

To use a concrete example, every Valerian album has been translated into Finnish - a language spoken by about 5 million people.
Yet close to a _BILLION_ people on the planet speak English.
How can it be that the Finnish publishers (and polish, swedish, danish, etc) can turn a profit even with a small print run of a few thousand copies and yet it seems every company that does it to English ends up either bankrupt or giving up.
I'd love to start a publishing house and just do it as cheap as possible, low-quality paper etc, so at least the stuff would _exist_, and maybe help build demand.

I wish Cinebook continued success, and will surely do my part to contribute to their coffers - I only wish they'd expand the mature line, and get rid of the silly censorship.

I was also happy to notice Marvel translating quite a few European comics. Hopefully they keep it up.

And so this post isn't entirely one big derail (sorry), I'll add Frezzato to this list, his Maser series has been published in nice big hardcover copies and the art is fantastic. Not so enthusiastic about the stories themselves, but I'm not complaining.

Are comics and manga really popular in general in the English speaking world? Surely sales are massively down on the peak years of the 50s-70s (for the UK at least). Most book shops I go in to have almost no comic-related material at all, aside from (maybe) a random batch of Marvel/DC books and, of course, Tintin and Asterix.

It's certainly true that comics/manga have a high profile in the male-dominated sci-fi/collector world, and as source material for Hollywood and TV (if one reads any American site that focuses on the output of Marvel+DC you'll soon come to realise that crossing over in to Hollywood seems as important as the source material. There's a desperate need for validation) but I don't think the art form has a massive impact on 'the real world', at least no more than, say, poetry. And, like poetry, it takes a brave and committed publisher to dip their toes in the water - especially for European work.

Having said that, has there ever been a time that more work has been brought in to English? Cinebook alone must've doubled the amount of translated titles published over the last 50 years. First:Second do excellent work, and Fantagraphics have always tried new ways of bringing us stuff. Paul Gravett's recent relaunch of Escape is hopefully another example of this.

Talking of Fantagraphics, I hear Kim Thompson (co-owner I think) says that the Tardi books have done much better than expected and that they'll be doing Adele Blanc-Sec later this year.

I've glanced at a few of the Marvel books but they're less ambitious than the Moebius/Epic stuff from over 20 years ago and seem to be aimed squarely at the super-hero/sci-fi market. I've got hundreds of translated albums but I've skipped these entirely.

Of course none of this even approaches the volume one gets in continental Europe; Belgium in particular. But given that the economics and market have never seemed quite right I don't think things are too bad.

George

Does that possibly not say more about the Finnish comic scene than the English-speaking one? Could it not just indicate that there is a hole in the market for comics which can only be filled by foreign product, whereas the English market is mature and prolific enough to make it less essential to fill it with other material? Why are we not saying, "Why did they pick Valerian, and not Zip Nolan, or Adam Eterno, or Billy the Cat and Katie or The Spellbinder or Roy of the Rovers, or any of the hundreds of British characters available, not even looking at American comics or wherever?

I wonder about this a lot: it is easy to assume that, given the common area of interest on these boards, that Tintin is in some way superior because it is foreign, and therefore by association that foreign comics are superior. We like to think that the continental origin means that domestic fare is not as good, is lacking the certain je ne sais quoi. We then back this up because they are sold as books, and that must mean they are better.

But Tintin is only superior because it is a good comic, just as Dan Dare is a good comic. The fact that it is available as a book (we sort of blur over the fact that that it was a strip in a paper or magazine or whatever) is just us validating it as something you could get in a bookshop has to be better than something you got in a newsagents.

Similarly we like to throw in the fact that comics are read on the continent by adults, who take them seriously. Well, I'm an adult, and I read comics, but so did my mum's dad, who wouldn't have dreamed of Sunday without reading the antics of Oor Wullie in The Sunday Post - comparable to reading a full page of Tintin, every week of the year over decades, in a run far more prolific than Hergé's work on Tintin, and all written and drawn by one man. But no one here is asking why Oor Wullie isn't available in Finnish, or French ("Notre Guillaume"??). Oh, and he'd have read The Broons too, so that is another page every week, not to mention two shorter comics such as Nero and Zero (these ran to about the same format as the Peanuts Sunday strip did) which appeared in the same section. That's quite a lot of comics...

As for taking comics seriously, well, I don't know. I have an inbuilt distrust of literary criticism in any language, so while I think that they have their own merits in terms of the quality of the writing and the art, I'm not sure that academic disection of them actually makes any difference, so I wouldn't use that as validation, personally.

Going back to an earlier point: foreignness. The continental BD is foreign, to be sure, because we can see they originate in a foreign language; but they are still European, and I consider myself European. But American comics are just as foreign for me too, although they are written in my language. I have far more in common culturally with Tintin, wandering around Brussels, than I have with Ant Man and Beast tearing up the streets of New York in a Marvel comic, or Black Lightning and Superman on the beat in Metropolis.


Well manga sales in the 50s-70s would have been nil in the U.K., so the fact that they have arrived and flourished in the last twenty-five or so years shows that there is an appetite again for foreign comics, just not European ones. I'd also be surprised if the period really was the peak for comics, as you'd have been unlikely to find a comic shop, or anyone who would have thought that it was possible to have a shop that sold such things. Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed paved the way in London, but I doubt that it wasn't thought that virtually every major city and large town would have somewhere on (or just off) their high streets selling comics and associated merchandise.
Then we also have to consider what comics have to compete with. If, as you say, comic sales are down from some peak at some time in the past, they now have to compete with video-games, magazines (of which there are far more aimed at the same core market as the comic reader I would think), and DVD/ video. There's no need for TV Comic, or TV Action for example, if you can buy the DVD of the show.
I'd suspect that the market on the continent is waning too: the DVD section in Fnac in Brussels is now much larger than the BD section, which once was huge, and covered just about everything, in French and Flemish, but reduced to being not much larger than their horror novel section.

I don't know how the BD market is faring on the continent, but I'd guess that they are fighting to retain share of the money people have to spend on leisure there too...


But that again sounds like a search for validation: what does being sold in a bookshop actually convey? Most Waterstones have a comics section, and the ones that I go into stock all sorts: the Commando/ War Picture Library reprints have been very successful, I believe, and there are Robert Crumb volumes, Judge Dredd and Cº, the James Bond and Modesty Blaise books, modern graphic novels like Blankets, as well as Watchmen and Maus...

I also put it to you that the number of specialist bookshops selling comics outweighs the number of shops dedicated to cookery books, or self-help manuals. Can we take consolation from that? Might it explain why it isn't an area that has really been taken on by bookshops which are having to deal with the erosion of their sales overall to on-line retailers?


Or money? I dare say the profits from the Spider-Man movies have allowed Marvel to finance projects such as translating and publishing BD?

And it's not like BD don't make it to the screen either: the Belvision cartoons stoked my love of Tintin in my childhood (although as a wee boy I was disappointed by the animated adaptation of Asterix the Gaul), followed by The Aeronauts - the English-language version of the original "Chevaliers du ciel", a live-action series featuring Charlier and Uderzo's Tanguy et Laverdure (the BBC's adaptation featured a rocking classic of a theme-song!).

And of course there is the forthcoming Tintin film...

I'm sorry that this has rambled a bit, and it probably hasn't come to any great conclusion. It certainly isn't meant to criticise anybody's love of BD or comics in general; it is only an attempt to bring forward a few of the questions I ask myself about comics and books in general, and to which I have no real answers.

But I don't see comic shops as a sign of a mature market or mass acceptance. They are, at least in my opinion, a ghetto that only now publishers are starting to break away from. I doubt that many of the comics that have made an impact on the mainstream over the past ten years have had particularly strong sales in these shops, unless we're talking about the few who treat comics as an art form worth promoting and, if necessary, criticising. If, say, Fantagraphics hadn't penetrated the book-store market, would they take the risk on the Tardi books? And Cinebook have been dropped completely by the American comic-store distributor so I imagine their books are now effectively invisible in those US outlets.

Incidentally, I agree with your point about literary criticism; my larger point was supposed to be with a public acceptance as a comic being something you would give equal weight to as any other form of reading material. So, as part of the 'reading fabric', if I can coin an absurd phrase, which I think they are a million miles from.

It is great to have specialist shops as that's where the true customer service often sits - enthusiasts selling to enthusiasts, be it comics or coffee - but I don't see that as a sign that something is particularly popular.


There's an interesting view on this in the last (in every sense) Comics Journal.


Only that book shops rely on sales and if it isn't popular it doesn't get stocked. No search for critical validation, just a counterpoint to the original statement about comics and manga being popular.

I suppose I've taken the perspective of someone whose main interest is in European translations, of which Waterstone's (or equivalents) have very few, but your point about that particular store is well made. Saying that, it does seem vary a lot from store to store. The one I was in last weekend had two (or three shelves). Others have had most of a bookcase - albeit mainly Batman cross-overs.


Well, I don't know about self-help manuals(!) but I'd say that cookery books almost rule book shops there days so there'd perhaps be little money in specialist shops setting up. Cookery books are more of a life-style thing now - we all know there names of a dozen celebrity chefs - and, I would argue, are truly popular and mainstream in a way that comics (and manga) are nowhere near.

I understand your general point, but I wonder if maybe there are a number of shops in the big towns selling self-help manuals but that they're as invisible to us as comic shops would be to the general public? I suppose we can't help but see it from one perspective.


Sorry, I wasn't very clear. I didn't mean the publishers - and I understand Marvel are now a film studio as well as a publisher - but the news sites such as Newsarama that seem to be desperate for Batman/Iron Man/Watchmen to rule the box-office. I've no problems with there being Batman or Tintin films (well, unless they are terrible and I've paid money to see them - hello Superman Returns!) but I long ago disavowed my self of the belief that their existence would mean "Comics aren't just for kids".

George

Perhaps. I guess what I was really getting at is trying to understand why so little has traditionally made it to English. Why so many publishers doing translations went bankrupt, or published only the first volume of a story and then gave up (implying insufficient sales).
In a nutshell, if a (Finnish) print run of 2000 or so can recoup the costs of translating and publishing, then it seems bizarre you couldn't manage the same in English.
Maybe I'm being stupid, I really know nothing of publishing and all the economics and marketing involved...


I frequently visit said shop so I know what you mean :)
But I'm not really concerned - these days there are just so many forms of entertainment fighting over the same pie. Just think how much more of people's expendable income is eaten by very popular and expensive entertainment like films, games, computers, gadgets and mobile phones, etc compared to even ten years ago.
Yes, it means (presumably) harder times for publishers, but what I mean is I don't think the medium is dying, just getting down-sized a bit perhaps...


Just to clarify when I said american comics and manga were popular I didn't really mean "mainstream", just "very easily available." If you walk into a comic book shop just about anywhere, you will usually find 10x more Marvel/DC and another 10x more manga than European comics. I was in Forbidden Planet in London recently and was really disappointed to see the European comics were about half of one shelf. I remember there were like 10 copies of the first volume of The Third Testament (the other volumes haven't been translated, naturally), and they were being given away at 90p each. The rest of the shelf was pretty much just the more "obvious" choices, Tintin, Asterix, etc.
All this while surrounded by shelf after shelf of manga, superhero comics, etc.
That kind of summarizes my experiences and feeling in general.


Yes, this is true, so all in all I am optimistic. Also I do think success in one area helps open the doors for others as well, and I think the proliferation of manga, anime, hugely successful comic book film adaptations, etc, overall help European comics as well.

It's also pretty clear that nothing has been a greater gift to all the various niche markets and interests in the world than the internet. I think the full impact is yet to be realized.

You need to try Gosh!, around the corner opposite the British Museum as they're far more European-friendly and have a bookcase of translated albums (which isn't much compared to the Marvel and DC paperbacks, but it is a start). Forbidden Planet is really just a supermarket for comics, with no real 'feel' for their true value. And they play god-awful grindcore every time I'm in there!


Now listed on Amazon for July 1. They're starting with 'The City of Shifting Waters' which looks to be the very first story - or first collected in an album anyway (according to Wikipedia).

George

Actually it is the second story in the series. It was the first to be published in book form in French but a previous adventure "Bad Dreams" had been published beforehand in the comic magazine Pilote.

The problem was that "Bad Dreams" only numbered 30 pages and was thus not suited for book publication which required at least 44. It was thus not published in book form until many years later when they had enough material to justify a further 14 pages or more. It's annoying really because "Bad Dreams" shows how Valerian and his long-term companion Laureline first meet and how they deal with Xombul, an enemy they would later encounter in "City of Shifting Waters".

Yet another example of the reader having to takes stories for granted without wondering how the characters originally met or how the adventure relates to other episodes in the series. I believe that the English publishers of Tintin was also guilty of such a course when the stories started to appear in the 1950s and 60s.

Woot! Woot!

On balance, a good choice to start off with I think. The opening half of the book, set in a flooded New York, is very evocative but is let down by the second half. This is, however, a critical book in the range: it is referred back to on many occasions in the later books and becomes the crux of the format change that occurs halfway through the series. Hopefully they'll progress through the range in order so that we can get all the good stories (basically pretty much everything up to and including On The Frontiers) in print as soon as possible. I'm also glad that they're starting with a book that hasn't been in English before - I was dreading that Heroes of the Equinox would get a third English printing when so much of the range remains untranslated.

It will be interesting to see what version of "The City of the Shifting Waters" we get. This story was originally serialized in Pilote in two parts - "The City of the Shifting Waters" (1968) and "Earth in Flames" (1969). When the Valerian stories came to be collected in albums, the page count was standardized at 46 pages but "City..." was too long and several panels were edited (mainly from "Earth in Flames") to get it down to the correct page count. The unexpurgated version finally saw publication a couple of years ago in the new Intégrale Valerian collections Dargaud are releasing and I hope it's this version we get.

I also hope we get a sympathetic translation. This book was set in 1986, which was the future at the time of writing. The later stories that came along in the eighties then went on to address the problem that New York wasn't destroyed in the real 1986. I would have a fear that the translators might decide to disguise the age of the story by changing the date to a date in our future, wrecking the continuity. They have form in this regard - the iBooks translation of "On The Frontiers" included a scene in which a character receives a payment in Euro, even though the story is clearly set in the late 1980s, a few months after the Chernobyl disaster and long before the introduction of the single currency.


Bad Dreams has always been the runt of the Valerian litter though, even in its native France. In many ways it's the "Land of the Soviets" of the range. As you say, the low page count precluded its publication in book form for many years. It did not appear in any book until 1983, some 16 years after it was serialized in Pilote, and even then as part of a general collection of Jean-Claude Mézières' art, not as an official Valerian book. Dargaud did not incorporate it into the main range - as book number zero - until 2000, bolstering the page count by adding some concept art for a proposed animated adaptation of the series.

Personally, I'm glad Cinebook are ignoring Bad Dreams for now. It's not a good story and would be a poor introduction to the range for a new reader.

I would hope that they revisit it later (maybe when (hopefully!) the other stories are published). My dream would be that they'd make up the page count by incorporating some of the articles about the series that appear in the Intégrale... range.

They could always fill in the pages with some of the early short stories like "Le Grand collectionneur" ("The Great Collector") or even "Drôles de specimen" ("Strange Specimens") which not only shows how Laureline has adapted quickly to her new futuristic surroundings but has the added bonus of being very funny!

For what it is worth, Amazon has the Cinebook listings in place now to the year's end.

- A couple of new series: Crusade, by Jean Dufaux and Philippe Xavier; and Long John Silver by Xavier Dorison and Mathieu Lauffray.
- Valerian must be on a six-month (or more) cycle as there's nothing to be found other than the initial release.
- The Lucky Luke series continues with The Stagecoach and The Bounty Hunter.
- Fantagraphics have another of Tardi's series in the works:
The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec is out in September.
- And the same publisher has another David B book on the way in the shape of The Littlest Pirate King.

George