Comix Influx Blog: Five Archival/Translation Projects

It looks like Tom Spurgeon kicked off a bit of a meme in the regular “Five For Friday” column on Comics Reporter. The challenge for May 18th was “Name Five Archival/Translation Projects That Aren’t Happening Right Now (As Far As You Know) That You’d Love To See”.

Personally, I think it was a shame that he grouped archival and translation, rather than tackling them separately (I read it as “name five archival projects, and don’t worry if they’re not in English”). Anyway, David Welsh at Precocious Curmudgeon thought that there wasn’t enough Manga on the list, and so posted the question on his blog. And then, Chris Butcher of The Beguiling tallied up all the results and posted the results on the Comics 212 blog.

The aggregated list was much more slanted towards the archival, rather
than the translated, and most of the books for translation were manga (Hugo Pratt being the exception). Chris’ personal list included Fabrice Neaud’s Journals, and Ralph Koenig’s work.

Here on the Comix Influx Discussion list, Mark Nevins seconded the calls for Odd Bodkins by Dan O’Neill and Trots and Bonnie (originally in National Lampoon – check out this page including a use of the term “organic” from 1973, which surprised me).

Kenny Penman, of “ForbiddenPlanet International” suggested archives of the following:

• Leo Baxendale’s Bash Street – but it will never happen
• Cliff Sterrett’s Polly and her Pals Gus Arriola’s Gordo

and the following translated works:

• Peggy Adam – Plus ou moins.. series
• Frederick Peeters – Lupus series
• Some Tardi
• Prado – Nostalgies de Belo Horizonte
• Kati Rickenbach – Filmriss
• Tom Diek – Der unschuldige Passagier
• Rheinhard Kleist – Fucked

And these are my dashed off thoughts. Firstly, on archival reprints:

• I second Kenny on Leo Baxendale, but would love to see Baxendale’s later work in there too.
• Hugo Tate by Nick Abadzis
• A Posy Simmonds retrospective/sketchbook would be great.
• An Escape Magazine collection
• Personally, I’d pay for a Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo collection, but I wouldn’t every make the case for them being the highest the artform had attained!
• The Smurfs, having seen all the Smurf paraphenalia at Angoulême, and heard the enthusiastic memories of my Dutch and German friends that grew up with them.

And translations… this is trickier! I’ve tended to go with authors, to keep it easy.

• Baudoin, obviously – maybe Le Voyage.
• Dominique Goblet (although Ellen’s now completed Faire Semblant C’est Mentir)
• Stefano Ricci – in fact, there’s tons of stuff that’s really interesting visually from Frémok, and I’d love to see it in English to see how well that half stands up.
• Would be great to see some Joost Swarte in English,
• And, staying with the ligne-claire school, Drozophile has published some beautiful little books by Swiss artist Exem, which I’d love to see more widely published.

It’d be cool to have a Wish List on the site, to keep track of these works, and add to as more books come out… I’ll have a think about how that could work.