Comix Influx Blog: Valentine - in 14 languages

My good friend, Anna Knutson, New York literary scout, recently sent me this article from Publishing Perspectives on a new digital comic called Valentine by Alex de Campi (who wrote the article) and Christine Larsen. It’s very interesting for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it is being simultaneously translated into 14 languages.

First to note, it is a creator-owned comic, that makes full use of digital distribution methods. It is available on the Kindle and other e-readers, the iPhone and Android phones. Distribution is handled by the Amazon Kindle store, Comixology and Robot Comics, amongst others.

However, the interesting thing from a Comix Influx point of view is that they are, very unusually, releasing each episode in 14 languages simultaneously (including right-to-left languages, where the art is flipped). This is partly driven by a belief (from de Campi’s work as a film-maker) that not publishing simultaneously causes “piracy”, which she defines, comendably idealistically, as people finding ways to see things when they have “no other other affordable way of doing so other than torrenting it.” She is also very aware of the large audiences reading comics in French and Japanese.

Even more interesting, Valentine has a very novel translation model. Essentially they sent out a request for translators on Twitter and Facebook, offering to pay 50% of all royalties on the foreign-language editions to the translators (although those royalties are likely to be slight, initially). De Campi says that this has worked out really well, and, of course, encourages the translators to promote the comic.

The translators just submit their translations in Word documents, and then de Campi does the lettering in Photoshop, effectively cut’n’pasting into the appropriate places. De Campi handles just about all of the production work to publish Valentine in 14 languages – reformatting, grey-scaling etc., etc. She has written a fascinating post about all the work involved, as part of a series on Valentine at bleedingcool.com.

The comic tells the story of Valentine, a French/Russian soldier in Napolean’s retreat from Russia. Although decrying “motion comics” (“because they’re, well, lame”), de Campi is not afraid to use the tools of her other trade, film-making. Each screenful on a phone corresponds to a panel in the comic – no multi-panel screens in the mobile Valentine – very like a film story-board. De Campi uses fade transitions between panels (“one panel being a slightly closer close-up than the previous – to show the impact of a reaction”), fade-ins of captions, and pans across very large panels.

While to some purists this would probably put the digital Valentine closer to “motion comics” than de Campi indicates, de Campi and Larsen also have very definite plans to publish their book on traditional old paper. This will involve rejigging the panels so there will be several per page (I guess the PC Valentine version will be similar). It will be very interesting to compare the different experiences.

Valentine is not yet distributed on an open web platform. De Campi says it will be at some point, but the decision to go with the mobile platforms first was a pragmatic one: mobiles have a clearer revenue stream and de Campi and Larsen needed to make money from their book.

Despite that, Valentine is published under a Creative Commons license, acknowledging that some people wouldn’t read the comic if they had to pay for it. I presume that they figure a few lost sales will be outweighed by the additional sales (or perhaps the less immediate benefits) garnered by the extra publicity. I hope so – for a number of reasons, this is an innovative project that deserves to succeed.

Episode 4 of Valentine was released yesterday; visit the Valentine website to download the episodes so far to your handheld. Apparently a PC version will be available soon (via Comixology) and, in the meantime, the less mobilely-equipped (like me!) can read the first episode in a Flash iPhone simulator.