Scene from 1918 – in Chinese

Meredith Li-Vollmer decided to use the medium of comics books for this project as it enabled her to deliver the information to a wider range of her target audience of local immigrants and refugees than other media would have allowed. She discovered through audience research at Public Health – Seattle & King County, where she works, that immigrant communities wanted more pictorial information, with comic books being particularly popular in many parts of Latin America and Asia (in a small focus group of Vietnamese immigrants, more said they get information from comic books than from email or the internet!).

She says that an additional benefit with comics is that the number of words used is much lower than in regular prose – this makes the information more accessible to audiences with relatively low literacy, and also help keeps the cost of translation down. Lower costs allowed for the comic to be translated into eleven languages, targeting communities who do not receive much of their information through the mainstream media. The twelve languages in which No Ordinary Flu is published are Amharic, Arabic, Chinese, English, Khmer, Korean, Laotian, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. Public Health – Seattle & King County make the comic available in print to people who live in King County, but make it generally available to everyone as a PDF download.

Covers from every edition of No Ordinary Flu

A lot of information had to be packed in to the 12 pages of No Ordinary Flu, and yet it retains an accesibility which is key to the comic’s success. Li-Vollmer, had to figure out how to get all the important messages into a short book, and so decided on a simple story describing how one family survived the 1918 flu pandemic, told from the perspective of that family’s descendants. She shows the effects of pandemic flu and delivers advice on the appropriate precautions and procedures to minimise the impact of a new pandemic.

“A lone person walking past a playground”

The genesis of the story was “the image of a lone person walking past an empty playground” she says “it seemed like it might reach people on a visceral level”. And yet despite such bleak imagery, No Ordinary Flu does not come across as a scare-story (nor, at the other extreme, as a dry, fact-based infomercial). Cleverly Li-Vollmer makes her protagonists the descendants of survivors of the 1918 pandemic, so that the story is inherently positive while still getting its very serious message across.

Li-Vollmer approached Seattle-based comics creator David Lasky to illustrate the comic. When she discovered that his great-grandmother had died in the 1918 pandemic she knew he was ideal for the project. Lasky does a great job on No Ordinary flu. His duotone art works very well for the subject matter – sufficiently realistic and detailed to deal with such a serious subject, and yet clean and simple enough to be accessible. The shifts in the story between 1918 and the present day are very clear. Overall it’s a great work of the comic art – gracefully communicating its story without getting in the way.

It is fascinating, from a Comix Influx point of view, to see how rigorous the approach to translation has to be in a project of this nature. The idea with Comix Influx is that a “just good enough” translation is better than nothing; for No Ordinary Flu this is not true at all. The translation must be not just accurate (especially in its use of medical terminology), but must also use language that is appropriate for the immigrant communities in America, not for native speakers in their own countries. In order to ensure this, the translations, which were carried out by an agency, were extensively reviewed by independent speakers of the various languages (apparently Ukrainian and Laotian speakers were the hardest to find).

From the Khmer edition – different languages take up different amounts of space.

In order to keep the translations relatively straight-forward, Li-Vollmer’s team tried to avoid using colloquialisms in the original script, changing “glad to see you made it home in one piece,” to “great to have you back, soldier!” (Li-Vollmer tells of one occasion when an “information hotline” about the trans-fat ban was translated as “a line that is (temperature) hot” – fortunately the error was caught before going out!). They also provided in-line explanations where necessary to make the meaning absolutely clear – a similar approach to that used by some people on Comix Influx, annotating their best attempts at translation.

All in all, this is an astounding attention to detail, and it is no surprise that, according to Li-Vollmer, translation has been one of the most challenging aspects of the work they do at Public Health – Seattle & King County. For this project, though, they found a great translation agency in Lingua Linx, who are not only very experienced in translation services, they also were good at the Desktop Publishing side of the project. In fact it was Lingua Linx who suggested that, as Arabic is read right-to-left, the art in the Arabic version should be flipped horizontally – the reverse process from the flipping of Manga for a Western audience (interestingly, the Manhwa of Korea and the Manhua of China are read left-to-right, and correspondingly the Korean and Chinese versions of No Ordinary Flu were not flipped).

Different approaches to flipping panels from a page of the Arabic edition (here compared with the Amharic edition)

David Lasky provided the art as InDesign files, with blanks left where the words were due to go. Lingua Linx would then insert their translations into the InDesign files, before sending those to the publisher. One consequence of this process is that when viewing the translated versions in a PDF reader (such as Adobe Acrobat) it’s possible to use the cursor and select the text (for example, to copy and paste it)! This is even true for some of the text that’s part of the image such as newspaper headlines, and a coughing sound-effect. This is very unusual for electronic comics, partly because many comics creators hand-letter rather than use computer fonts, but also because the lettering is generally flattened into the art as part of the production process; clearly this wasn’t the case with No Ordinary Flu where the lettering was applied to the finished art, and so the text survives as a distinct part of the PDF file.

The News in Laotian – showing how even the headlines can be selected in a PDF reader

While this effect was not deliberate in No Ordinary Flu (although you could argue that it has some accessibility benefits), it is intriguing to speculate whether it might become more prevalent as computer fonts that mimic hand-lettering improve and as the number of comics available in PDF or similar formats increases. And there is another advantage to the electronic version: Li-Vollmer let me know that a small proof-reading error crept into the Spanish version of No Ordinary Flu; the printed copies now need to go out with a explanatory slip, whereas the PDF version was corrected immediately. Nonetheless, this is all a little academic at this stage, as unsurprisingly the print version has proved far more popular with the target audience than the electronic versions – indeed, the Russian, Somali and Ukrainian editions had run out at the time of writing.

If you compare the original English version of No Ordinary Flu with one of the translated versions, it is easy to see where Lasky had to erase things in the original version, such as the newspaper and the coughing previously mentioned, so that the translations could be more incorporated into the comic. Lasky said that he would love to see more of his own work translated, but if it were he’d love to be able to go in and do those kind of things by hand. Nonetheless, while computer fonts generally look a little jarring when used in comics, for this project a clean, clear computer font was most appropriate for reasons of legibility as well as, obviously, reasons of cost.

Some of Lasky’s sound-effects had to be replaced with text in a computer-font (again selectable in a PDF reader) – here shown for the Somali version

It is clearly evident how the need to bring this important information to as much of its target audience as possible – an audience that is traditionally difficult to reach through the normal mainstream channels – has driven every aspect of this project; from the story, to the art; from the careful choice of register, to the painstaking care applied to the translations; it has even driven the choice of comics as a medium.

The book succeeds due to the effort and attention to detail from Li-Vollmer, David Lasky and the many other contributors to the project, but realising that a comics story was the ideal vehicle to deliver her message was Meredith Li-Vollmer’s really brilliant insight.

My thanks to Meredith Li-Vollmer and Alanna Beebe of Public Health – Kings County and Seattle, and David Lasky for their generous help in writing this post. Please check out No Ordinary Flu at the Public Health – Seattle & King County website.

Courtesy of the excellent Boing Boing.

I’m not yet familiar with Davodeau’s work, but Katherine wrote enthusiastically about it on her blog back in April:

“Chute de Vélo is an astonishing piece of work that builds towards its climax in almost imperceptible increments. ... Davodeau is an incredibly gifted storyteller: whatever English-language publisher snaps up the rights to his works will be doing a great service for English-speaking comics fans.”

And Katherine’s doing a great service by starting a translation on Comix Influx. With any luck that will help bring it to the attention of someone interested in publishing it in Englishh.

I found some example pages from the FNAC website, and you can buy the book there or, of course, from amazon.fr.

For example, whereas I had expected to pick up the cover:

I ended up with one of the sample pages:

It looks like Amazon had added a bunch more detail into the responses they send from their web-service, which we use to get the cover images. In particular, they’ve added two sample pages from the book – so in addition to the one that was showing up erroneously, Le Long Voyage de Léna also has

The reason that the wrong image was being picked up has been fixed with a minor update to the code, but it’d be nice to make more of the extra images at our disposal. I’ll hopefully get round to it soon.

Blank Slate Books is a brand new UK comics publishing house, launched by Kenny Penman and James Hamilton of Forbidden Planet International. It’s just published its first 2 books: Trains Are Mint, a collection of the three mini-comics by Oliver East, and We Can Still Be Friends by the popular German comics creator Mawil, a translation of his book,Wir können ja Freunde bleiben.

The first thing to say is that the books are beautiful. They have a similar form factor to books from First Second, with wraparound illustrations on the front- and back-covers, and are printed on nice thick paper. It certainly looks like Blank Slate have put a lot of effort into getting these looking just so. Interestingly they chose to put Trains Are Mint out as a handsome hardback and We Can Still Be Friends as a nice, accessible paperback. I’m not sure why they chose that configuration – Trains Are Mint does have more of an “artbook” feel to it, and you could imagine the Mawil having a broader appeal.

Trains Are Mint by Oliver East is a sort of travelogue comic showing East’s journey, on foot, following the train track from Manchester to Blackpool. The overall feel is very much of a sketchbook, using watercolour over black ink. The drawings are fairly simple outlines – no shading with the pen – and the watercolours employ a subdued palette, evoking overcast English weather. There are a few lovely moments – the first time in the book that East sees a train go past is great. Taken in isolation his sketch could be an abstract watercolour of a tranquil, seaside twilight, but in context becomes the blurred streak of a train at full pelt.

The art effectively captures the feel of the post-industrial North East – its cities, suburbs, farmland and, notably, the ill-defined areas inbetween – the seams that join them together. These are the bits that people passing through wouldn’t normally see, and what, in part, make East’s book so distinctive. East isn’t documenting a disappearing Britain but observing life at the joins, often with a genuine affection. He maintains an amused detachment from things he relates, and, for example, is regularly disappointed with the poor quality and paucity of the graffiti he passes.

East often interweaves the text directly into the art, so that his
narrative takes the place of advertising hoardings, logos on lorries, and signs in shops. This again takes the comic away from just being a sketchbook, and also makes the images highly personal – you are always aware that you are seeing things through his eyes. This subjectivity is enhanced by the lack of people depicted through the book; East’s journey is largely solitary, and those that are shown are essentially featureless, sometimes reduced to just their clothes. East is also a very passive narrator. He observes and comments, but does not really interact with his surroundings. Indeed, the most exuberant page in the book shows East’s joy at getting to start a new sketchbook.

Trains Are Mint is not about the destination or even about the places that East passes through. Life goes on around him. He doesn’t investigate curiosities, such as a shop intriguingly called Escapito Pinkos, and a pub advertising a “Meat Draw”. A traditional travel book would turn those into the focus; East observes and notes, but passes on, content to acknowledge them amongst life’s mysteries. The journey is the thing. For example, we know that East is breaking his journey up, and returning home at the end of each day’s walk. But there is no mention of the return legs at the end of a day’s walk, nor the journey to pick up the route again, nor anything else that happens in his life. We don’t even know for sure whether the journey is conducted over consecutive days. This stops Trains Are Mint from being a standard sketchbook diary, and focuses attention on his quest. And this is what the book most feels like: a modern, existential updating of a Knight’s Quest, where the actual goal (Blackpool in this case) is rarely the point of the narrative but is instead a device by which to hang other stories. In this case, the other “stories” are East’s asides, musings, observations and day-dreams (which occasionally drift into the obscene).

This might make it sound as if the book feels somewhat pointless, or even dull, but this is not the case. For one thing, East is an entertaining narrator, undercutting the unavoidable social commentary with bathos. He also wryly acknowledges his faults (commenting that if this were a “proper book” he would do better research on what he was seeing, “but Scrubs’ll be on”), and questions the “legitimacy” of his journey.

I like East’s comics. They are highly individual and the book is completely immersive. We may reach the end of the book without any real idea why East is on this quest. Never apologise, never explain: he just is. And that’s enough.

Mawil is one of the most popular comics creators in Germany. He has had 6 books published in his home country, with Beach Safari published in English by Top Shelf. Mawil created this 64-page comic as his MA thesis, and it deals humorously with 4 unrequited (naturally) crushes he had from when he was a boy up to a student. He maintains a lightness and humour, never descending to the narcissism or self-pity that many such autobiographical comics would have done. In part this is helped by having the stories told as if they were being discussed in a bar with friends (with the associated laughter, incredulity and commiserations). I’d be surprised if anyone didn’t find some sympathy with at least one of the situation that Mawil describes.

In East’s book the reader is gradually drawn in, but in Mawil’s case the art has a very easy, accessible appeal that grabs the reader from the outset. He utilises regular line drawings with flat greyscale shading, and his style tends toward the cartoony, emphasised by his slightly formless figures. There’s a strong feeling of motion within Mawil’s drawings – on occasion he draws his characters with multiple limbs to show rapid movement.

But additionally, in the mess of broad, cartoony fluidity he can also freeze a moment very effectively; when his Spanish admiree shakes the sea out of her hair, the change in pace shows the strength of feeling attached to that memory. It’s a very effective switching of gears, which Mawil uses well.

In addition he also makes good use of different panel layouts. He generally sticks to pages with a regular 3×3 panel layout. But the linking scenes in the bar use a varying number of borderless panels, emphasising the less structured conversation. There’s another page which is a page from an exercise book, overlaid with the hands of different writing in it, and their speech-balloons of their simultaneous conversation. Difficult to describe, but it’s an inventive panel that works very well. Mawil is a naturally inventive cartoonist, with a very relaxed, engaging style. While the stories in this book are not ground-breaking, he brings them to life effortlessly, making it a truly engaging book with universal appeal.

This is an impressive start from Blank Slate Books, and I like their approach of publishing new artists from the British small-press and authors that have achieved success in other countries but are not yet recognised over here. For both books, it is not obvious what other UK publisher would have given them an opportunity, so I hope that Blank Slate Books manage to make this a productive and successful niche. I eagerly await the next books they have lined up.

We headed up to Camden in the afternoon (Ellen bearing copies of the nearly out-of-stock Whores Of Mensa #3) and quickly met up with Jeremy Dennis, another of the Whores of Mensa group. Jeremy is the queen of the bejewelled (or beblinged) comic, and we bought her lovely Angry Owl and Falling Leaves comics.

I also, picked up a couple of minis by Francesca Cassavetti – The Most Natural Thing in the world and Party Pieces. I hadn’t seen Cassavetti’s work before, and really like it. I’m definitely going to pick up the other issues of The Most Natural Thing In The World. I also bought Ooomoonaflii by Clare Power, a beautifully produced, full-colour comic, totally enchanting and barely scrutable, which reads like an all-too short hallucinatory kids’ story. I hope Power is prolific, ‘cos I think her work is great.

We later went to the a local bar and got to meet a whole load of people from the market, including Peter Lally (who creates The Bedsit Journal, along with Richard Cowdry), Sally-Anne Hickman, and Andy Luke. It was great to catch-up a little with Sean Azzopadi as well.

From what I saw and heard, the day was a great success, and should hopefully be repeated. It’s excellent to see this kind of enthusiasm, drive and focus within the UK comics scene, outside of the UK conventions. Congratulations to Oli Smith for having organised it.

This rather feels like the Times copying the Guardian, and Posy Simmonds’ strips. If that is what they’re doing I’m all for it, and Nick is an excellent choice to take on the challenge.

The strip itself takes up about three-quarters of page 2 in the Times2 pull-out supplement, sharing the page with the contents listing. This is a very prominent spot for a new comic strip. There is no over-simplification for the non-comics-reading public – no cast of characters, and the necessary scene-setting is accomplished subtly. Perhaps the one concession is that the narration is all in a typed font – presumably to distinguish from the dialogue – and the narrator’s name, Marco Albini, is announced, minimising confusion.

In the first episode Albini attends a gallery opening with an artist friend and bumps into an old acquaintance of them both: Joe Chase, the “Sober Dog” of the comics’ title. Chase is apparently effortlessly successful, engendering resentment in Albini. Not much more is revealed beyond this, but it seems likely that the artistic world will provide a significant backdrop in future episodes.

Abadzis works in a dig at the relationship between commerce and art in his opening paragraph: Albini describes the gallery opening as a place where art and commerce “shag”. I found this acknowledgement of a more complex interaction between art and money – rather than the traditional dichotomy – interesting. And this relationship is echoed in the complexity of the briefly sketched characters – none are out-and-out dislikable, nor purely sympathetic.

This is a sophisticated comic, promising a rich narrative, and given a hitherto unheard of prominence in The Times. I eagerly await future installments.

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.

• 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.

I’m just back from a trip to the States and so have a bit of catching up to do. I’ll post more over the next few days…

The DFC is aimed at 8-12 year-olds, and is the brainchild of children’s publisher David Fickling (as detailed in The Times). The initial roster has a good mix of established professionals (such as Nick Abadzis, who also functions as Consultant Editor on the magazine), talented newcomers (such as Sarah McIntyre), and big names (like Philip Pullman, who writes “The Adventures of John Blake”, illustrated by John Aggs).

In order to keep costs down in the early stages, the comic will be subscription only, which has necessitated a lot of promotion by Fickling and his team. Some of the comics have been previewed in The Guardian (Nick Abadzis’ strip, Cora’s Breakfast, is running everyweek in The Comic), and Philip Pullman appeared on the Today programme to promote the comic (I’m sure there have been many more child-oriented promotions as well, but they’ve passed me by!).

The launch itself was held in the Film Café at the BFI Southbank. Apparently, there were about 400 people there including many cartoonists, excited to have a domestic outlet (other than 200AD) for their talents. David Fickling and Nick Abadzis both gave speeches, which were unfortunately inaudible at the back of the café (Nick has included the text from his speech in his post about the launch party – it’s well worth reading). Then a whole load of DFC balloons were released over the Thames, carrying free DFC subscriptions wherever the wind took them.

The party was great fun, with a really striking enthusiasm pervading the event. Clearly there’s a huge will for The DFC to succeed, and also a lot of curiosity about whether it can; there are a lot of people in the industry watching to see whether Fickling can pull this off. If he does, and the subscription figures hold up, hopefully it will lead to more comics being published in the UK.

This could have truly transformative effect on the UK Comics scene. As John Aggs said to me, the long-term aspiration is that the real impact of The DFC will only really be felt in 10 years time, when some of the kids initially reading The DFC become the new wave of comics creators. With all the false dawns within the UK comics industry it is easy to be cynical about such grandiose proclamations, but with The DFC there is a genuine optimism, a real sense of attempting the extraordinary.

Eisner Awards Voting Site. The deadline is June 13th.

Batuman’s article has become something of a meme; I certainly heard of it via several independent channels (including Katherine Farmar’s disparaging comments, and a discussion on the Comics Scholars list of whether the “Eisensphritz” of the title was actually misspelling of the Harvey Kurtzman-coined “Eisnersphritz”). Leaving aside the questions of terminology, the rest of the article is a bit confused. It crowbars at least three different theses into the same article and then uses each to prop up the others. The part about the prevalence of themes of duality in comics is true and interesting, but relating that specifically to Jewish cultural identity is a stretch – and largely founded on their having been a large number of Jews working in the early American comic industry. The subsequent casual connection of the themes of duality to the “text-image duality” of the medium just feels lazy.

I enjoyed rather more Cyril Mendosa’s There’s No Such Thing as a Graphic Novel on the First Second Blog Doodles and Dailies. Mendosa is the Angoulême-award winning creator of Les Trois Ombres, which will be published in English by First Second. As the title of the post implies, Mendosa is very solidly in the “marketing strategy” camp. Odd to think that the French comics industry needs a term like “roman graphique” when the anglophone world tends to regard Bande Desinée, and the BD album, as the pinnacle achieved by the comics industry in the western world.

However, for all the discussion of graphic novels and terminology, what really annoys me is that there are no decent terms for the people who actually create comics. “Cartoonist” seems most prevalent, but you need to clarify whether you’re referring to animation, or even to editorial or gag cartoons. “Comics creator” might be best, but isn’t really generally understood. And then there’s the whole confusion with “stand-up comics” – no, Angoulême isn’t a comedy festival! Still, even having to explain that repeatedly won’t get me turning to the term “graphic novels”.

Highlights include a huge Christophe Blain exhibition, and Nicolas Robel, Atak, Ben Katchor and Tom Gauld, and also Beaty-favourites Florent Ruppert and Jerome Mulot. I’m really sorry that I’m missing the Atrabile exhibition – it looks to be the original art from the 10×10 oversized anthology that Atrabile had out for Angoulême this year, and which was my “Book of the Festival” (for what that’s worth).

Ah, well… maybe next year.

I’ve just completed a translation of Isabelle Pralong’s fantastic, award winning book, L’Éléphant. It’s a wonderful book, and a worthy winner of the Best Newcomer Essential at Angoulême 2008. It’s certainly the best comic that I’ve read in a long while.

The story tells how Claire Safagi, a 39-year old mother of two, suddenly finds out that her father, whom she’s never met, is in hospital, in a coma. I won’t say more for fear of giving away too much, although the plot itself is pretty understated. While still managing to maintain a compelling narrative, the book is much more about people and relationships. As you might expect, it is very moving, but it also manages to be very funny and humane.

Pralong’s writing is beautiful, although I know my translation will not do it justice. Her characterisations are really great: very well realised and distinct, and conveyed with an admirable economy. The characters of Claire’s children and her relationship with them are particularly well depicted, but Pralong also does well with a large cast of incidental characters.

Pralong draws in a somewhat naïve, cartoony style, something like a neater, more contained Jules Feiffer. She evidently does not feel too constrained by traditional concerns of anatomy, or even the physical opacity of objects, preferring to rely on her ability to express the mood of the panel. Personally I love it, but some people express reservations.

Whatever your opinions of her artwork, it would be hard to deny that Pralong uses the vocabulary of comics very effectively. For the most part, she maintains a relatively traditional 3×2 grid of panels, but uses a variety of techniques to subtly diverge from the format where the story calls for it. Pralong will up the number of panels, increasing the pace, in the more dialogue led passages; she zooms out of her subject, using more empty space, when her protagonist is feeling uncertain or nervous; she even drops all panels, in the style of her fellow Swiss cartoonist Anna Somner, in a five-page dream sequence. Pralong manages to incorporate all these techniques into her comic elegantly and effectively.

In addition, her most pervasive technique is the use of a first-person narrative beneath the panels. Whereas her artwork is loose and expressive, this narration is rendered in a capitalized, serif typeface. This imparts a distinct and sober voice, almost monotone in its reflectiveness, which suits the story well and provides a good counterweight to the somewhat manic artwork and surreal flourishes (Claire’s cat dancing in a skirt).

Ultimately, Pralong has beautifully balanced all these various elements in a way that is not showy or overbearing, but totally in service to the story. L’éléphant is a beautifully told story, by an artist in excellent control of her medium.

Buy L’Éléphant from FNAC or amazon.fr

This upgrade does not add any new features to the site as yet, but will make it easier to add more features in the future. It does appear to have improved the speed of the site already!

The other great thing about it was that it was really a collaborative translation – Keith Logan did the first 270-odd pages, and then the last 160 were added by Katherine Farmar. A huge thanks to both of them, but particularly Katherine as she really threw herself into using the site, and gave me much valuable feedback on things that were missing – as a result I’ve begun an Editing Guide, and will soon add more features to make editing translations easier.

I’ve recently been working on the translations of L’éléphant and Sergent Laterreur, but my meager skills have meant that progress has been slow. Nonetheless, I’m finding it all highly enjoyable – the act of noting down a translation really makes me try to figure out passages I probably would have skimmed or skipped (and being somewhat slowed down when reading a comic is generally no bad thing anyway).

Anyway, after some experimentation, I have ended up settling on a bunch of different translation tools (not counting just asking on the Comix Influx Discussion list).

For Christmas, my wife, Ellen (engaged on the Dominique Goblet translation), bought me a really fantastic, huge Oxford Hachette French/English dictionary. This thing is the Family Bible as far as I’m concerned – look something up in the right way and it’ll tell you just about everything you need to know. But it is sloooow. And heavy. And you need to look things up in the correct way, and that way isn’t always obvious to me. Make no mistake, this is the best tool I have for finding every obscure usage and turn-of-phrase I could want, but sometimes other routes can be more efficient.

The next most useful is the online dictionary Word Reference. One thing this excels at, which can be tricky in a dictionary, is identifying obscure conjugations or participles of verbs. It’s also good with slang (so is the Oxford Hachette), and has online forums, which I am yet to use. It doesn’t have the depth of explanation of the traditional dictionary, but for speed and accuracy it’s pretty darn good.

And finally we have Google Translate (or Babelfish, or whatever – they all seem much of a muchness). Anyone who’s ever used this will have seen the violence that it can do to a language, the bilingual stream-of-consciousness that it returns in its nice, clean interface.

But still… When I can’t quite figure out all the clauses and changes of tense in a sentence. Or I can tell that something’s a turn-of-phrase, but I can’t find where it’s referenced in the Oxford Hachette. Or I’m too lazy. In those cases Google Translate will often provide just enough information to decode the troublesome sentence. The mangled and subliterate response is just intelligible enough for me to understand the author’s initial intent and fill in the blanks.

And yet somehow, despite having to decipher its garbled response, Google Translate still feels too easy. I know I’m learning less than when I struggle through, and even than when I ask Ellen to help me out. I can’t escape the fact that I’m cheating. So when I’ve given in, and have sneaked a peek at another of Google’s bilingual streams-of-consciousness, it leaves me feeling just a little sordid; ultimately, Google Translate makes me feel dirty.

Picturebox have gone with a very Comix Influx-esque solution, although taken one step further: it puts a translation at the bottom of the page, with a number beside it indicating the panel, but it also had a mini-diagram of the page indicating the panel layout, with the appropriate numbers within the panels themselves. This is particularly useful for manga as some are published in their original orientation, with the panels read from right to left, while others are “flipped” so they read from left to right (in fact, this book compounds the problem by having, for reasons I cannot discern, some strips right-to-left and others left-to-right).

Talking of right-to-left strips, I went to a preview the Manhua! China Comics Now exhibition at the London College of Communication, curated by Paul Gravett. There was lots of original artwork on show, and I was surprised to see that the panels in pages of Manhua (Chinese comics) read left-to-right! No cognitive dissonance! Apparently Manhwa (Japanese comics) also read left-to-right.

The comic itself is essentially a simple gag strip, with two main protagonists – the Sergent of the title and the soldier who alone comprises his company. The somewhat repetitious strips – the punchline is frequently the soldier snapping his heels to attention – poke fun at the ludicrousness of army life: the ingenuous foot-soldiers, the lunacy of the people who command them, and the general absurdity of war.

In those respects – the repetition, simplicity and faint air of futility – the strip probably shares most in common with with Spy vs Spy, but the experience of reading Sergent Laterreur is somehow more immersive. With two pages per strip it has more space to riff on its ideas anyway, but it is the artwork that really overwhelms you.

The first thing to hit you are the colours – gorgeously garish planes of colour just suffuse every page (a seriograph version of these strips would be stunning). The actual drawing style is fairly sparse on detail, and veers between geometric simplicity (most obviously in the single soldier of the company, with his circular body and head, oblong patch-pockets and perfectly triangular lapels), and more stylised and organic forms elsewhere. The overall effect is a sort of brutalist psychedelia – appropriately enough for the period and subject matter. The fabulous lettering and the liquid, flowing speech balloons makes the guttural, phonetic screams of Sergent Laterreur and all the noise from the various machines of war really erupt off the page.

The art always manages to keep you on edge – everything always seems unbalanced, and many panels themselves are drawn from precarious, close-up perspectives.

When I first saw the book I found the art too jarring and overbearing to be immediately appealing. But the more I looked at it the more it grew on me, and crucially the more I appreciated how well it complemented the stories and subject. You can see examples of the artwork at du9.org and lambiek.net.

The L’Association book is a beautiful edition and I understand it was a labour of love by Jean-Christophe Menu. The reproduction of the artwork, and the solid colours in particular, is just amazing. The book also includes examples of sketches and unfinished artwork, as well as covers from Pilote and earlier collections.

Partly due to the incorporation of the lettering into the artwork, it is really unlikely that Sergent Laterreur would ever appear in translation, which obviously makes it a great candidate for Comix Influx. Sergent Laterreur is readily availalable from Amazon.fr.

That in turn mentions a really nicely produced article on Comix Influx and interview with me that Comics Guru Paul Gravett posted on his site. And finally Nick Abadzis, my good friend, and creator of the wonderful comic Laika, has included a blog post about his recent trip to Angoulême, in which he mentions the site.

My parents have resisted the allure of the Mac, so on a recent visit I took the opportunity of checking the site on their laptop and, ooh, it was ugly. On the book pages, all the panels at the top, containing the main information and the “About this book…” blurb were all over the place. The sub-panels had no border (Firefox understands the English spelling “grey”, but IE insists on “gray”), and the main blog page was pretty hideously broken too. Urgh.

Fortunately, my parents generously lent me their laptop so I could work on it at home. I managed to get the main pages fixed yesterday, and things are looking acceptable on IE now. Not perfect, but good enough for the minute. I just hope that people looking at the site in IE have not been put off!

* Clearly I will be from now on!
** Although that doesn’t explain why the site still isn’t quite right in Safari either.

I got to talk to quite a few people about Comix Influx, gave out a bunch of my spiffy new business cards, and received a lot of encouragement. But probably the biggest encouragement is seeing the fantastic new books that are being published.

Obviously faire semblant c’est mentir – nominated for the Essentiels, the Angoulême Festival annual awards – is already in progress on Comix Influx. I was sorry but unsurprised that this challenging work did not win one of the prizes.

I was very pleased, though, that Exit Wounds by the estimable Rutu Modan was decreed to be “Essential”, and that L’Elephant by Isabelle Pralong won the bEst Newcomer Award. I bought L’Elephant, and it’s in the Comix Influx queue.

Personally, my book of the festival was the Atrabile anthology, 10×10. The unifying concept is that all the stories use Post-It Notes in their composition (mostly as individual panels), although it seems more of a design decision rather than a constraint.

• Odile et Les Crocodiles by Chantal Montellier, a reprint from Actes Sud/l’An 2 of a comic originally published in Metal Hurlant.
• A catalogue from an exhibition by Andrea Bruno (of Italian Anthology Canicola). This is really great, as it shows how he achieves the stark chiarascura of his striking artwork
• Leon la came by Nicolas de Crecy. This one’s on Indy Magazine’s 20 Best Graphic Novels, all of which I’d like to see on Comix Influx.
• The amazing Toy Comix catalogue from L’Asso (sadly didn’t manage to see the exhibition in Paris – I must get better organised!)
• Gogo Club by the casually surreal, insouciantly experimental Ruppert & Mulot
• Ethique, a anthology from Swiss boutique publisher, Drozophile. A good find, this one – unusually for a book from Christian Humbert-Droz, it is not a seriograph but a rather more conventionally colour-printed book. But still as beautifully produced as you’d expect from a Drozophile.

Bart Beaty was enamoured by Frag by Ilan Manouach. This was published by La Cinquieme Couche, who were carrying the torch for the high-concept, high production values, avant garde art comic at the Festival.

But you can always rely on finding good books, however bad the Festival. This year, though, the rest of the festival came up to scratch too. The exhibitions were the best they’ve been for many, many years. And even the weather surpassed all expectations.

The whole festival was underpinned by the presence of the President, José Muñoz, who can count his Angoulême Festival as an unmitigated triumph. I’m a big fan of Dupuy-Berberian, and their winning the Grand Prix for 2008 was the icing on the cake – I hope that their festival next year comes close to mmatching this year’s.

Muñoz draws live on stage, accompanied by Argentinian singer Haydée Alba. This was a really magical occasion – a fantastic culmination of a wonderful festival.

I spoke to lots of people about Comix Influx – and handed out many of my new business cards!

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