Auteur Comix

Thirty all-time cartoonists with some of the best and most representative work of the Spanish artcomics scene in the 1980s. (Vols. II and III in preparation.) Enjoy, but know that you're robbing the artists and rights holders of appropriate compensation in doing so.

"Contactos" ("Personals") strip by Mariel Soria and Andreu Martín, 1980, as reprinted in a Suplemento mensual El Jueves volume, and translated by me.

One-page strip drawn by Jordi Saladrigas from a script credited to one Miguel Ángel, originally published in Metropol #6, 1983, and translated from the Spanish by me. Yes, I believe the resemblance to middle-period Brando is intentional.

"Estaré Esperando" by El Cubri, as published in Cairo #7, early 1982, and translated into English by me with a small assist from Google software. The "Sombras" series of stories by El Cubri (writer Felipe Hernández Cava and artist Pedro Arjona) are heavily influenced by film noir, but few of them are as much of a piece with the expressionist crime comics of Argentine artists like Alberto Breccia and José Muñoz as this brief sketch. The swirling, almost haphazard brushwork here is virtuoso.

"A Este Lado," written by Elisa Galvéz and drawn by Federico del Barrio, printed in Madriz #28, June 1986, and translated into English by me.

"El Dinornis" by Josep María Beá, originally printed in the Spanish horror-fantasy anthology Drácula in 1971, translated by me with a little help from Google software. This was one of a series of stories starring Beá's character Sir Leo, a Victorian investigator into the supernatural, and a useful excuse for Beá to show off his knack for imitating the lush linework of Victorian-era illustration. (The gaudy spot colors do both the art and the flow of the narrative a real disservice here, but I don't have a copy of the story in black and white.)

The end of the first chapter of Eva by Didier Comès, translated from Spanish by me with a bit of vocabulary reassurance from the Internet. Since it was originally published in French, I've felt free to be a bit looser in my translation than I normally am; although I'm just realizing now that I actually have the original French serialization in my files, and should be checking my stuff against that. Well, starting with Chapter 2.

"De la homosexualidad" by the underground comics collective El Cubri, 1978. Created for the Spanish humor magazine Por Favor, but left unpublished until the 2008 collection Tal como éramos (the way we were), translated by me with more recourse to the internet than usual, as political Spanish is out of my usual wheelhouse. Beyond the strip's interest as a specimen of comics-as-propaganda and of a particular political era in Spanish civil life (the "ley de peligrosidad social" was a 1970 law that forced homosexuals into reeducation centers), I found it fascinating for what El Cubri predicted about our own cultural moment.

I would have said more but the current iteration of the Tumblr IOS app refuses to remember anything if I hop over to another app for a second, and I’m not retyping all that.

Ted Benoît, "Bon et intéressant d’essayer de survivre," from the September 1982 issue of Métal Hurlant, translated by me. For such a short strip, it was surprisingly tricky to translate. You're not missing any plot -- there's no previous story this is continuing from, just good fun with hardboiled tropes -- but it still reads abrupt and inchoate. The title still doesn't sound quite right in English, but "trying to stay alive" wouldn't fit on the title logo; and the whole thing hangs on a dream sequence both twitting and hyping that year's Angoulême festival, which I changed to the San Diego convention for the same reason that I changed Paul Personne (a French hipster bluesman) to Brian Setzer -- wanting to make the references as immediately-understandable as possible across cultures. This was also the first time I tried translating sound effects, which wasn't too hard (wham! is in the original), but made me realize all over again how bad I am at drawing with a trackpad in Photoshop. I'm still working on some of the longer stories -- including the first Ray Banana album -- but I guess because Ted Benoît is the clear-line artist of his generation least well represented in English (or at least tied for that honor with Floc'h), I want to cover as much of his work as I can find. So here you go.

De Smet is one of the great Dutch cartoonists of the past fifty years, smart and funny and absurd and broadly accessible across language and time. Although his masterwork, De Generaal, about a tin-pot military leader attempting (and consistently failing) to grab more power in an unstable regime, is probably the least culturally translatable to Anglophone audiences, though it’s widely enjoyed pretty much everywhere else in the world. I deeply admire his ability to build a fully thought-out and detailed world even with an exaggerated cartoony style; the humor of this strip is as much in the setting as in the action.

"Promiscuity on Proximol" (Promiscuité sur Proximol), drawn by Jean-Louis Floch and written by Jean-Luc Fromental, as published in the "Vacances" special issue of Métal Hurlant in June 1982, translated into English by me in one go, then revised with the help of Google software. Jean-Louis Floch is the older brother of Jean-Claude, who signs his work simply Floc'h. (To add to the confusion, they've both worked extensively with Fromental.) This short, punchy story in brilliant neo-atomic style, all clear lines and neon 80s colors, is a lovely piece of sci-fi nostalgia. I love the shape it takes, moving from social satire to reverie. I changed all the specifically French references (ski resorts, beach towns, pop songs) to American ones, because I feel that that's a translator's job when working with a form this short and context-dependent. (In translating a novel or a film I'd try to keep the local color; a comic, like a sitcom or a pop song, mostly just needs to sound like it belongs in the new language.) On the other hand, now that I've stuck "Strangers in the Night" in there I've got no reason to expose my popspotting crew to Antoine's "Qu'est-ce que je fous ici."

I guess I should probably create a tag so that the collected translation is easily read in one place. Of course that means that anyone on Tumblr can find it if they type in the correct words. So I've taken my real name off the site.

The first few pages of "The Atomic Spritzer" (El sulfato atómico) by Francisco Ibañez, the first of the album-length Mortadelo y Filemón stories, from 1969. The Franco-Belgian comics of the clear-line (studio Hergé) and Marcinelle (Jijé, Franquin, Tilleux, lots more) schools tend to take up so much oxygen in discussions of classic continental comics that the fact that Spain (along with many other countries) was having its own parallel movements of florescence and innovation, even when the cartooning style remained classically "bigfoot" (to use an Americanism), can easily be ignored or forgotten entirely. (What, France assumes that its culture is the only one worth paying attention to in Europe? Knock me down with a feather.) Mortadelo & Filemón (I've only slightly anglicized one name, which departs from previous translation efforts, but I think preserving the rhythm is worth a little "foreignness") are the biggest comics stars in Spain, comparable to Astérix or Spirou in France and Belgium, or maybe even to Charlie Brown in the USA. (Ibañez is still going strong, pumping out 48-page albums at the alarming rate of six a year.) It's terrific comics-for-kids work, with some social, political and military satire for older kids and grownups but plenty of pratfalls and jokey-jokes for the youngest audiences, and with a rough, scrappy grace to the drawings that strikes me as what Tom Spurgeon likes to call "essentially comics." Ibañez isn't a particularly realistic artist, but he builds his world as firmly as any technician of three-point perspective and cross-hatching does. I've left in all the original onomatopoeia (though I've removed all the initial ¡ marks), and tried to be as vernacular as possible. My adaptation of the title of the story turns out to change its meaning significantly, since "atomic" in the original doesn't necessarily mean anything to do with nuclear energy; it's just a sulfate compound sprayed through an atomizer. With, obviously, unusual results; but I took the atomic hint and ran with it. Time will tell if I've done irreparable damage to the storyline. Okay, this really is the last full album I'm going to try to translate until I finish the ones I've started. Nothing but short stories and to be continueds from here on out.

"Fall Guy" by Ted Benoît, a two-page montage (later a stand-alone portfolio) from a "comics noir" magazine special in the early 80s (I assume in (À suivre), but I only have the Spanish reprint in Cimoc), translated by Google and me.

In a way, the translations I'm doing here are an attempt to establish a canon of comics and cartoonists that people in the US -- even very well-informed comics people -- generally don't know much about. This work is too good to be forgotten, too universal to belong to only one country or continent. My fondest hope is to be co-opted by a real publisher, so all these wonderful cartoonists can get paid.

Anyway, this the translation I’m proudest of so far. Time to circle back to something else now.