Keskustelujen arkisto

>>Can someone tell me how Daan Jippes last name is
>>pronounced? ("Yips" or "Yip-pas"?)

Harry wrote:
>Of these two, yip-pas is closest.
>(I would have written yip-puhs, but maybe that's less clear.)

Thanks, Harry! That's very clear.

Best,

Eric

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Jonathan Gray wrote:

> "Scrooge's Quest" was the first of the 3 major Duck Tales serials. The
> second one being "The Gold Odyssey" and the last being "A Dime in Time". The
> final one was condensed into two parts (probably due to the implosion) but
> the latter two reflected Disney's attempts to try and interject on-going
> continuity into the Disney series while maintaining standalone stories.
> UNLIKE Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers (which I think mastered this to SOME
> extent), the two major Duck Tales stories were each 7 parts long and had a
> definitive beginning and ending.
> Think of them like...remember how the TV show had "Treasure of the Golden
> Suns", "Super Ducktales", and "Time Is Money" as large multipart storylines?
> Think of "Scrooge's Quest" and "The Gold Odyssey" as comic book style
> stories of that.

"TGO", I think, was far more in the spirit of the TV series' multi-part stories than "Scrooge's Quest". In particular, it mimicked the first season's serials ("Treasure of the Golden Suns" and "The Firefly Fruit Contest" / "Catch as Cash Can") in that it bounced from location to location and mini-crisis to mini-crisis while maintaining a consistent "throughline." The cliffhangers didn't hurt, either.

> On the opposite end of the spectrum, "Scrooge's
> Quest" felt isjointed and "patched together" in spots - namely because two
> of the subchapters - "Shipwrecked" and "Down But Not Out in Duckburg" felt
> very tacked on and out of place. Kinda like they were inserted into the
> story as filler. Furthermore Magica seems out of character in spots (even
> for Ducktales) and Scrooge's incessant obsession over Webby after her
> kidnapping (which serves as the first major climax/focus of the story) feels
> very out of place.

Right on the nose... either Wolfman legitimately wasn't comfortable with the characterizations or simply didn't take the necessary time and trouble to get them right. For those Disney fans who are relatively unfamiliar with DuckTales -- and, notwithstanding the availability of DVD's and Toon Disney, such folks undoubtedly exist, particularly among the younger set -- Wolfman's version of the series will give a somewhat misleading impression. The only positive good that can come from the reprinting of "Quest" is that, if enough copies are sold, Gemstone just might feel comfortable enough to issue "TGO" and "A Dime in Time" -- perhaps in the same volume.

Chris Barat

PS: Jonathan: Another thumbs up for your work on "Gawrsh-Durn Champion". It was great. (I especially liked the subtle reference to MouseWorks!)

--
The Barat's Home Page -- watch for weekly updates!http://home.comcast.net/~kimba1962

And on the opposite end of the question in the title - can a good story save
bad artwork? I just had a discussion with a fellow artist/writer on this and
we each came to interesting conclusions about it but I'm curious as to what
you all think when it comes to the Disney comics end of things?

What Disney comics from any era in particular - Gladstone I, Disney,
Gladstone II, Gemstone - would you say that the artwork totally ruined a
good story for you? Or which one was saved by good artwork on what would be
an otherwise terrible story? Be brutal. :)

On that note, how do you think this applies to the vast Dell/Gold Key era?

This oughta make for fun discussion...

Jonathan H. Gray

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Gary Leach wrote:

> A fair stockpile of 3-tier stories were acquired for DDA and MMA
> before the two titles were cancelled. These stories represent a
> sizable investment (and are not "returnable"). While we don't see
> using them in WDC and US as an optimum solution, we also don't see
> any sense in just leaving them sitting on the shelf.

This sounds a little bit worrying to me. It seems that you guys bought
those 3-tier stories "only" because you had pocked-sized books, and not
because they were good and needed to be published anyway. I wouldn't
want to see those 3-tier stories stop appearing soon just because the
pocket-sized books are no more. I hope you'll keep buying them when the
ones you've already bought are through. Because those stories (and I'm
talking about *some* Italian stories. "Some", but still a lot), simply
put, are a lot better than anything else (and I'm not being patriotic
here, I'm being objective) and it'd be a real shame not to present them
to the American readers.

--
Francesco
http://www.dimensionedelta.net/scarpa/

FRANCESCO:

> Because those stories (and I'm
> talking about *some* Italian stories. "Some", but still a lot), simply
> put, are a lot better than anything else (and I'm not being patriotic
> here, I'm being objective)

Hear, hear! (And I don't think I'm being patriotic in agreeing with you, even
though Greeks do say "una faccia, una razza", i.e., "one face, one race", with
the appropriate Greek mispronunciation, of course, when talking about Greeks
and Italians!)

If I'm not mistaken, the original poster in this thread had expressed both his
dislike for three-tier stories and his appreciation of Scarpa's stories,
perhaps not realizing that Scarpa drew most of his stories in three-tier format!

Kriton.
-----
"I will venture just one question, Doctor. What precisely do you *do* in
there?"
"Argue, mainly!"
-----

Travis Seitler wrote:

> To which I would reply, "it depends." Specifically, it depends on
> whether the publisher's intent is to republish an old story _as an old
> story_, or rather to reinterpret an old story in a new light so that
> new audiences will find it as engaging as the original was to its
> intended audience.

Ok, but we're not talking about the Bible or Dante here, we're talking
about a story that's just as modern today (in language too) as it was in
1957. I'm a translator myself, I deal with these problems every day... I
translate Caniff and Herriman, and their works are generally a lot older
than Scarpa's! Notice anyway that I'm not dissing the translation at
all. In certain points it is *very* good. And not only when it's
literal, as you say you can't be always literal. For example... here
they talk about "Manhattan" a couple of times more than they actually do
in the original. But that's okay, because they're *really going* to
Manhattan, it's not added "for fun". Nor I see problems with "Killa
Goriller", to make another example! I know how "English" names made up
in Italy sometimes look weird there, and have to be changed.

But why, for example, talk about the Phantom Blot's traps? There is no
reference to the Blot in the real text, and adding it does not add
anything to the story, since the creator didn't mean it to be there.
We're all midgets standing giants shoulders here, we should not think we
know better than them, because we don't. None of us does.

This is not a new problem anyway! I remember some awkward references to
Barks's stories added in the old Gladstone's Colossus of the Nile...

> So to bring it back to the topic being discussed here: if we had
> printed "The Great Gawrsh-Durn Champion" in a collected archive of
> Scarpa material (a la the CBL) then I would agree with you--a direct
> translation would be preferred. On the other hand, since we published
> the story in a monthly pamphlet (a pamphlet which, whether anyone here
> likes it or not, is seen as "kiddie comics" in this country) it makes
> more sense to update the dialog and thematic elements where it's
> feasible, creating more of a "dynamic equivalent" of Scarpa's tale.

But these ARE kiddie comics, I agree! (meaning that it's imperative that
kids can read them.) And there is no problem with creating the
equivalent... of course you are, you're translating it! 8-)

--
Francesco
http://www.dimensionedelta.net/scarpa/

> I'm not sure I'd like it, though... just as I did not like the
> Flintstone reference... this is 1957, the Flintstone still had to air!
> But besides that... if there is no reference in the original, then
> there must be no reference in the translation, no matter what. Not
> even the Phantom Blot reference later on in the story, there is no
> such thing in the original.
>
> I'm also sorry to see that censorship in the first two pages (about
> hunting). I know that many Italian reprints of this story were just as
> censored (actually, even more), but that's not a good reason.
> Censorship is always wrong, no matter what.

How ironic to read the second "no matter what" in the paragraph
immediately following the first! What is an absolute, unequivocal
statement of what MUST NOT be in something, if not an attempt at censorship?

Being a typical monolingual American, I don't do translation work. But
I've written new dialog for both Gladstone and Gemstone when the
original writer has made a good story, but his non-native skill with
English has rendered the actual words on the page less than ideal. It's
a lot like translating from English to American. In the credits, it's
called "American script".

My sole mandate in this work is to make it entertaining. Usually, that's
done by remaining faithful to the story as a whole, but playing fast and
loose with details. If I think of a good gag that can be slipped in
without damage to the original, I have no qualms about doing so. I've
even inserted entire subplots that weren't there before, tho the
opportunity for anything as radical as that doesn't come up very often.

If there's a reference in the original that may strike a modern reader
as dated, you can bet it'll be modernized in the American script. And if
I can insert a reference into the script, that modern American readers
will get, I'll do so in a heartbeat. In a Scarpa story published by
Gladstone during the '90s, I needed an anology to fit into the reader's
cultural context, so I made a passing reference to President Clinton's
cat. It was perfectly apolitical, so no problems there -- just a thing
everybody had heard of, which was therefore available for use -- which,
to an American audience, the European equivalent was not, even if a
"faithful" translation would have used one.

I took some flak from this very list for something else in that same
story. "How would you like a translator to do that to one of your Egmont
stories?" I was asked, tho it came more in the form of a challenge. I
responded by asking the translators to make me look good in their
languages, whatever that took. We're all familiar with the idea of
things being "lost in translation". That's inevitable. But the
translator can also put something in to replace it. There's no reason a
translated version can't be as good as the original, provided the
translator, who presumably is as good a writer in his own language as
editors seem to think I am in mine, is given a free hand.

As for "censoring" things like references to hunting or (one of my
favorite things to drop) tobacco smoking, bear in mind that while these
stories, churned out like yard goods for the voracious appetite of a
weekly comic book, may indeed be deathless art -- that's not how
publishers see them. They're just trying to sell funnybooks. If a racial
stereotype, perhaps perfectly acceptable in some bygone era, would cost
him circulation by offending some modern readers -- he'd be a darned
fool not to soften or eliminate it. It's not a matter of right and
wrong. It's what the audience is likely to buy.

In an ideal world, there would be separate editions for quaint, musty
antiquarians who want it precisely as it was, and modern readers who
just want to be entertained -- the antiquarian edition, of course,
available only privately, so as to avoid unnecessary
circulation-damaging controversy -- but we don't happen to live in an
ideal world. In the here-and-now, only one edition of the average,
routine story is going to see print, and it's going to be the one with
mass audience appeal. End of story.

Quack, Don

P.S. Translating Herriman?!! Since much of his appeal lies in his
inventive use of the English language, that must be a daunting task!
Hats off to anyone who can evoke a similar response in another language!
But I'll bet a good job of it would be nothing like the original.

If Gary Leach could possibly lift the veil on a few of the 3-tier stories
considered to be published outside the now sadly abandoned "take-along"
pocket books, readers already familiar with them could comment on their
qualities. Of course without actually spoiling the plot, please.
Besides Scarpa and apparently Fecchi, who seem to have the readers'
approval, are there other writers/artists in the lot yet to appear for the
first time in American comic books?

-- Ole