I Have Now Translated 100+ Comics

February 9th, 2014 § 0 comments

100

I did an official count, and sometime last year, I officially broke 100 in terms of the number of French graphic novels I have translated (am currently at 103). Some of these are still in production, so the actual published count is probably in the low 90s. This doesn’t count excerpts for periodicals like Words Without Borders.

What constitutes a “graphic novel”? I know, I know, this nomenclature is despite being widely suffered, still warmly contested. This count was based on source materials: i.e., if a French series was released in 3 volumes in France, but published as a single book in English, I counted it as 3 books. Conversely, if a single French book was split into 2 or more floppy issues in English, I counted it as 1 book.

The 100 looks more impressive in the original French, since they were mostly large hardcovers. Take the series The Secret History, for example, of which I’ve done 20 books to date: in French, each installment is a volume, hence a “graphic novel” unto itself, but due to packaging as a slightly thicker floppy with nicer cover stock, American readers are unlikely to consider it more than a single issue, hardcover trade collections of which might be deemed graphic novels (the relative completeness of story inside, or lack thereof, is another topic altogether).

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