Start publishing on
DD Comics!
Advertise with us
I came across this wonderful link (http://www.nickstember.com/chinese-star-wars-comic-part-1-6/) yesterday. A Chinese comic adaptation of Star Wars (A New Hope) drawn by someone who hadn't seen the movies and appears to have had limited source material to draw from.
Wow! Looks like he just swiped any pop-culture images he could to represent stuff he was unfammilare with. Instead of making his own designs he just coppied whatever he felt like.
- Stardestoryer = Space battleship Yomato
- Rebel frigate = Skylab
- Princes Liea = woman in a Spanish Matador jacket. (probably from a magazine ad) He look changes depending on what art he was copying from at the time though.
- Rebels = dressed in US high altitude flight suits.
- Stormtroopers = BobbaFett.
- Droid escape pod = Mercury reentry module.
And more and more and more… wierd! Reminds me of how prop artists used to make spaceships out of recognisable WW2 model kits and household items.
-As indeed were most of the props in Starwars, with the guns being barely changed from the real designs they were based on…
How about the English dub of Space Cruiser Yamato, Star Blazers? Or the first dub of Nausica "Warriors of the Wind" or the dub of My Youth in Arcadia, " Vengeance of the Space Pirate "?
Some butchered scenes and lost sequences and you're like WTF? Then I see a subbed uncut version and it's "oh so that's what that meant!"
It is understandable that many things would change (or got lost) in translation…
Consider that it is not only words what it's been translated… you're communicating ideas, concepts, into a different culture (sometimes really, really different) and it has to be done in a reduced space where footnotes or explanations have to be short (if at all present)…
In Gunwallace's example the translation of the Star Wars story is pretty much the same as the real thing. The only real difference ia the imagery: the artist was the translator there. He/she obviously didn't have access to any of the original art except for pics of Darth Vader and Bobba Fett so they used whatever they found in magazines and books for the rest.
It's a really cool approach to the lost in translation idea.
The artist also had pictures of most of the droids from both the first and second movies. His interpretation of the Jawa crawler matches one of the very early concept drawings. Ralph MacQuarrie did a few illos very early in the design process and one wonders how well that movie would have worked instead of the look they ended up with.
And then there are the samurai snow troopers from Empire and other abandoned concepts. Like what if they had retained Jabba as a fat Cockney guy in a fur coat?
It's kind of cool to go aorund and look at foregin posters of familar movies. Then there are posters for movies that have no realtion to what actually appeared on screen. The artist just took one concept and ran with it like the Metaluna mutant from This Island Earth.or Robbie the Robot in Forbidden Planet.
Kirby's 2001 is a strange, strange beast. The translation is from Clarke via Kubrick to the weirdness of Kirby's extended universe, and his characteristic way of drawing people and things. Even the way he drew the monoliths is just so Kirby.
Another example would be how a comic book retelling of War of the Worlds became the comic Killraven, and how P. Craig Russell's art developed over that run.
Someetimes this "translations" end up being very different. Maybe, instead of using the word 'translation' we should use the word 'adaptation', that'd be closer to what it is actually happening. But then again, it's more fun to say 'lost in translation' than 'lost in adaptation'…
Advertise with us
DDComics is community owned.
The following patrons help keep the lights on. You can support DDComics on Patreon.