“Doctor Necromantic”

Doctor Necromantic is a webcomic by Nate Bramble, currenly published either on its own domain or on the website Tapastic (or do they prefer Tapas now? bah! humbug! I'll call them Tapastic much as I will call Wikia Wikia to my dying breath, whether or not they rename themselves Ostrich or whatever). Webcomics, much like print comics, are a wild jungle of mediocrity with the occasional gem, and I think this is one of them. 

It concerns a wel-off gentleman by the wonderful name of Dr Olaf Derleth, who decides to take up necromancy as a hobby. Spooky fun ensues in a classic Addams Family or Comedy of Terror vein.

Even setting aside for a moment the fact that I really like spooky comedies, and that this is a very good one, I think the biggest draw has to be the artwork. The watercolor coloring/shading and the “classic” look of the characters, combined with the detailed backgrounds, make for an extremely appealing aesthetic that is too rarely seen in modern comics. Note also that this uses the comic font, the one foolish discarded by IDW lately as you'll recall from the last post. I dig it.

The above strip is representative of the kind of joke usually found, and of Dr Olaf's dynamic with his simple-minded (but in no way  Igor-eque) assistant Carl. Most of the comic is just strips of this sort chronicling Dr Olaf's studies into the Dark Arts. The Doctor himself is a fun protagonist, whose acerbic wit, ego, and cynicism somehow shouldn't work with the fact that he is also an incompetent beginner, but, somehow, do.

This not to say, of course, that Doctor Necromantic is perfect. As with any comic strip, some jokes just aren't that funny or tasteful, and some of the attempts to inject a serialized story into the proceedings don't work as well as the author thinks they do.

Nevertheless, Doctor Necromantic is a very enjoyable (and rather quick) read, recommended to all who like both classic comic strips and fun spookiness. 

Post-Scripta:

• Is it a coincidence that both this and another, much-better-known gothic-story-parody, Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events, feature an egotistical, cynical nobleman by the name of Olaf with a unibrow? I frankly don't know. 

• Yes, this review was rather short, but I don't have much time these days. Still, you can look forward to a review of a much better Disney comic than… what we saw last time… quite soon! And after that, to another, non-comic bit of wannabe-gothic hilarity…

“My Second Million” And Its Translation

I love Disney Comics, and I love period dramas, and I love ventures into the pre-1947 life of $crooge McDuck — indeed, my only beef with Don Rosa's masterful Life and Times series has always been Rosa's conscious decision to not only limit himself to Barks, but to try and write a 'definitive' biography with precious few holes for other authors' tales to fill. Thus it stands to reason that I would love All of $crooge McDuck's Millions, the miniseries which New IDW have elected to start off their run of Uncle $crooge with. 

But no. 

It's terrible. 

The series itself — it's a little on the bland side already. I'd previously read a few chapters of it, though not this one, either in French or in their online ComiXology format. But a little blandness is nothing some snappy, euphonious dialogue can't solve. That had, ever since they began, been the philosophy of American translations of Disney comics; and while I don't condone some of the heavier changes performed by these 'freeform' translators in the past, there's no doubt who I'd pick between them and dialogue that sounds like it's been written by a goddamn robot. 

And oh, does the IDW version of All of $crooge McDuck's Millions (renamed Uncle Scrooge: My First Millions in this printing, in perhaps one of its wisest decisions; mark that noting something title's is slightly less terrible than it could have been is probably the faintest praise anyone's ever damned anything with) ever read like it was written by a goddamn robot. Let me demonstrate. 

So I'll make a cursory note that Paolo Mottura's art is what it always is, namely that the background and shadowwork are extremely impressive at times, the characters' on-modelness is sometimes less so, and overall it's pretty solid. This isn't its most impressive example or anything, but it's soearing leagues above Fausto Vitaliano's frankly insipid plot, and more to the point grafting this terrible English dialogue on it feels rather like surgically giving a pig's tail to the Marsupilami. 

But so then, the dialogue. To begin with, Scrooge's line is fine, I guess, but ‘hard’ vs. ‘thrilling’ is hardly the most effective dichotomy. Might I suggest, for example, ‘tough’ instead of ‘hard’? Mostly however, it is Donald's line which fails horribly. “The second part of the soap opera is now beginning”? Who's saying this, Donald Duck, or David Attenborough? Try to imagine Clarence Nash saying this in his Donald voice. Just you try it. The line even fails on its own terms — “soap opera” is an amusing turn of phrase that cannot ever, ever, ever sound refined; sticking it in the same sentence as a by-the-book construction such as “is now beginning” simply will not do. 

The awful thing, of course, being that this line could be very funny. Comparing Scrooge's tales to a soap opera from within a serialized format of storytelling is delightfully metafictional. But you can't even think of all that, because your eyes hurt from how badly that thought is translated into words. 

And the stilted, robotical, unsayable-by-real-humans dialogue does not

ever

ever

goddamn

STOP. 

I've heard people defending the so-called ‘Fresh And New’ translation style by proposing that the higher-ups of IDW (or, indeed, Disney itself) may have ordered the simplification of translations to better appeal to younger audiences. To this I say, firstly, humbug, children haven't been the core audience for Scrooge McDuck in the united states in forever; secondly, if you dare bring up DuckTales 2017, I'll counter that even within this show's fandom, the kids are primarily interested in the triplets and Webby, whereas the Scrooge fans are on the older side; thirdly, I will kindly remind you that children love wordplay very much and stilted Grammarbot.exec speech less so. 

And fourthly, the Fresh And New translations even fail at being educational. Oftentimes they'll use English phrases wrong or just make them up. For example…

…ten second's Googling, if nothing else, will inform you that a telegraphic message is called a telegram. The telegraph is the machine you use to send it. See, this is the kind of detail you really don't want to get wrong if your aim is to have simple, grammatically-unfailing dialogue to aid and educate youngsters. 

And…

…TWO IN A ROW? HAVE YOU NO SHAME? HAVE YOU NO CONCEPT OF MERCY?! 

What we have here, in both panels, are attempts at witty dialogue. Or, rather, they are the charred husk of what was once witty dialogue in Vitaliano's original, mangled beyond repair by the Fresh And New treatment. “I smell the smell of [smth]” is not something anyone has ever said or ever will say, thank heavens. And it's painfully clear “Nothing can stop progress or my wealth!” used to be a wacky spin on the “You can't stop progress!” proberb in Italian that lost any fizz or pizzazz when the Fresh And New translator failed to consider that, A), the saying is less readily recognizable if you swap out 'you' for 'nothing', and B), “wealth” is not some sort of progress you can “stop”. 

For reference, here's how I (an unpaid amateur) would have done it. 

I think anyone with a taste for funny comics will agree it's already bounds ahead of the printed version. And I'm not even saying this is that good for localization — that first one is a little unwieldy, I kind of wanted to do something in the second one with the visual of Scrooge's ever-rising curve, and, of course, the lettering is all over the place. Yet in all humility I feel pretty confident in stating that by most metrics, it's already bounds ahead of the printed version. 

These two here are clients to whom Scrooge is giving a refund. First, “that's not enough!” and “that's right” are as boilerplate as you get. But also: unless Alistair here is a police officer, the line “I should put you in jail!” is nonsensical (it should at least be: “I should have you put in jail”). And unless he is a good friend of Scrooge (he isn't), you just can't let him call Scrooge Scrooge in the way he called him Paperone in Italian. That's as bad as those children's books where people like the Beagle Boys or even total strangers would refer to him as “Uncle Scrooge”!

And on, and on, and on. Mistake after blunder after blandness after nonsense, right up until the last panel…

…where even all of Mottura's shadowwork can do nothing to obscure the sheer fact that casual use of the word “businessduck” goes against everything we know of how anthropomorphic species work in the Scrooge McDuck universe. Fercrissake, one of the most famous and influential Scrooge stories ever is called Only a Poor Old Man, and you think terms like businessduck are a thing? What did the translator use for reference, My Little Pony? 

…

…so yeah. My Second Million, IDW edition. It's terrible. I've been trying to articulate just how lowly I think of it, and I think I have it now: if for some reason I ever want to reread the story, it's the ComiXology version I'll pick up. It would still be a travesty if a publisher tried printing it in a regular book, but it's still better than this version. Let me repeat that, for it bears repeating: this is a situation where the cheap ComiXology translation is significantly superior to the printed IDW version! THIS SHOULD NOT BE A THING THAT HAPPENS! Here's the first panel in the ComiXology version. Compare the IDW one I showcased above. The dialogue ain't Oscar Wilde, but good lord is it better here than it was there. 

And for our traditional Post-Scriptum, something else that irritates me about the so-called ‘Fresh And New’ translations, and which the ComiXology versions didn't get wrong: I didn't mention it earlier because it can't be the translator's fault per se, but what the sugar-bowl is up with the new font? For whatever reason, to go along with the change of staff, it was decided to use a completely different, and (if I had to choose) significantly uglier, font, than the one Disney comics had been using for decades. Compare the two version of the opening splah panel.