Sixteen Volts

The blog "Comics Curmudgeon" made me think about newspaper comic strips, as opposed to graphic novels, manga and other similar types of "long-form" comics book. With the newspaper comic strips, the term "comic" is lot more appropriate, since these strips are typically actually intended to be humorous. In fact, instead of "typically", these days you could pretty much say "always".

In the old days, there also used to be more serious newspaper comic strips such as Rip Kirby, Modesty Blaise (by the way, wouldn't this one be just perfect for a summer movie adaptation, with perhaps Angelina playing Modesty and that guy who is going to be the next James Bond playing Willie Garvin?), Flash Gordon and The Phantom. These strips were drawn in a more "realistic" style and they have continuous plots, which makes them less marketable compared to humorous strips whose self-contained strips can be read in any order and occasionally skipped with no harm. I don't think that they even make serious newspaper comics like that any more. At least I don't remember having seen any in the newspapers that I have read for a long time. A couple of Finnish newspapers still run The Phantom, though, for the sake of nostalgia and because I guess that it's pretty much the last such strip still being produced. Perhaps the British still do these strips, but I wouldn't know it since I don't read any of their newspapers. I know there used to be "Garth", a strip worthy of its own post in the future.

When a humorous comic strip is run in a Finnish newspaper, the strip and its characters are given new translated names. The same isn't done for the realistic strips, at least since after the war. (Before the war, Finland was a very different simple and agrarian nation, so that having "Mandrake" would not have worked at all, so he was given a new more descriptive name "Taika-Jim" (taika = magic), since "Jim" was probably the only American name that most Finns would have recognized at the time. Aww, that's so quaint.) For example, "Beetle Bailey" becomes "Masi", but Rip Kirby is still Rip Kirby. When I was younger, I sometimes wondered about the logic of doing this and thought whether the dividing line between the comics in which the names are translated and the comics in which they are not reveals anything else important about those comics. I came up with a hypothesis "The name of a character is translated if the character would survive a fall from the edge of the cliff to climb back up with his arm and leg in a cast and band-aids over his face" which initially seemed to have a pretty great predictive power, but it is not 100% accurate: for example, I don't think that Charlie Brown would survive such fall.

I have always considered such translation of cartoon character names to be a good thing, since it would be strange to read a humorous comic that is otherwise in Finnish but where the character names are in English. That would just be pretty weird. But for some reason, during the past decade or so there has been a noticable trend not to translate names of not only cartoon characters but also of movies and TV shows but to keep them in their original form, since English names are more trendy and fashionable and not so old-fashioned. For example, "Garfield" used to be translated as "Karvinen", but the comic is now published under the original name "Garfield" and the character is called that even inside the translated strip. For some reason, the original English name is thought to just sound better for the young target audience. I haven't read Marvel Comics for a long time, but I have understood that all superhero and villain names are these days kept in their original English form. This didn't used to be that way when I was reading these comics.

And I just don't think that this is right. I hate mixing languages this way since it always looks so goddamn juvenile. There is nothing wrong with either language by itself, but if you are writing English, then write English, and if you are writing Finnish, then write Finnish. Simppel äs tät. If some name of a movie really is untranslatable but is considered important, the convention of taking the original name and augmenting it with a short explanatory Finnish text is halfway acceptable. Besides, it is always a delight when the translator does his job well and comes up with a great translation for the name of a movie, a TV show or a cartoon character so that the important connotations are preserved in all levels at once and the underlying basic idea of the name resonates the same way in the translation as it does in the original language. In this sense, translating "Wally" in Dilbert as "Erkki" must have been the absolute number one translation ever. I have no way to describe to a non-Finn why this particular translation is so insanely great, so you just have to take my word for the fact that it really is. But of course, having "Pentti" and "Erkki" in the strips instead of "Dilbert" and "Wally" would be lame and old-fashioned, so these characters are now called "Dilbert" and "Wally" even when the rest of the strip is in Finnish. Crap.

But perhaps not everything should be translated. In high school age or so, I remember reading a comic strip called "Snake" which wasn't translated, but I can't find now what the original name would have been. This strip was about a snake that all other animals hated and despised because, well, he was a snake. Of course there was also a girl snake (with eyelashes and a pink bow on top her head) that he unsuccessfully tried to pair up with. The thing is that obviously most of the strips were somehow based on some pun or wordplay in the English language, so even if the translators did their best, it never came out right. So this comic perhaps shouldn't have been chosen for translation, but perhaps it came as part of some syndication package deal. On the other hand, this strip became an interesting puzzle in the sense that it was often fun to try to decipher what the original joke must have been and why it was supposed to be funny, when the translated strip made no sense whatsoever or contained some bad pun. (Puns simply just don't work in Finnish, since the language is much more "sparse" than English and its spelling and pronunciation are practically one-to-one.) At that age, I succeeded in this task perhaps half of the time, since I didn't really know the idioms that well. It would be interesting to see the strip again and see if it is any more obvious now.

But that's enough griping for that topic, let's move on to something more interesting. It would be funny if somebody created a comic strip that was drawn in a cartoonish style but whose content was serious and realistic. There might even be such comics out there, or at least one-shot experimental strips in the sense of "Super Fun-Pak Comix" by Tom the Dancing Bug. Conversely, there could be a comic strip that was drawn in a totally serious and realistic style but whose characters lived and operated in a cartoon world. Imagine a strip where such a character falls of a cliff or is attacked by a hungry grizzly bear, and then in the next panel we would see him lying in a hospital bed in a full body cast. I have to wonder if anybody has ever seriously considered creating such comic strip.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Saturday, April 08, 2006 at 3:27 PM