Found in Translation: New Books from Typocrat
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on Nov. 8, 2005 Sign up now!
By Douglas Wolk -- Publishers Weekly, 11/8/2005
Typocrat Press has only published two books so far—Baladi's Frankenstein Now and Forever and next month's release of Killoffer's Six Hundred and Seventy-Six Apparitions of Killoffer—but it's already distinguished itself as a promising graphic novel imprint. Run by married couple Nadia Katz-Wise and George South, the London-based company plans to concentrate entirely on English-language translations of European art comics.
PW Comics Week: How did the two of you start Typocrat?
Nadia Katz-Wise: It kind of started on a whim. I went on a three-month tour of Europe with a film festival from Philadelphia—we traveled to 93 different cities in Europe. In every city, while the director was showing the movies, I went to scout out the local comic book shop. I ended up bringing back thousands and thousands of pounds' worth of comics to London. I couldn't really read any of them, but I was really excited. I know a bit of Spanish and French, and I have a lot of bilingual friends, and they sat me down really patiently and read me most of the stories. Originally, we wanted to do a small comic book distribution company, but we realized that people wouldn't be able to read them. So we thought, "Well, why don't we just publish them?"
I went to Angouleme two years ago, and Alex Baladi was there—one of my favorite artists, he's published maybe 30 books. I approached him and said, "Can we be the first to translate one of your books into English?" And so we did it, and that was Frankenstein. We didn't know anything about publishing—we just learned it from reading books.
The Killoffer book seems like a real labor of love for both artist and publisher; how did that come to be?
Again, I'd admired Killoffer's work for a really long time. Six Hundred and Seventy-Six Apparitions of Killoffer was nominated for "best edition" at Angouleme a few years ago; the other nominees were Jimmy Corrigan, David Boring and The Rabbi's Cat, and Jimmy Corrigan won, but I thought it was a great, great book. I approached him about a year ago in France, and said, "We want to do this book." He said, "Ah, but do you have lots of money?" We said, "No." He said, "Oh. Okay, why not?"
What's the story behind the book itself?
[French comics collective] L'Association was doing this project where the publisher sent all the artists of the group—David B., Lewis Trondheim and so on—to different parts of the world. The idea was that they'd all do travel journals from Egypt and South America and wherever, a sort of Carnet de Voyage thing. So Killoffer went to Montreal, and this is what he came back with, and everyone went, "what?" But it's amazing, it's a masterpiece. He's always kind of been like this—he's a really serious artist, and he's primarily known to the general public as an illustrator. He's kind of a dirty guy, he's filthy, he's a bit rambunctious, but I don't think anyone expected this. Our translator, Richard Lawson, also worked on the translation for Frankenstein Now and Forever. He did the first draft and sat me and George down and took us through it. Every other word is a pun, and it's really vulgar as well, so we thought, "we can't translate this word-for-word, so we'll have to shape it to give the same feeling as if a French person were reading it." We talked it through for up to eight-hour sessions. At one point, we'd polished as much as we could, so we called Killoffer. He was very involved—we spent maybe two months working with him, going back and forth.
What's coming next from Typocrat?
We'll be releasing information on our Web site, probably in the next couple of months. At the moment, I'm only interested in translations. There's no need for us to do any original English-language work—there are some amazing publishers to do that. I just want to publish nice books, and I want to be the one to publish the books that nobody else has translated into English.
