UPDATE: I made a new version of this comic. Announcement here: http://miloscat.tumblr.com/post/50456307633 I also replaced the links in this post to the new ones.
It’s finally done! I’ve been working on this comic for a long time now, on and off. You may recall I previously released some DKC2 gag manga pages, and single pages from Kirby and Star Fox comics. All those mini-projects were practice for this.
This comic has never been translated before, as far as I know. It appeared in a 1995 “Special Edition” of the German Club Nintendo magazine. Some of these were free giveaways, not sure about this one though. It contains humour, action, and some game tips and covers most of the adventure through each world, up to the top of K. Rool’s Keep. It was written by Marcus Menold, John D. Kraft, Thomas Görg, and Markus Pfitzner, and was illustrated by Work House Co. Ltd., Tokyo.
This comic is important to me as it was the last Donkey Kong-related western comic that wasn’t available in English. Although Donkey and Diddy do appear in other regular Club Nintendo comics, those are mostly cameo appearances in ensemble comics and not a retelling (as this is) or unique Kong adventure. Incidentally, many other Club Nintendo comics have been translated online. The other DK ones are on the DKVine forums, and Opentrain are about 1/3rd of the way through the regular print run comics. There’s also 3 on the Bomberman wiki.
But back to this release. This started when Caramelman from the DKVine forums offered to help me translate it, as he is German. Big thanks to him for translating the whole thing, each line, into English. He did a great job and even tried to adapt the idioms, etc. I have handled cleaning the scanned pages (mostly the speech bubbles), editing the script and typesetting. Thanks also to my wife Everbloom for helping out with the final editing stages and for painting the beautiful credits page art. Special thanks to my parents-in-law for some small German clarifications. Scans were sourced from nintendo-power.de, they’re not great scans in terms of fidelity but consistent and level. They have all of the special edition comics there in the original German.
I should also say that my editing philosophy was not strictly literal translations. If something was idiomatic or awkward in the German I changed it. Throughout I emphasised flow in English rather than 100% the same words as the original. I also added a few little lines for the sake of a joke that weren’t there originally. Hopefully I wasn’t too blatant about that. Having said that, several lines in the German rhymed like the characters were singing or chanting (for humour, I guess), I mostly tried to make the line rhyme in English too.
Ok, so that’s the comic. I recommend everyone take a look, if only because I spent so much effort on it. I’m very happy with how it turned out. It’s a fine reminder of a time when the world of games could be immersive but still fun and silly. It also has some admittedly very funny faces. I could say a lot about the value of these types of things in helping develop personalities for characters but I’d better just stop prattling and post the links.
Please, enjoy.
