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.
Since I’ve been working on these comics—translating, cleaning, editing, typesetting—I wanted to write a little something about my process. Self-indulgence is one of the purposes of this blog after all.
The translation is the most collaborative part. I try my best with Google translate and dictionary apps, but I’ve also had some help. With Japanese, my sister-in-law (a linguist who has studied Japanese for many years) has been a great help. I also used the iPhone app “imiwa?” extensively for kanji recognition. With German, I managed to secure the assistance of a German speaker from the DKVine forums, Caramelman, who is doing most of the translation work on my current project. My parents-in-law also lived in Germany for several years, so they have answered some of my questions. This is usually the first step, and I put it all in one or several text files using TextEdit.
The step I refer to as cleaning usually just involves whiting out the speech bubbles, although for the Kirby comic at least I had to do some image compositing. This is easier with some scans than others. The Super Mario-kun scans were very clean with great contrast so it was easy to just draw white boxes over the text and leave it at that. The Club Nintendo scans are not as nice, so I have to go around each speech bubble with the paint brush tool while zoomed in. They are somewhat pixelated at that level of zoom, so the granularity of editing makes it easier. I try not to edit or change any of the actual art outside the speech bubble, that’s an obvious decision on my part. All of the image editing is done in Seashore app, which I settled on after trying many different painting apps.
The editing and typesetting phase occur simultaneously, and sometimes require retranslation on my part. I type out the contents of the next speech bubble, change the wording if it needs to fit better, sometimes change the size. After all that, I usually ask my wife to proofread what I’ve done to make sure it sounds natural and flows well. The font I use throughout the speech and narration of a comic is SF Toontime. Again I tried various programs to find the best way for this process of positioning text boxes, and none of the paint apps were any good at it. Finally I hit upon OmniGraffle, a professional tool for making flowcharts and stuff, which I used during Honours at university to make diagrams for my thesis. It works great, and now I have a workflow for each stage of the comics process.
Oh there is a final step. After cleaning I try to save as raw an image as I can, to import to OmniGraffle. I then export, and finally use the export options in Preview to make the final product as close to the original in terms of data size. This usually involves saving to jpeg and adjusting quality, which I’ve found doesn’t make too much of a difference visually. The image size is the same throughout.
Kirby’s Biggest Case comic from Club Nintendo, page 19.
Another small mini-project, to complete an unfinished comic on the web. Kirby’s Rainbow Resort has a great page on various Kirby comics and manga, with a very nice design. The only thing it was missing was the translation of the other CN Kirby comic, printed during the regular run, and half of one page from their translation of this comic, which had been corrupted somehow.
This comic, by the way, is from special edition #3 of the German magazine, and unlike most of the special issues, isn’t based on any one game in particular. Instead, there is a framing story about Kirby being a private eye with his assistants, Dedede and Bluefish, with interstitial dream sequences and so on to exhibit brief plugs for the spinoffs Kirby’s Dream Course, Kirby’s Ghost Trap, and Kirby’s Block Ball.
Anyway, this was a very quick job to add the lower third of the page just to make it complete, as well as retranslating the section that I had added. Font doesn’t match but meh, like I said it was a quick job.
I tried to post a topic on KRR’s forums about this, but it hasn’t been approved yet so if anyone’s involved over there, get on this! I can’t stand seeing things like this incomplete.
Speaking of which, here’s the links for the only Kirby comics I know of:
KRR’s nice page with lots of manga (mostly 4koma and a small bit of the CoroCoro comic, Dedede who lives in Pupupu, which is even cuter than usual) and the two Club Nintendo comics. There’re a few 4koma translations but it’s mostly the native Japanese. http://www.kirbysrainbowresort.net/multimedia/manga/
The English translation of Kirby and the Secret of the Glibber (ie the other CN comic) is included as part of the CN translation project by Opentrain. This has not been brought over to KRR either, so you spies get onto that too! It’s in the 1994 edition, here: http://opentrain.199xchan.org/?p=223
Of course, Kirby also featured fairly regularly in other comics during Club Nintendo’s run, in crossover situations. Highlights would be the Wizard of Oz parody wherein he is evetually turned into a toaster, and Die Nacht des Grauens (The Night of Horrors), in which he, Link and Mario become demon hunters. To see these and other comics, check out Opentrain’s site. They’ve done 4 years of comics so far, but also provide a link for the (almost) complete German raw collection.
Lylat Wars (Star Fox 64) comic from Club Nintendo, final page.
Small follow-up comic project while working on a larger one from the same magazine. This is the final page of a comic printed in special edition #6 of the German magazine Club Nintendo. I only did this page because the rest of it (or at least as much as anyone has scans of) has already been translated, and is hosted at the Arwing Landing gallery. Can’t figure out how to contact them about it… But now, all the pages I know about are available in English. If anyone can get them to put this up, let them know!
Other Star Fox comics:
1992 Star Fox comic, Nintendo Power
1997 Lylat Wars comic, Club Nintendo (German, translated)
2002 Star Fox Adventures prequel manga, Japanese Adventures website (Japanese, translated)
UPDATE: Arwing Landing has disappeared from the Internet, taking all of its galleries with it. Also Dropbox sharing doesn’t work any more. Basically, ignore all the links above and just go here for where I uploaded all these comics.
I’ve posted a few times on here about the official Japanese manga “Super Mario-kun”. Well, for a while now I’ve been planning on scanlating a small bit of it, for practice and to see if I could do such a thing on a larger scale. I already have scans, so it’s more like translating and editing—I’ve never owned anything rare worth scanning. I chose to start with these because they’re very short, only a few panels on a few pages; they’re very simple, being a children’s manga they have simple language and plenty of furigana over the kanji; and the scans I had were very clean, well aligned, very high contrast, which made the typesetting and all easy.
What I’m presenting here is a series of 8 4komas (4-panel gag strips), and 2 picture puzzle activity pages, that went in between chapters in a volume of Super Mario-kun. This volume was a recreation of the story of Donkey Kong Country 2, except with Mario and Yoshi, because they’re the main characters of the manga. You’ll find they tend to visit a few places they’re not supposed to, like Wario’s Woods, and their past selves in the Yoshi’s Island volume. Only natural, with these 3 sub-series being part of the greater Mario Universe.
Don’t expect any heavy themes here, especially from the spot-the-difference page. The nature of this manga is visual jokes, occasional toilet humour (not in these, though), and over-the-top comic violence. But, and this is the reason I translated this at all, it is a contribution towards the overall Donkey Kong pseudo-canon. I’m not sure what to call it actually, the body of work of DK-related materials, not all of which are strictly in continuity but which are still important (at least to me). Anyway, I’m a fan so I was interested in a comic about silly monkeys.
Give them a read, and if you’re a true fan like me, save them to your computer and spread them around. Although I intend to post this on DKVine and DKC-Atlas myself, so I’m not sure where else you would go with this.
EDIT: By the way, credit to my sister-in-law for translation help. There’s only so far you can get with online dictionaries and apps. Also thanks to my wife for helping to make some lines more natural.
