Invited to a dinner held by the Dutch Foundation for Literature who are supporting now comics, the first language we found ourselves speaking was Dutch. The great satirical artist and agent provocateur known as Willem (Bernard Willem Holtrop, 1941-) initially made his name as a Dutch cartoonist, but was charged with high treason after a 1966 caricature depicted Queen Juliana as a prostitute, and he moved to Paris and built up an illustrious career in France, combining politics with obscenity. Last year, he was awarded the Grand Prix d’Angoulême, a lifetime achievement award. It gave the Dutch the perfect opportunity to get their foot in the door.

This year, Willem invited twenty comics artist from Holland to come along and produce screen-printed posters satirising French current affairs and fly-post them all over Angoulême. The project was called LA BEDE EST DANS LA RUE and was highly visible and very effective. (Do check out the posters on their weblog.)  A good deal of these artists’ books have been or will be translated into French but few are published in English. Typex’s Rembrandt was recently published by Self-Made Hero, who will also be bringing out Barbara Stok’s Vincent, translated by Laura, next month. Jan Cleijne’s Helden van de tour (Heroes of the Tour) has just been sold to Head of Zeus.As we dined with this select group of Dutch artists, attempts to ply our trade were met with incomprehension. Translators?! What are you doing here? We all translate ourselves into English. Or we write in English. Do comics need professional translators? We can’t afford them.

We ended up editing Jeroen Funke’s self-translated texts at the dinner table instead. The next day when we did a tour of the stands and the rights’ centre, we encountered similar patches of resistance. One publisher translated from French himself and had an editor check it. Others used native speakers of the language being translated from rather than the other way round. Only the French, who with their thriving comics industry form an international hub and translate from many languages, were un-phased by the concept of comics translators.

Unfortunately, we can’t translate into French! So it was time to relax and enjoy the show instead. Two of my favourite graphic novelists, Rutu Modan from Israel and Alison Bechdel from the US were coming to give talks, both had recent books about their family. The concept of the graphic novel as opposed to the comic was partly derived from the fact that there has been a growing trend in biographical and autobiographical works over recent years. La Cité internationale de la bande dessiné, Angoulême’s über-modern, super-fantastic comics museum bore witness to this fact too. ‘Towards the end of the twentieth century a new form arose, featuring current affairs, society, world travel. It was a way for the reporter-artist to reconfigure observed reality and offer a personal vision of the facts’.

The personal is often political though and the comics genre’s history of subversion is one of its most popular characteristics (see for example Mad magazine est. 1952). Alison Bechdel, famous for the Bechdel test, said she knew how it felt to not be seen, and she wanted to render visible people on the margins of society. Her famous series Dykes to Watch Out For is a page-turning, at times hilarious lesbian soap and deliberately includes more than one black character (no token measures). The French interviewer clumsily questioned Rutu Modan on the unconventional-looking female protagonist in Exit Wounds, giving her the perfect opportunity to wonder why a woman shouldn’t be represented as very tall and not conventionally beautiful. This is what real people look like.Meanwhile, a cartoon on the front page of the local paper poked fun at the outrage from Palestinian supporters that the Israeli company Soda Stream was the official sponsor of the festival, and the Japanese ambassador had apparently denied the historical accuracy of a wonderful exhibition featuring Korean works about the enforced prostitution of ‘comfort women’ during the second world war. Check out the drawings of Tack Young-ho, Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, Choi In-sun and Jisue Shin if you can find them. Translation work may have been scarce but there was enough controversy to go round.

About the author
Michele Hutchison worked in British publishing and in Dutch publishing for many years before becoming a full-time translator and blogger. Writers she has translated include Joris Luyendijk, Rob Riemen, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer and Simone van der Vlugt.

Additional information
The Angoulême Festival website in FrenchFleurs qui ne se fanent pas – Korean exhibition on Comfort women.More information on the Sodastream controversy at the festival.Please see here for ‘Ghentish Talent‘, Michele Hutchison’s previous PEN Atlas piece for graphic novels from Flanders.

The post Comics, cartoons and controversy appeared first on English PEN.

Outside of the UK things look rather different. In America there is less critical resistance, super-hero comics are an integral part of popular culture, while arty graphic novels have long been accepted as part of high culture. The US comics industry prizes, the Eisner Awards were established as far back as 1988.  In last week’s Publishing Perspectives  Duncan Jepson pointed out that graphic novels also have a long tradition in Asia, which interestingly he believes might be related to having a more visual written language made up of pictorial symbols.

Franco-Belgian comics also have deep roots. Think of Asterix, Tintin, Lucky Luke and Suske en Wiske (translated in the US as Willy and Wanda). Yet alongside these series created by teams of writers and illustrators and often aimed at a children’s audience, there is now a thriving graphic novel scene in Belgium – more specifically in Flanders where the Sint Lucas Art Academy in Ghent is churning out a wide array of talent from its Illustration course. One of their most famous alumni is the young graphic novelist Brecht Evens, whose stunningly-illustrated books The Wrong Place and The Making Of have been published in English by Cape in the UK and across the pond by Drawn & Quarterly to great critical acclaim. (As an aside, I confess to being one of his translators, along with Laura Watkinson, and for the first book, Rhian Heppleston.)

Brecht Even’s lush and complex watercolour panoramas have made him most hip artist on the scene right now. He was the obvious choice to curate a show of Flemish graphic talent at Angouleme Comics Festival last month – which sees 200,000 visitors descending on a small town in France. In ‘La Boite à Gand’, Brecht chose to showcase four other illustrators with whom he’d trained at the Sint Lucas: Brecht Vandenbroucke, Hannelore Van Dijck, Lotte Vandewalle and Sarah Yu Zeebroek. Not all of them make books yet and the exhibition made the overlap between contemporary art and graphic art very clear. Brecht Vandenbroucke has just published an entirely textless first book, White Cube, which was the subject of much foreign interest at the festival. The explosions of colour are indeed reminiscent of ‘the other Brecht’s’ work.

General agreement that graphic novels are in vogue hasn’t yet translated into an increase in sales figures, I hear from editors and graphic novelists alike. On the High Impact tour (highimpacttour.com), I talked at length to another fantastic Flemish talent, author of the beautiful and moving When David Lost His Voice, Judith Vanistendael, who told me that rights to her books have been sold in countries like Korea and Egypt but she feels that most of the hype is still confined to conversations and awareness of graphic storytelling rather than it being a money-earner. Her works still mainly reach a niche audience and are not yet mainstream. In the Dutch-language market, this translates to sales figures of up to ten thousand copies, which represents major success in the field.

Producing books in colour is expensive, debutants generally have to make do with black-and-white line drawings which scan more easily. Yet small specialist publishing houses like Self-Made Hero and Drawn & Quarterly do manage to maintain high production values for their books. Young entrepreneur and director of Self-Made Hero, Emma Hayley, told me she was actually planning on doing more graphic novels in translation and it seems that others are listening to the jungle drums too. With subsidies available to cover translation costs from Dutch, we might be seeing a lot more of that Ghentish talent.

Incidentally, the Grand Prix Angouleme this year went to a Dutchman, Willem, who lives in France and produces a cartoon for Charlie Hebdo. It coincided with the Dutch Literary Foundation producing their first comics offensive: Ten Graphic Novelists from Holland.

A name to watch out for there is Tim Enthoven whom I came across when he was still finishing his graduation project. The project, his as yet untranslated book, Binnenskamers, was published in 2011, and like his Flemish contemporaries, his work also crosses over into the field of contemporary art.

About the Author

Michele Hutchison (Solihull, 1972) worked in publishing in the UK before moving to the Netherlands in 2004. She now works as an editor at a Dutch literary publishing house and as a freelance translator. Writers she has translated include Joris Luyendijk, Rob Riemen, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer and Simone van der Vlugt.

Additional Information

• Article in Publishing Perspectives about the British attitude to graphic storytelling
• Film on ‘La Boite à Gand’ featuring Brecht Evens (in French)
• The Flemish Literature Funds (for subsidy information and the free publication Bangarang, Comics from Flanders)
• My blog for the Dutch Literary Foundation, Judith Vanistendael on the High Impact Tour
• London Super Comics Con: 24-25th February 2013
• Angouleme Comic Festival 2013

The post Ghentish Talent – Graphic Novels from Flanders appeared first on English PEN.