{"id":45727,"date":"2021-03-05T23:18:51","date_gmt":"2021-03-05T20:18:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tentaclii.wordpress.com\/?p=45727"},"modified":"2022-04-29T18:30:18","modified_gmt":"2022-04-29T18:30:18","slug":"party-like-its-1984","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2021\/03\/05\/party-like-its-1984\/","title":{"rendered":"Party like it’s 1984…"},"content":{"rendered":"

A while back Archive.org put up the legendary science-fiction comics editor Josep Toutain’s first run<\/a> of his Spanish-language 1984<\/em> title (#1 – 30<\/a>). It’s still there.<\/p>\n

The magazine actually ran on to #64<\/a>. Now Archive.org also has Toutain’s 1984<\/em> #30 – #64<\/a> in PDF, newly arrived. Plus five Annuals (1980-84) and even two ‘specials’ in the year 1984 that appear to have been showcasing aspiring young comics artists.<\/p>\n

The magazine was titled 1984<\/em> until the actual year of 1984 swung around… and of course this made an anachronism of the masthead. It was then continued, necessarily re-titled, as Zona 84<\/a><\/em> (#1 – #96<\/a>, three annuals, four beginners anthologies, and what appear to have been four poster-magazines — the latter being a format that was hot at that time).<\/p>\n

It’s not to be confused with the various licenced editions of the Spanish 1984<\/em> which appeared in other languages. In the USA this means Warren’s 1984<\/em> (later titled 1994<\/em>) magazine, which offered a toned-down American competitor to the English edition of Heavy Metal<\/em> and Marvel’s native Epic<\/em> magazine. I never saw the Warren 1984<\/em> (1994<\/em>) here in the UK, and it probably never even reached our comics shops, perhaps due to the import censorship and moral panics of the period — and thus never survived to be found later in the comics boxes of second-hand bookshops.<\/p>\n

There was also the partial reprint of the Spanish title as a French-language magazine Ere Comprimee<\/a><\/em> (#1 – #42). This seems to have been a high-quality competitor to Metal Hurlant<\/em> (the French source of Heavy Metal<\/em>) in France and Belgium, but heavier on the nudity and cartoon violence.<\/p>\n

The Warren titles and Ere Comprimee<\/em> did not just do straight translated reprints of the Spanish issues. They appear to have selected the strips they wanted, adding alongside them local artists and new unique editorial material. I would imagine the words also saw some buffing and shifting in the translations.<\/p>\n

Which reminds me that we still need an auto-translate comics reader software for French and Spanish comics. The best we have is Project Naptha (May 2020), a browser addon at the Chrome store. It now works on the Opera browser as well, but can still only do ‘English to other languages’. We need a PDF\/CBR reader than can attempt basic auto-translation of comics-lettering from French and Spanish to English. Ideally inline and replacing, as Project Naptha has shown is possible.<\/p>\n

I seem to recall reading somewhere that other publishers in Europe also produced their own clones of the Spanish 1984<\/em>, using translated material from the Spanish magazine. Possibly there are titles from Germany and Italy I’m not aware of.<\/p>\n

Such titles also appear to have inspired Cheval Noir<\/em> (1989-1994), an American Heavy Metal<\/em>-like title in which Dark Horse reprinted the best continental European comics in English. It offered a mix of standalone shorts, and ongoing strips, in black and white. Probably other long-forgotten magazines were also around in this ‘free’ period between the censorship of the 1950s\/60s and the prudish political correctness of the later 1990s. While the stories in these various titles veer toward excuses for titillating 1970s-style nudity and gory battle, the comic art and sci-fi inventiveness is fabulous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A while back Archive.org put up the legendary science-fiction comics editor Josep Toutain’s first run of his Spanish-language 1984 title …<\/p>\n

Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lovecraftian-arts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45727"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45727\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54033,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45727\/revisions\/54033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}