It's a comic, an American comic, that fans feared they'd never be able to read: the sequel, on sale Friday, November 8, to the huge bookstore success “What I like is monsters”by Emil Ferris. In 2019, she received the prize for best album at the Angoulême festival, the critics' grand prize and the Eisner Award (equivalent to the Oscar for best comic strip). Five years later, it is the opportunity to look at the painstaking work of the clever publisher who bought the rights. But the adaptation of an American comic book turns out to be much more complex than one would imagine.
Huge boxes are stacked on the shelves of “Monsieur Toussaint Louverture”the small publishing house from Gironde which adapts Emil Ferris' bestseller in France. Inside one of the boxes, thousands of loose sheets: “We keep all the corrected proofs”specifies the owner of the place, Dominique Bordes. “There are the corrections that need to be integrated, then we check if this integration has been done correctly”.
Because adapting an American comic book is much more than just passing the text in “Google translate”: “We talk about style rereading. We have to find the author's style, find the exact meaning, the subtext she wanted to put. Afterwards, there is a pre-editing, matching the text with the size of the images. bubbles. And the third step is to have the book hand lettered.”
For six months, Lisa Folliet, the editorial assistant, took her sleeping hours to assemble this large puzzle, from multiple scans of the author's writing: “When someone writes by hand, they rarely write the same letter twice, as we had several sets of fonts, there can never be two letters in a row that look the same”specifies Dominique Bordes. “It was very detailed”adds Lisa Folliet.
“It made me a little crazy. When I walked down the street, the letters on the storefronts transformed by themselves, it was special.”
Lisa Folliet, editorial assistantat franceinfo
“We would like it to be simpler to do, adds Dominique Bordes. This is why other publishers do not take these books. If someone gave me Marvel, I would be very happy to see if I could contribute something. It seems a bit vain to do all that, but we want the French reader's experience to be as close as possible to what Emil Ferrris wanted.”
Not to mention the logistics of getting it to your bookstore. This volume 2, highly anticipated and very successful, was released in bookstores in 57,000 copies, an exceptional print run for an American comic book.
