I was scanning another issue of the Swedish comic book Kalle Anka & Co, when I encountered an issue where two pages have some slight water damage. Still completely readable, and the sort of thing to expect when you pick up used comics for cheap from the second-hand store, and it's not like the goal of this project is to have printable files - I do it to have digital, readable versions of these comics (and because I find this enjoyable).
That said, I'd rather have pages that look better than that if I can help it. At first I tried editing it, but undoing the warping would just be too big of a project. So I went on INDUCKS to check what magazines this particular story had been printed in, and downloaded a scan of the French comic book Super Picsou Géant #174. I erased the French dialogue, re-typed the Swedish dialogue in the typeface used in the Swedish version, and there we have it. These two pages alone probably took the same amount of time as scanning two whole issues normally would.
There are some differences, including:
- The positioning and spacing of the text is not 100% accurate
- Two of the speech bubbles in the French edition are redrawn to be slightly larger to accommodate the longer French dialogue
- The ducks' beaks and legs are slightly redder in Sweden than in France (this is consistently so; I noticed this while doing a fan translation of a Scandinavian Magica De Spell comic and similarly using a French magazine as the art source)
...But you would not notice it unless you looked at the Swedish print magazine and my edit side by side. All that said, the integrity of the project is definitely compromised starting today.
This was cross-posted to Cohost and to my blog on Neocities.
Comments from the original publication:
Rastagong @lrwerther, 24 Sep, 2024
Didn't ever expect to see Super Picsou Géant mentioned on cohost!
It's so great you were able to salvage your page (digitally) by checking for an equivalent edition in another language, I just love the idea so much.
Alexandra IDV ✨💙 @AlexandraIDV, 6 Sep, 2024
Hehe! I did feel clever when I realized that there was a way to salvage this without finding a second Swedish copy, and it turned out really nicely!