US – Friday, July 30

A Japanese manga makeover

'This dangerous situation is dangerous, Batman!'

That quote in the sub headline doesn’t quite have the ring to it as “Pow! Crash! Thwapp!” does it? But for graphic designer and editor Chip Kidd, that’s exactly the language he had to decipher when he worked on the translation for the new book, “Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan” [Knopf, $30].

During the time when Batman first captured the United States’ attention with his pointed cap, trusty utility belt, and Boy Wonder at his side (1966 to be exact), Shonen King, a weekly Japanese manga anthology for boys, licensed the rights to commission its own Batman and Robin stories. Those comics were never translated or reprinted in the US, until Chip Kidd and his co-authors came along.

“It’s like when people found those lost Beatles recordings,” says the famed graphic designer excitedly. “It’s this cross-cultural moment that’s 40 years old. They very much are at their core Batman and Robin stories — and they are very fun stories. But they incorporate this whole
other manga style. This kind of modernist chic that is just cool.”

For those not versed in comic book ease, manga (in the broadest sense) is basically the word to describe Japanese comics. And Batman, is, well, do we really need to explain that one to you? To have the two come together is, in Kidd’s words, “brilliant.”

In order for “Bat-Manga” to be readable to a US audience, Kidd and his co-authors had to translate what  the characters were saying the in the speech balloons. Luckily, they had a trusty translator but what was being written down didn’t have the umph of US comics. “I found myself further translating [the text],” says Kidd.” Hence, “This dangerous situation is dangerous, Batman!” which is what the translator wrote, became something a bit more exciting — and sensible.

“There was no subtlety at all,” Kidd laughs about the literal translations. “And we’re talking about comic books here.”