1 Comics in Translation: An Overview FEDERICO ZANETTIN University of Perugia, Italy This article provides an introduction to comics, the translation of comics and the contents of the volume. It begins by ofering a brief historical overview of comics, highlighting those aspects which may be especially interesting from a translation perspective, and an overview of diferent types of comics translation, from an inter- and an intra-semiotic perspective. This is followed by a discussion of the speciicity of comics as an art form (the ninth art) and as a means of communication, and of its bearing on translation. The article ends with an overview of the literature on comics in translation, and of the contributions to the present volume. I n a socio-historical perspective comics have a precise time and place of birth: the end of the nineteenth-century, in the USA. While in many respects comics are not diferent from other forms of ‘sequential art’ (Eisner 1985) such as pre- historic graiti, carved Roman columns, painted glass windows of medieval churches, eighteenth-century prints, or twenty-irst century Web pages, “the history of comics is closely related to the emergence of mass-media, due to new means of mass repro- duction and an increasing readership of the printed media” (Mey 1998:136). More specifically, comics ‘as we know them’, began to appear in Sunday pull-out supplements in large print-run newspapers. This is in fact where the word comics itself originated: “Because of their exclusively humorous content, [the Sunday pull-out] supplements came to be known as ‘the Sunday funnies’, and thus in America the term ‘comics’ came to mean an integral part of a newspaper. […] Later the word would encompass the whole range of graphic narrative expressions, from newspaper strips to comic books” (Sabin 1993:5). The birth date of comics is usually made to coincide with that of Yellow Kid, a character created by Richard F. Outcalt whose strips irst appeared on the pages of New York newspapers in 1894 (see Figure 1.1, centre fold); this was not only one of the irst comics to be printed in full colour and to contain dialogues within balloons in the pictures, but most of all “the irst to demonstrate that a comic strip character could be merchandised proitably” (Olson, n.d.: online). Within a few years ‘the funnies’ were joined by daily strips in black and white, and since the Sunday pages and daily strips created by early masters of American comics such as Winsor McCay and George Harriman (see e.g. Carlin et al. 2005), the history of comics in the world has evolved within diferent cultural traditions, but often bearing the mark of translation. American comics rapidly travelled across the world and merged with other traditions of ‘drawn stories’. The most famous European ‘proto-comics’ are perhaps those created by the Swiss teacher and painter Rodolphe Töpfer (1799-1846) (see Groensteen 1999, 2005a), who in 1837 published the irst of a series of illustrated comedies in the form of booklets, and the German Wilhem Busch’s (1832-1908) Max und Moritz illustrated stories