Stern volume 1 cover

The Series That Publishers Forgot (to Continue Translating)

Stern

I saw a video trailer for the recently-released fifth book in the “Stern” series. This is, in theory, very exciting news:

Except, only the first three books have been translated into English so far. The fourth never was, and so I’m not holding out hope for the fifth to be, either.

Sadly, this is not the only title that’s been abandoned like this.

Ekho

Echo v8 cover by Alessandro Barbucci

Ekho is another brilliant example. This is one of my early favorite European series. It’s a great combination of a fun story and brilliant art. However, after volume 9, translations suddenly stopped. Two more books have since been released in France, but there’s no sign of them ever reaching the English language market.

This one really hurts. It’s one of the first books I started reading from Europe and always a delight. It’s the kind of book I would have wanted to draw when I was a kid, filled with imaginative alternative earth scenarios including lots of creatures.

It’s also sad because this isn’t a Europe Comics project. This is published by Delcourt/Soleil, who do their own translations. They don’t do many of them, though. This is one of the few. If they’re given up on it now, I’m super sad.

Also, the English translations of Ekho aren’t available on Izneo, just Comixology.

Glorious Summers

Cover detail from Glorious Summers v1 by Zidrou and Jordi Lafebre

There’s one more book in the “Glorious Summers” series that remains untranslated. For a while there, they were moving fast to translate those books into English. Once they caught up, they stopped. The next book came out and we’ve heard nothing.

Dark Horse did a print edition of Lafebre’s album, “Always Never“, but Glorious Summers has yet to make it to print in English. I’d have thought this series would be an easy one for an American or British publisher to pick up.

All the North American comic professionals who’ve read it love it. It’s easily accessible. It has beautiful art and an engaging story told through the ages.

Why that most recent album was never translated, though, is a good question.

Lafebre has another new graphic novel coming out this year. My fingers are crossed that we’ll see it in English. Maybe Dark Horse will even pick it up.

The Old Geezers

The Old Geezers v5 cover detail

“The Old Geezers” has two untranslated books on the market right now. I assume this series stopped showing up digitally because Ablaze picked up the English language license for the series. Unfortunately, they’ve only published the first four albums (across two books) so far.

Maybe they will translate the most recent two for print eventually?

And More!

There are other missing books, too. Manu Larcenet did a “Valerian and Laureline” book. While Matthieu Lauffray’s book in that series was translated and available through Cinebook both in print and digitally, Trondheim’s entry remains forgotten. All of the core books in the series have been translated, though, so I can’t complain too much about that.

Back to Basics v1 cover detail by Manu Larcenet

“Back to Basics” was a great series from Jean Yves Ferri and Larcenet. The five original books are all translated, but a recent return to the series for volume 6 is not included. I’d love to read that one. I need my Larcenet fix!

“Jerome K. Jerome Bloche” is a series I’ve been more quietly enjoying. I’ve read two of the three books that are available today – and have a review half-written for one of them — but there are more books out there that could be translated. I’d love to see them.

What am I forgetting about? Drop a comment below with your favorite incomplete or forgotten series!

What This Doesn’t Cover

This is where I need to disclaim something: I’m not counting series that are being reprinted slowly or out of order here. I wish Cinebook published the Spirou books in order. I wish they published more of “The Bluecoats.” But they’re still continuously publishing titles, just on their own schedule in their own order.

Maybe we can talk about those books in another article sometime…


What do YOU think? (First time commenters' posts may be held for moderation.)

11 Comments

  1. If I may go a bit old school, I want to nominate Dieter and Michel Plessix’s Julien Boisvert (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julien_Boisvert). Sort of a deconstruction of Tintin, Heavy Metal brought its first volumes to English-speaking readers in 1993, but to date, no one has translated the last two books in the series.

  2. Only about 2000 or so titles have been translated into English since 1958, which accounts for less than 5% of published BD. You may have a long wait ahead of you.

  3. Good idea to keep track of this! I haven’t got anything to add, probably because I mainly read in Dutch. I did notice that you mention Dargaud as publisher of Ekho, but shouldn’t that be Soleil? And the untranslated Valerian album you mention is also by Larcenet right?
    I hope that all of these series will be continued!

    1. Thanks, bacta, you’re right — Ekho is published by Soleil, which I believe is an imprint of Delcourt. My mind sometimes confuses Delcourt with Dargaud. These are all excuses. I’ll go make that correction now to be productive. =)

      I have no excuse on the Trondheim/Larcenet mix-up for Valerian, except that Trondheim has written so much stuff that my brain defaults to his name every time and it’s right more often than not. 😉

  4. Stupid question : I seem to remember that Manga afficionados have develop a crowdsourcing system (scantrad ?) to translate into French some japanese books not yet available on the French market officially. Why can’t we do something like this for FR>EN ?

    1. Probably just a numbers thing. There aren’t enough fans to keep it going, if it did exist. I imagine one could pop up and translate a few books before getting bored and closing up shop from lack of support. I’m also very cynical these days.

      1. There is a very small scene that does this for Franco-Belgian comics, and even some that have done it for Italian comics, ex-YU countries. Back in the day some members of DCP, a comics scanning group, started doing translations, that eventually became known as Dragonz, their work got me interested and I’ve been doing amateur translations (scanlations) for around 10 years now. Most of the people who were active when I started have faded away due to real life, various other reasons, or just disappeared, but there are still some very talented and dedicated people who do the odd comic here and there.

  5. Yes, I don’t know why the English translation for Stern was stopped, (poor sales,most likely, but this was supposed to be a tool to convince foreign publishers. For some reason there is a Croatian translation!). Time to learn French!

    1. Yeah, I’m guessing that once they had three books translated, they didn’t need anymore to sell the license. Pity. And I AM learning French! Mais, tres lentement. J’aime lire Spirou chaque semaine. I can read a little more of it every week. 😉

  6. I really enjoyed Castle in the stars by Alex Alice. The watercolor art is really good. Unfortunately, they haven’t translated the last 2 books in the series. I tried contacting the publisher directly but they never responded