Yesterday I read Chicken Soup & Goji Berries (link) by Naomi Cui and Janice Liu. I originally got this when I participated in Alex Steacy’s Drainers comic kickstarter and chose a tier where some other comics published by Cloudscape were bundled in.
It is a sweet little story about a chinese-canadian family, with the paternal grandmother moving to canada. The story is structured into chapters, with each chapter focusing on one member and how they relate to and interact with the grandmother. It’s short but very nice. The art is also decent.
The reason I’m bringing this up here is because the comic has an interesting experiment, that unfortunately doesn’t quite work. See, the family the story is about is bilingual. The grandmother speaks only chinese, where as the rest of the cast often speaks english and the youngest child actually speaks very little chinese. The comic chose to have the language rendered as it is spoken, and each page is published twice, once in the canonical version on the right, and on the left a “translated version” with text that is english on the right in chinese and what is chinese on the right in english.
This makes the comic rather annoying to read, however. I don’t speak chinese, so for longer sections where the characters speak chinese I was looking at the blown-out art on the left, which is still legible but also a deliberately worse version of the original art.
When the language switches in the middle of the conversation you are also forced to switch back and forth between the two versions of the comic, which is also annoying. You could perhaps credit this as a sort of manifestation of how it feels to rapidly switch between two languages, but that would at best be the case for someone who doesn’t speak one of those languages very well. As someone who speaks both german and english fluently, I never experienced that sort of “whiplash”.
So yeah, the comic is nice and sweet, but reading it is kind of unnecessarily difficult. It feels like there would have been a better solution for this like, rendering both versions of the text in the same speech bubble. In the online version which I linked above, the thing is that you see the canonical text, but then you can click the speech bubble and get the translation, which works well, but simply doesn’t translate into print. The online version is also in color whereas print is just black and white.
