Translation, censorship and the development of European comics cultures

This article provides an historical overview of the role played by translation and censorship in the development of national traditions of graphic storytelling in Europe. In the mid 1930s, comics industries witnessed a boom in countries like Italy, France and Spain, largely due to the influence of imported American comics. Other nations followed different routes. The UK, for instance, acted as an exporting country towards the rest of Europe but imported little foreign production, and the British comics industry reached a peak only in the 1950s. In Germany, a comics industry was not born until the 1950s, and a national tradition developed only much later. While the production of comics in all these countries was regulated at various points by official censorship, preventive self-censorship was applied independently of political color and form of government, and translated comics were often heavily manipulated to suppress verbal and visual representations of violence and sensuality, and to alter unwanted political and cultural references. National traditions were promoted by censorship against foreign products, and developed by incorporating the themes and visual language of American comics in original production, while the translation of comics was characterized by the norms regulating the translation of popular fiction more generally.