Call it irony, call itmise-en-abyme, but this is a story of bad luck within a story of bad luck, as if a hoodoo really had been cast upon this doodad (work of genius.) Certainly, the commercial failure ofThe Hoodoodad,1 and that of its series predecessor,Harum Scarum, are hard to explain without putting it down to some sort of curse. (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secretsbook was released around the same time, so perhaps there was a little dark magic involved?)
On paper, it should have been a hit. The story, reminiscent of Hergé’s lauded classic Tintin adventureThe Castafiore Emerald,is aSeinfeld-esque comedy featuring entertaining characters, and penned by France’s hottest new star ofbande dessinée– the prolific Lewis Trondheim. The writing, the plot, the gags, the cartooning, and the translation are all solid gold, from start to finish.
So, what’s it about? “The Hoodoodad is a story about misfortune, dirty-word Scrabble, too-secret art, too-public photography, miniature car racing, exorcism, answering machines, nauseating desserts, pinball, parents and godparents, yappy little dogs, and the intricacies of fate and destiny.” …according to the blurb on the back, which, although not far from the truth, somewhat misses the point. The beauty of this book is not the story itself, but how it is told.
Reviews are unnecessarily hard to find given that the McConey series effectively represented the zenith of Trondheim’s powers at the time. (Arguably, he’s achieved even greater things since.) Thankfully, in TCJ #201 a comprehensive overview of the Trondheim phenomenon is supplied by the insightful Bart Beaty who makes numerous references to The Hoodoodad:
“This is a very simple story in which [McConey] and [Richie] repeatedly save a man from killing himself. When they learn that the man believes he has been cursed by a carved rock from the imaginary [Mi’shgo’sh] dynasty, [McConey] agrees to accept both the rock and the curse. Chaos ensues, of course, as [Richie] believes that he is the one newly afflicted with the misfortune that emanates from the stone.The Hoodoodadis an extremely strong piece of writing that benefits from exceptionally sharp characterization. The exchanges between [Richie] and [McConey] are among the best that Trondheim has yet written and what should by all rights be throwaway scenes (an exchange with a beggar on the metro, ordering food in a restaurant, playing games in an arcade) take on the characteristics of minor classics. […]The Hoodoodadis the most thoroughly enjoyable piece of fiction […] the dialogue is consistently inventive, wringing humor and insight from seemingly unremarkable conversations about the minutiae of everyday life. […] Jokes are held long enough that their effect is maximized but never overplayed.”
The cartooning is simple and effective, with low-angle street scenes usually carrying a fisheye effect where cars and buildings are compressed and horizons curve into the distance. As for the protagonists… admittedly, I remember being a little put-off by Trondheim’s anthropomorphic animal-headed characters at first (Richie is a cat, McConey is a rabbit, etc.) but that was until I realized the true ingenuity of their invention. These are characters that can be drawn from any angle, in any situation, with any expression, and be immediately recognizable – they might look simple, but what they convey can be incredibly complex. Perhaps this partly explains how Trondheim has managed to produce so much material throughout his career. As Beaty explains, by the timeThe Hoodoodadhit the shelves in the USA, just seven years into his career as a cartoonist, he had published “two dozen books for more than half a dozen publishers in a multitude of styles, formats and genres.” Today, there’s so much material out there that it’s hard to put a figure on just how many books Trondheim has now put his name to, conservative estimates come in at over 150 titles.
Trondheim’s breakthrough McConey series had already sold likegateaux chaudsin France by the time Kim Thompson acquired the rights for Fantagraphics, presumably expecting similar success stateside. (He later recalled that his first encounter with Trondheim’s work had been a “holy shit moment.”) The initial sales, however, told a different story; in an editorial that same year, Thompson lamented that they were losing their shirts on it. Even though enough momentum eventually built to sustain seven issues ofThe Nimrod, a pamphlet series devoted entirely to Trondheim, McConey would never cross the Atlantic again. The autobiographical material that appeared inThe Nimrodwas released by Fantagraphics in 2011 asApproximate Continuum <a href="https://comicvibe.com/globalcomix-partners-with-kuaikan-comics-for-final-pre/” title=”GlobalComix partners with Kuaikan Comics for final pre”>Comics. However, the publication of further Trondheim work was shelved, with the brief exception of the first volume of the Ralph Azham series in 2012. American readers simply hadn’t been struck by that same holy shit moment.
The question today, given the prolific output of Lewis Trondheim up to its publication, and since then, why should the unassumingHoodoodadbe worthy of a second look, 28 years after its release?
The answer lies in the translation by Kim Thompson, for, sixteen years after publication, I experienced a holy shit moment of my own upon opening the pages ofThe Hoodoodadfor the first time and reading his wonderful translation.
While Beaty laments Thompson taking “a number of liberties” with his approach to McConey – I take the opposite view. Thompson’s word-bending not only did Trondheim’s work justice but, I would argue, achieved something much rarer: the same feat that only Anthea Bell withAsterixand Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper withTintinmanaged to pull off — that of improving upon the original. Furthermore – he was American! Thompson clearly admired the translation work of Bell and Lonsdale-Cooper, and his goal seems to have been the same: smooth dialogue, distinct character voices, and a real feel for how the story plays out on the page.
His first book credit was for Hermann’sThe Survivors!,published by Fantagraphics in 1982, ironically just weeks after he wrote a scathing article for TCJ 72 about the ‘dreadful’ English translation of Moebius and Jodorowsky’sThe Black Incal. Far from being well-received, theComic Book Buyers Guidewas unimpressed by Thompson’s dialogue – saying it was so overloaded with contractions and neologisms that it was almost impossible to read, the only reason to buy the book was for the artwork.
A full thirteen years had to pass before Thompson was prepared to put his name to another title (although he had been kicking out translations for countless pamphlet series’ in the interim), Franquin’sZ is for Zorglubfor Fantasy Flight Publishing in 1995. This time it was clear that Thompson had learnt his lesson. The translation also proved he had a skill for finding pleasing solutions to knotty linguistic problems. His ‘No more fungus among us’ for the rather bizarre original line of ‘Mort aux champignons’ (lit. death to mushrooms) was so catchy that the publishers emblazoned it across the back cover.
Thus, in addition to being a veteran writer and editor, by the time Thompson began tackling Trondheim’s material he already had a good twenty years of translation experience behind him. This meant that he knew the target market would not accept any weirdness in the name of being faithful to the original. Indeed, the title he went for inThe Hoodoodadspeaks volumes about the plot, yet if he had decided to keep the direct translation of the original album title,Les Pichenettes, the book would have been called “Flicks” – an unsatisfying allusion to the cinema instead of, um, a doodad with a hoodoo. A clear improvement on the original.
Consider too that the lead characterLapinottranslates as “Bunny” – which is what my mom was known as until she married my dad – a somewhat feminine handle (and Bugs Bunny kinda owned the name anyway.) During the comics translators’ roundtable (published in three parts on The Comics Journal website in 2010) Thompson said he knew that readers would not have understood whatLapinotmeant, let alone how to pronounce it, so he had to change it without losing the rabbit reference. I guess “coney” sounded slightly masculine to Thompson, the word for rabbit first coined in the 12thcentury, and, somewhat inexplicably, he hits the nail on the head simply by adding a Mc prefix – to ensure the gender of the bunny becomes crystal clear.
Thompson also, unashamedly, added words and phrases that weren’t in the French original, employing what you might call a co-creative approach to translating Trondheim’s dialogues. His additions are well chosen though, as they all help you identify the tone and voice of each character in fluid, idiomatic, believable English. An approach he admits was heavily influenced by Art Spiegelman, the celebrated author of Maus. When he was translating Tardi’sIt was the War of the Trenchesfor the fifth issue of RAW magazine in 1983, Spiegelman gave him some excellent advice:
Spiegelman said, ‘What I try to do, is I try not so much to translate as to write it the way I think he would have written it in English to begin with if he had been writing it in English.’ I think that sort of sums it up. You junk all the stuff you know is in the way, because it was in that language to begin with, and just go for, when necessary, the spirit, the meaning of it […] I try to go for what reads best in English and I tend to be an extremely ‘unfaithful’ translator on that level.
When I readThe Hoodoodadfor the first time I was just blown away. It indeed read as if it had been originally written in English, even though I knew it was a translation.Holy Shit– I was thrown back to those days of my childhood when I was blissfully unaware that theAsterixalbums I was reading, again and again, were in fact translations.
Everyone should kneel on one knee and raise a palm to the heavens in freely and consciously accepting thatThe Hoodoodadis a work of pure genius.
- • Released as Les Pichenettes by Dargaud France (in the original French) in 1996,
* Released in English, with translation by Kim Thompson, by Fantagraphics in 1998,
* Nominated for the Harvey award for Best American Edition of Foreign Material in 1999,
* Released in digital format by Europe Comics in 2018.
