Especially in the hands of Batman.
Don't tell me. I don't ever want to know where that pen's been.
This sadistically creative use of a writing utensil has been brought to you by JLA: Welcome to the Working Week (2003) by Patton Oswalt, Patrick Gleason, and Christian Alamy.
After reading way too many comic books, I’ve noticed that artists seem to really enjoy doing their own renditions of Leonardo da Vinci‘s famous painting, The Last Supper. Just for fun, I’m going to post these images as I find them and also specify which comic book character is standing in for which biblical figure.
For the record, this is the original painting…
"The Last Supper" by Leonardo da Vinci (1495-1498)
…and here’s a panel from Countdown #36 (August 22, 2007) by artist Jim Calafiore:
Somehow, Batman doesn't seem like the forgiving type to me.
The character-by-character breakdown:
As you can probably guess by the unimaginative title of the premiere entry in this ongoing series, I’ll be using these blog posts to provide English translations for foreign language text appearing in comic books, cartoons, movies, television shows, anime, manga, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
This time around, we’ll be focusing on Justice League of America #44 (June 2010) by James Robinson, Mark Bagley, Rob Hunter, and Norm Rapmund, where four members of the Rocket Elite, a German armed forces unit outfitted with powered suits of armor, are sent to investigate a meteorite crash in the Black Forest and end up having a run-in with the Demon Etrigan:
German: Wie lange haben wir erreichen das Ziel?
English: How long do we have reach the target?
Yes, that’s a literal translation, meaning that the original is grammatically incorrect. “Wie lange, bis wir das Ziel erreichen?” (“How long until we reach the target?”) would’ve been more accurate.
German: Dreissig Sekunden, Commander Danitz.
English: Thirty seconds, Commander Danitz.
Since comic book fonts are generally comprised of uppercase letters only, substituting “ss” for the “ß” in “dreißig” is indeed correct. What’s strange is that “commander” is still in English. A complete translation would’ve been, “Dreissig Sekunden, Kommandant Danitz.”
To be fair, though, translating “commander” isn’t as clear cut as I’ve made it out to be here: it’s highly dependent on the branch of the armed forces you’re dealing with as well as the country. If you were to subtitle or dub a movie or television show that focuses exclusively on the U.S. Army, for example, you’d usually leave the rank designations untranslated. Commander Danitz is obviously German, though, so I see no reason for them to leave it in English here.
German: Gut, ich bin sehr gespannt…
English: Good, I’m very eager (to)…
German: Vas ist…
English: What is…
This is a common mistake. “Was” (German for “what”) is written with a “w”, not a “v”. The reason why this error appears so frequently is due to pronunciation differences between languages: the German “w” sounds more like the English “v”, while the German “v” sounds more like the English “f”.
German: Nei…
English: No…
The poor guy didn’t even get to finish saying “Nein”.
German: Die Rakete-Auslese
English: The Rocket Elite
The grammatically correct translation would be “Die Raketen-Auslese”, though I would’ve gone with “Die Raketen-Elite” myself.
The Raging Fanboy 