Scott Dunbier, former Wildstorm editor, recounts on his blog one of my favorite Michael Moorcock stories. In the mid-50s, Mike worked for Tarzan Adventures, who had acquired the plates of the Burne Hogarth-illustrated Tarzan stories. Problem was that the plates were in Spanish.
| Quote: |
| "Oh, I speak Spanish," I told him, "It would be nothing for me to take those plates and translate them into English." He was surprised, but agreed, and the plates were duly delivered.
I didn’t speak a single word of Spanish and would have been hard put in those days to tell you what ‘Hola!’ meant. So all I had to work with were the strips themselves and make a guess at what the Spanish meant. I also had to work very quickly, since we were on a weekly schedule. For the fun of it, I also decided to use the names of friends in the science fiction community, which is how you can easily tell which strips are by me and which by the original writer–my story lines, of course, are also subtly different, but they also carry characters like the evil Benford twins (Greg and Jim Benford were then teenagers living with their military dad in Germany), Ken Bulmer, Lars Helander, Ron Bennett and various other well-known UK SF writers and fanzine fans of the day. |
I’ve heard Mike relate this story many times and I’m glad to see it in print. The only piece missing from Dunbier’s report is that Moorcock was actually 15 at the time!
Original text (Click on image to enlarge)
Text re-written by Michael Moorcock (Click on image to enlarge)