New comic, new concept, new site

A new series begins with "She's the Ransom"
恭喜发财!

Two things have occurred to me over the past year or so. First, there’s a lot of very ugly nationalism surfacing in the world, and as a consequence of certain political developments we Americans in particular are seen more and more as ugly Americans. Second, since my twisted boyhood I’ve always had the conviction that beyond the barriers of language and geography there are potential friends out there who share my share obsessions. It’s high time, therefore, for a bit of internationalizing outreach.

So here it is. A new webcomic called Bubbles.

Pretty women in bubbles!

It’s a little bit of satire, partly inspired by all those 1950s mad-science and monster movies I misspent rather too much of my childhood on. With the help of a battery of specially-commissioned professional translators and a very patient collaborating artist I’ve managed to produce editions in many different languages. It’s a bit less racy than many things you’ll find over here at Erotic Mad Science — one has to defer to different cultural sensibilities, after all.

Becky Brindle greets Dr. Odbol in eight languages.

At launch, we have editions in the following languages:

Future editions for Arabic, Bengali, Chinese (both simplified and traditional characters) Farsi, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Punjabi, Russian, Tagalog, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, and Vietnamese are in process. I hope we’ll be able to roll a new edition out every two weeks or so, although this projection depends on our being able to deal with the various technical challenges of working with all these languages. More languages might be added to this list, and if you have something you would particularly want to see, by all means let me know. I’m also making available a “blank” edition for anyone who wants to attempt their own translation (or perhaps just writing their own parody of my dialog). If you make one of these and I like it, I might just publish it for you!

Also, anyone who can translate the comic into Yiddish or as much of ancient Greek as that latter language will accommodate (what would Aristotle have called a “tube girl, anyway?), please get in touch. I might have a reasonably generous commission for you…

8 thoughts on “New comic, new concept, new site”

  1. A noble experiment. I look forward to watching it unfold. Do you have connections to promote it amongst Spanish speakers and Esperantists?

    • My network of artists should be good for giving it a boost in the Hispanophone and possibly also Lusophone worlds. As for Esperantists? Those are the people I’m hoping to find.

  3. Well, you found one Esperantisto, or at least an Esperantiĝanto. Filing this under “places I did not expect to find my newly learned Esperanto coming in handy.”

    Who did you find to do the translation?

    • As with the other translations, he, she, or they worked for one of the translations services I contracted with. (It took a try or to to find someone, but I managed.)

    • For some reason it appears not to have been working properly, but if you look now you should be able to see a comment box at the bottom of each page.

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