Thursday, August 20, 2009

Watchmen in Greek? ‘Xpm.’

Photobucket

Recently I was given a fantastic gift: a copy of the Watchmen trade paperback in Greek, picked up by a good friend who was there on business. I’ve been poring over it for weeks, fascinated by every detail, big and small. Not only do we get to see the ordinary word-balloon text in another alphabet — which is kind of cool in itself — but we also get Greek renderings of some particular Watchmen-isms, like Rorschach’s “Hurm”:


PhotobucketPhotobucket

Interestingly, there seems to have been some re-coloration in the Greek edition. In some spots the color differs significantly from my copy, even to the extent that some figures have been shaded much differently. This scene from Chapter 5, the brilliant “Fearful Symmetry,” also confirms that Rorschach’s little signature glyph needs no translation:


PhotobucketPhotobucket

It’s possible that I just have an old edition of the book, and that since I bought it — some time in the early ’90s* — it has been recolored. Warning: I have a three-year-old, bottom-of-the-line printer/scanner, and my skills on it are minimal. So the colors are not perfectly reproduced here, but they’re OK. Whatever the reason, it’s interesting that Moloch’s bathrobe goes from brown to green, and that the shading that obscured Rorschach’s mask was apparently lightened in the newer, Greek version.

Anybody have a more recent American edition for color comparison?



* It was a replacement for one lent to this guy, which came back with crayon on the cover, something that at age 14 or whatever I found inexcusable.

2 comments:

Jesse said...

I have the one with "additional coloring & digital finishing 2005 by John Higgins" and it is closer to the Greek.

Robbb said...

I have an early version of 'Watchmen' in which Ozy kills people with Occam's Razor.

It was later written out of the story.