Spectreman Comics (French to English Translations)

     First off, I want to give the warmest thanks to the efforts of French Spectreman fan and blogger Ludosan13 for his page Les Intercalaires Nucleaires.  As much as I love Spectreman, I've never taken the efforts to preserve all of that information on a blog like he/she has done. Whether or not you speak French, that page is amazing, and I recommend paying it a visit especially if you follow along with my blog from time to time. If not for the collected information and trivia posted there, some of the material I am posting here would not be possible.

     From what I could glean in the limited research available, a French publication produced these Spectreman comics in 1979, one year after the series began its syndication in the US. Spectreman was dubbed and syndicated in several other countries including France and Brazil, where it seems to have had its greatest impact outside of Japan. Brazil produced a very large number of Spectreman comics, many of which can be found on Ludosan13's blog, but unfortunately I don't speak Portugese to create English translations for those. I do, however, have some limited French background, so I've taken it upon myself to start translating the French Spectreman comics into English a little bit at a time.
     My French is a little rusty, but with a little additional assistance from a French-English dictionary and Google Translate, I've come up with what I believe are faithful translations of the original French text. As I went through a number of lines, I discovered that the stories were written rather simplistically, and I took liberties in a few spots to make them sound more like what I imagine the dialogue would have been on an actual episode of the show. I had some trouble in a few spots because literal translations don't sound exactly as they should in English, so I added or altered a few words so that they would both make sense and not always sound so simple and matter-of-fact. It may be just my personal opinion that the writing felt a little bland and lifeless compared to the action on the page, and I tried to balance them out a little more. The resulting English text is translated almost 100% literally, and the majority of tweaks to the dialogue were made with synonyms, rearranging a few sentences, and adding a few words here and there to display emotion.
     Interesting to note is the female member of the Pollution Squad in this story, named Nakaya. Unless I've made a mistake in research, none of the ladies that appeared on the series in Japan used that name, so this appears to be yet another member of the revolving roster of G-Women. Her artist rendering also does not resemble any of the ladies from the series, so I treated her as a new character and kept her name from the French text intact. No other names have been changed in the translation, either, except for Karas. In French, his name was spelled Carasse, and I changed it to the English spelling to avoid confusion. This forced me to make one artistic little change on one page when George shouts his name, and I think it worked out well. I did, not, however, make any changes to the action words elsewhere, so just remember that when someone looks like they are shouting, "Noon!" they are shouting, "Nooo!" I considered changing Nikki to Nicholas, but I had enough difficulty trying to get the text to fit properly and still be as faithful as possible to the original.
     So, without further ado, here is the Son of Karas' AKA The QuandaryMan's first attempt at scanlation with "Spectreman - A Child Like the Others." Enjoy!