Gustave Dore: Twelve Comic Strips

by David Kunzle (Editor)

For the first time in English, the overlooked sequential narratives by the great illustrator and engraver

Genres: Art

208 pages, ebook

First published July 2, 2015

Reviews

[Alex Fyffe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although this is an excellent collection of Dore's early work in the comics medium, the presentation of the material gets in the way of fully appreciating the work as it was intended. David Kunzle has decided to keep the French captions of the original printings instead of changing them into English and has opted to include the English translations below the entirety of each comics page, which gives reading these versions the feeling of constantly referring to footnotes. The distance the eye must travel between the text (in English) and the image is so great that the effect of reading the works AS comics is effectively ruined. It would have been a far better release for an English-language audience if Kunzle had simply replaced the French with English, as most translations would, and moved the French to the bottom for reference, if desired. As it is, this is a great work of historical scholarship but is lacking as a work of comics translation.

I appreciate Kunzle releasing valuable comics works like this and the complete works of the excellent Rodolphe Topffer, but I wish he would treat them as English-language releases of comics, not as historical artifacts. The same problem is also present in his collection of Topffer's graphic novels, but the damage is less since the English translation appears just beneath each individual caption in the original French. The distance is greater than it should be between the English captions and the images, but they are much closer than those in the Dore collection. All in all, this is a worthwhile addition to any comics fan's library, especially those interested in the early history of the medium, for offering English readers a glimpse into Dore's early work and putting that work into context, but it is difficult to fully appreciate the work itself due to odd editing decisions.