FAQ

Comix Influx is a website dedicated to the collaborative translation of foreign-language comics. At some point, almost all inquisitive English-speaking comics readers will hear about the amazing comics coming out of Europe. Many will try buying a few, only to find that the medium of comics is genuinely a combination of pictures and words. Some of those will then try to work through those comics, painstakingly slogging through them with a dictionary.

That effort is to be commended, but is spread among a relatively small (and easily discouraged, if I’m anything to go by) band, and tends not to contribute to the community as a whole.

The aim of this site is to harness all that disparate effort, so that it can benefit other interested readers. At Comix Influx you can find translations of great comics, help add to or improve the translations that are there or start a new translation of a comic that deserves a wider readeship.

• click on the “Latest link”: in the black navigation bar to find the latest added, edited and completed books.
• click on the “Books link”: in the black navigation bar to browse for a book by its original title (although not yet by author or publisher).
• Search Comix Influx using the search box above the black navigation bar.

The pictures are in the books. We don’t allow uploading of images to avoid any copyright infringements. In the future we hope to allow the uploading of limited sample panels.

No, we don’t believe so. The words from a comic are, actually, pretty much useless without the pictures – they are a long way from even being a script. So Comix Influx is only really useful to people who have a copy of the comic of which they are reading the translation.

So we expect Comix Influx to make international comics available to a wider audience and encourage people to buy more of them.

Much as we think Comix Influx is awesome, realistically we don’t expect the number of people using the site to affect sales.

We hope that the site will generate more interest in international comics and so encourage more published translations.

We’d love them to get involved! We have enormous respect for translators, and know that the majority of translations on the site are more, well, utilitarian than a professional translation would be. Again, we think that more interest in foreign-language comics can only benefit professional translators.

Anyone can do what they like with translations so long as they do not violate the original copyright of the book, and so long as they give attribution to the Comix Influx users that contributed. That attribution should be the list of contributors from the main page for the book.

In principle we’re happy for comixs to be translated from any language to any language, but the software hasn’t been extensively tested with a wide range of character sets (and please send any problems to bugs@comixinflux.com).

The application is custom-built and is based on the Ruby On Rails web framework.