Thursday 28 November 2019

OINK! in Germany!

Thanks to Brendan Quinn on Peter Gray's UK Comics group for finding this curiosity. I'd heard way back when that there was a German language edition of OINK! comic in the late 1980s but had never seen one. My 'Tom Thug' and 'Pete and his Pimple' strips (amongst strips by others) translated into German! Naturally, IPC never paid us for these foreign editions... 
https://www.comic.de/2018/12/oink-wie-wir-bei-bastei-das-ferkel-rausliessen-oder-als-man-bei-bastei-ueberlegte-marvel-aufzukaufen/

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4 comments:

Manic Man said...

always interesting to see changes made for international humour style. though my German is bad.
Tom Thug becoming Paul, the thug.. not quite sure why.. Tom is a fairy common German name.. where as the change from Pete and his pimple to Peter and his pimple makes sense.. Pete is more an english slang name for Peter.

Mary Lighthouse.. the joke would go completely over the heads of people outside the UK at the time.. So they change to Thekla.. no surname given on that page that I can see.. German version of Thecia, so it's a name from an old Christian saint/martyr..
so if that was the intent, I guess naming a censor after a Christian saint is a good way to keep some reference ^_^

I got the complete Run of the German Sonic Der Comic (plus one of the trade paperbacks) where they put in Reprints of an American Mr. T comic in it too.. weird that

Lew Stringer said...

I was shown one of the German Sonic comics once when I visited Fleetway. Again, we never received any extra for overseas use. I suppose they thought our initial payment covered everything.

PhilEdBoyce said...

I'm surprised this was allowed, what what Oink! being that rare thing of a comic where the individual cartoonists owned their own work. It's an interesting find though. Do you mind if I show one of them on my blog and point the way to the other one here?

Lew Stringer said...

Seems that IPC just assumed they owned everything and let Syndication International reprint them in whatever country they liked. I complained back in 1999 when I found out Sweden were reprinting Pete and his Pimple and it was dropped. IPC always said Oink! was "a grey area". On some strips, yes, but most were created by freelancers outright with no contracts. Anyway, Rebellion own some characters now.

Feel free to blog about them, Phil. The images aren't mine anyway as I took them from a post on Facebook.