Die Rückkehr der Götter

 

Have no fear your eyes are not deceiving you. That post title is German and I mention that as posts in Chinese with Chinese language titles appear to have confused readers in the past. CBO has a truly world-wide audience so forgive my occasional "catering for"!

With each book I publish (and there are 180 of them) I go through at least 4-6 cover designs. The covers are, after all, the first thing potential buyers see. The original Return of the Gods: Twilight of  the Super Heroes cover collecting the original six part series from Black Tower Adventure was pretty basic with Jack Flash on the cover...

In 2012 I compiled the 6 parts of Return of the Gods -Twilight of the Super Heroes from Black Tower Adventure (volume 2) with a basic Jack Flash and The Many eyed One on the front cover. 96 pages and when I looked through it I realised that this was the cut-corners version since the theme of the story had been running since Black Tower Adventure volume 1 in the 1980s. 

Looking through it made me realise that if I did not do the full story then this was just a "throw away" collection. Besides I was not keen on that cover. Fellow blogger Subzero over at Tales From The Kryptonian seemed to enjoy the book.

https://talesfromthekryptonian.blogspot.com/search?q=Return+of+the+gods+Twilight+of+the+super+heroes

I think he later thought I was completely insane as not only did I expand the book to over 300 pages but I also had to re-letter the first 96pp to keep things consistent.  As many should know, I have never made a secret of the fact that I only use the computer to scan pages AND letter them.  At a UKCAC in the 1980s Moebius told me that the artist should letter their own pages as it was "part of the art".  However, thanks to osteoarthritis my fingers cannot hold a pen and use it to letter and that has only gotten worse over the years. At one time I used to paste-up word balloons on art but now I can decrease/increase text size and font and, unbelievably, I actually enjoy doing this though it takes time.

Credit to real hand letterers!

As noted in the past here on CBO I tried various cover designs for the 300+ pager as I did not want a super hero fight scene cover and eventually decided on this one.

Oddly enough this design was praised by various reviewers so it just goes to show my modest genius at work (did you just laugh??!)  

With a truly international cast of heroes the book was written so that where ever you are -Africa, Australia, United States, UK, Hong Kong, China or Russia- you would find characters representing those countries. If there was ever going to be a foreign edition then it had to be a German one but my German is rusty and not up to translating to a standard needed.

I even had the cover design and text for the German version -Die Rückkehr der Götter – Dämmerung der Superhelden

Someone I was in contact with was going to translate the whole thing for his degree since one of the language translation projects listed was "Translate a published graphic novel". He started the translation and got to page 10 when he showed the work to professor. Apparently, he was told that when "graphic novel" was listed it was intended to be from an established company. That seemed odd but he apologised and set to work on a DC graphic novel at which point students were informed graphic novels were no longer included and the translation had to now be of a wholly (albeit illustrated with photos, etc) text book.

Call me paranoid but I reckon the university involved did this to spite me personally.😡 So no German version of this book and I'm guessing that also rules out D-Gruppe translations!