Geek Syndicate Issue 5 | Page 29

Geek Syndicate
GS: Hello to everyone at Cinebook, and thank you. You’ve been magnificent hosts over this last year, and I feel like I’ve ‘feasted’ very well at your table. Cherry-picking my way through your catalogue has been a real eye-opener for me. I confess the courses have come so thick and fast that I can barely keep up, but the overall quality has been such that – whilst not every dish has been to my taste – I’ve always looked ahead at the next serving with hungry eyes. The Gallic palate for comics may be very different from that of the average British or American consumer, but by gum it’s nice to have something different to the same old Spandex salad. Now, before I confuse our readers too much with all this culinary codswallop, perhaps you could chip in and save me from my horrendously over-egged metaphors. Why don’t you tell the good folks a little bit about yourselves? Jerome: translator and PR officer. Erica: translator. Olivier: founder. Valerie: supervisor. Aldous: proofreader and convention man. GS: What is Cinebook, at heart? Jerome: Cinebook is, first, a labour of love. A company created by someone who wanted a “market.” He looked at it as something that needed to be cracked open so that all the wonderful works of art that France and Belgium had produced could be known to millions of readers who’d been deprived of them for so long. Erica: In France, one out of every eight books sold is a comic book. Olivier knew there was a lot of scope for encouraging the same kind of appreciation for comic books and graphic novels in the Anglophone world. Another important piece of the puzzle is that comic books promote literacy. Olivier chose to offer a range of titles for both children and adults, knowing that reluctant readers are often enticed to start reading when the words are accompanied by colourful images.
Image © Cinebook, 2012

to work with comic books, someone who loves French culture, and has at heart the desire to spread that aspect of it abroad where it’s still undeservedly unknown. That person is Olivier Cadic. He’s a French expatriate living in Great Britain, and he didn’t approach the Englishspeaking world of comics as

Jerome: He set Cinebook up, he built the team, he made our goals and methods clear. The idea for us is to select quality series in French, do our absolute best to provide translations of equal quality, and then put them out there for people to experience. And to keep the series going until our readers have the whole thing available.

29