Heralds of Canada

Earlier this week, I received a bundle of back issues I purchased from Mile High Comics.

Among them was the Canadian Ninja book I mentioned a while back. The only other title produced by that company was also included: Heralds of Canada.


Any comment I've been able to find about Canadian Ninja underscored the terrible spelling and clunky dialogue within. Evidently, it's not exclusive to that title; it's all over the Heralds book as well.

The peculiar thing is...the books have different writers. So I suspect what we had here is someone relying entirely too much on an early version of Google Translate. As a result, you have lines of dialogue like "You're good at that, don't you?" and "We won't be that lucky when the boss will know that his month's delivry (sic) has been destroy".

Yikes.

Mind you, the publisher's mailing address is in lovely (presumably) St. Gabriel de Brandon, QC, a town that...huh...I've never heard of before. According to Wikipedia, which as we all know, is NEVER wrong, the town's 1991 population (the year closest to the 1987 publication dates of these two books) was a cramped 2161. Less than 1% of them lists English as a first language and clearly, Herald's writer was not among them.

But could someone not find one of the 20 anglophones around town to look over the book before publishing it? It would take that one English-speaking person all of four seconds to point out that the book reads like "le shit".

You kind of wonder what could have been. Some of the art reminded me of Ron Lim's work on Ex-Mutants a few years later. Long thin legs, heels, Elvira-sized hair...


On the other hand, they clearly couldn't even differentiate between a foreword and a spoiler.


The Bombardier's chef? What, the guy who prepares dinner on a train?

So to be entirely honest, the book probably still would have sucked in proper English, but at least it would have been easier to read. It's still fun in the same way that watching a Spike TV show about kids falling off skateboards is funny. You know, that whole "a failure so epic that it's almost a success" thing. Hell, if the other issues were available, I'd get them. Unintentional comedy is still funny.