Nate Bennett on the left and Matthew Senn on the right at their booth at Comic-Con. Senn was dressed as comic book detective Dick Tracy.

(JESSE TOMAS / iNFOnews.ca)

A Kelowna artist, who created an online comic strip just over a year ago, has already had it translated into several languages to reach a global audience.

Matthew Senn created the comic series “Poppy: The Girl Who Slept-In 100 years,” about a teenage girl named Poppy who is from the 1920s but wakes up in the 2020s. Senn’s comedic premise for the work relied heavily on characters misunderstanding each other because of how English has changed over the last 100 years.

“It's kind of a comparison between the 1920s and the 2020s. She sees what’s new and what's different. She kind of brings this old school optimism of that era to the kind of nihilism of the modern age,” Senn told iNFOnews.ca.

Senn started uploading Poppy to the online comic platform Webtoons in July 2022 and by that December he had a translator from France, Philemon Royer, who wanted to translate the work.

“There are some tools and websites to translate comics so fans can translate it but he wanted to go further. He wanted to work with me to translate the comic because it’s such a difficult task,” Senn said. “He wanted to make sure he did it right which I really appreciated.”

The challenge with translating Senn’s comic is how the jokes play with language. Poppy uses words like “shamster” and gets confused about notions of “going viral.”

“It’s heavily steeped in slang and puns. I love puns. There are lots of puns using modern and vintage slang. It's a very western North American comic,” he said.

The difficulty didn’t intimidate Royer who had previously worked as a translator. The French national took it as a challenge, a passion project. Not long after Senn started working with Royer, a Brazilian linguist training to become a translator took interest.

Bruna Almeida wanted to work with Senn to translate his work into Brazilian Portuguese.

“There aren't that many comics that get translated into Brazilian Portuguese and she wanted to bring more of that to her own country, her own culture,” Senn said.

An example of a panel from Poppy translated.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED-Matthew Senn

Together Senn, Royer and Almeida translated the comic into French and Brazilian Portuguese.

Almeida spoke with her grandparents to find slang to match Senn’s jokes.

“Since it’s 1920s slang it doesn’t need to be a literal translation, it's about the spirit of it. It’s antiquated jokes and speech that nobody understands but it’s still accurate, which is the heart of the comic and of the translations,” he said.

Shortly after they started working together Martina Camprini, an Italian linguistics student at the University of Venice, interviewed Senn so she could write her bachelor’s thesis about “Poppy.”

“She went over how a comic could be translated, what tools and techniques and how true it would be to the original, what kind of Italian slang would be appropriate,” Senn said. “She broke down five comics, but probably the hardest five comics. How she would translate them and break down the gags, she dissected all the jokes beautifully.”

The cover of Camprini's thesis on Senn's comic strip.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED-Matthew Senn

Senn ended up starting a Kickstarter raising more than $5,000 in the summer of 2023 to help pay the translators and get “Poppy” published as a paperback collection.

Senn says the experience has been surreal. “Poppy” has over a million views online with readers from France, Brazil, South Korea, the Philippines and nearly every English speaking country.

“Every time I look at (Camprini’s thesis) I think that’s not mine, that's someone else’s work that’s being preserved in a thesis at the University of Venice. It’s someone else who worked for six months with translators around the world to get their comic translated in such a passionate way. It is a great motivator to know I’m on to something here and people are enjoying it. It keeps me going through the hard times and the good times. It’s fuel for the fire to keep this train going.”

Read Poppy and support Matthew Senn here.

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