عاصفة في اللغة العربية

How about a little Firestorm elemental action … in Arabic!

Our good buddy Jon at the Fizzit Firestorm-themed blog made an fascinating discovery recently.  He bought some Superman comics translated into Arabic for a friend who’s learning the language.  As he was flipping through a comic he purchased and stumbled across Firestorm!  Arabic Superman #703 (1992) featured a reprint and translation of Action Comics #666 (1991).  Below you’ll find the Arabic cover, followed by the original American cover.

The Elemental Firestorm appeared on two interior pages.  The interesting part is that Arabic reads right to left.  Therefore all the pages are flipped to their mirror-image, and the back page is the start (exactly like manga, if you’re at all familiar with that).   Below you’ll find the Arabic Superman pages in black and white, followed by the corresponding American pages in color.

I wonder if reversing the art caused any problems for the readers.  For example, if you look above you’ll notice Superman’s “S” shield is reversed.  Now the Arabic language doesn’t even feature our version of the letter “S”, so it’s probably a non-issue.  However, I can’t help wondering.  By the way, this entire issue was a sort of dream/trance sequence, so Firestorm appearance was just imagined by Superman.

My thanks again to Jon at the Fizzit Firestorm-themed blog for providing me with theses scans to publish!  Jon has supplied FIRESTORM FAN with numerous scans over the past few years, including Firestorm comics translated into Spanish!  Jon is also quite the collector of original Firestorm artwork.  You may view scans of his entire art collection online by clicking here.

دعم عاصفة نارية! مروحة الشعلة!