Teshkeel Media Group, KSC announced a comprehensive agreement with Marvel Entertainment, Inc., a leading global character-based entertainment and licensing company, to bring Arabic-language Marvel comics, trade paperbacks and magazines to the Middle East and North Africa region.
Headquartered in Kuwait, Teshkeel
Well this is not the first time for Marvel comics to get translated into arabic. there has been an extensive translation work done in lebanon back in the seventies or the eatly eighties I am not quite sure. and they were popular and well received at the time.
This is not a first. I used to buy Superman and Spider Man comic magazines when I was a kid in Damscus in the 80s. They were popular, they spoke Clasiscal Arabic, and they weren’t too awkward. I enjoyed them alot. Kent Clack has an Arabic name: Nabeel Fouzi. I think they were printed in Lebanon. They were part of hour childlish world, along with the Japanese-Arabized cartoon movies: Sasuki, The Blue Wahle, Adnaan & Lina, Grandazer, and many more. We were connected to the world with our flavor. Today, we feel like we need to copy everything ecxactly the same.
By the way you can find a scanned copies of those old arabized comics (such as el 3emlak and Tintin) at http://www.arabcomics.net , they are doing a really cool job wil preserving those old “hard nearly impossible to find” comics, all the old comics companies went ….
I found your review on this deal while surfing the internet and wanted to comment here: as you can see from the people commented before me, the arab world is not strange to the concept of to-arabic-translated comics. On the contrary, till the early 1990’s there were extensive translation to the works of many and various comics, not only Marvel, but that included DC and Tin Tin, to mention few. In addition, the translation did not only included English speaking comics, but because of the popularity of such type of stories translation from French and other European countries has been done.
In fact the work which has been done by giving Arabic names to some of the characters (and even cities and places) was so perfect that I personally enjoyed and got used to them, it was not strange to me when I used to read the original version of these comics at all.
Finally, I have to give credit to the great and excellent effort the people at http://www.arabcomics.net for the outstanding and marvelous job they are doing in restoring old comics (which includes the translation of some never been translated before). Big salute