Asterix: Anthea Bell, a translator of the innumerable Asterix books from French into English, explores the process in some detail.

Via Open Brackets, which Jim pointed out t’other day.

Now if someone would only get going on Franquin’s Gaston books.

M’enfin! Mais qu’est-que-c’est? Looks like, maybe, they did!

Alas, the “gag of the day” link returns a bad ODBC call. Foo. But go here anyway and rummage around.

Gaston was the officeboy for Belgian kid’s comics publisher Spirou, and first showed up in anecdotes that Spirou himself, the magazine’s lead character, would write and publish as prose supplements in the magazine (imagine a two-page story written by Peter Parker appearing in The Amazing Spider-Man, telling about an amusing ineraction with JJ, and you’ll be in the neighbrhood). Eventually, he graduated to a full page gag strip drawn by Andre Franquin for years, and in Yurp, the strip is well known as one of the gems of gag cartooning. To my knowledge, with the exception of a very few pages that were published in Fantagraphics omnibus mags years ago, he’s never been translated into English. It’s certainly our loss.