The transcript for Alexander, The Servant & The Water of Life is written in the style of a prose novel, divided into snippets that accompany each comics page.
A transcript snippet can be found inside the Author’s Comment below the relevant comics page, viewable by clicking on a dropdown toggle. It will be labelled by the book number, chapter title and page numbers.
A version of the transcript that collects all snippets into a single document will be available when each volume is completed, to be released alongside its companion ebook edition.
In the spirit of Liana Kerr’s article “On Describing Comics” for her Broodhollow transcription, I wanted to add to the literature on accessible (web)comics by explaining my approach to making transcripts – as the creator of the work which I’m transcribing.
My approach is one of many, and I’m always on the lookout for new and effective ways to retell comics for a broader audience (for my own curiousity). If you want to learn more, there’s this article by Abby Kingman that provides a good overview, in addition to this blog post on Digital Strips.
So far the most common approach is to include descriptions in the alternate text, but the problem with alt text is that the formatting is not flexible (in that you can’t break text into paragraphs), and there’s this tendency in webcomics to use alt text as a place for non-relevant author’s commentary or inside jokes.
The second approach is to put these descriptions under the comics page, or elsewhere, like a Google Doc or a text document. In this case, formatting is no longer a problem. What becomes troubling, in the decision-making sense, is how to write the transcript itself. How much detail to provide. In other words, style.
Speaking from personal experience, until recently from the time of writing, I had not considered creating image descriptions for my comics. I could blame a lot of things, like how the sighted and able-bodied live in a bubble and how our society has only been designed for a certain type of person and therefore, has not bothered to teach everyone to consider differing needs or experiences. It’s a systemic problem etcetera, but anyway. I hadn’t the knowledge or slightest clue about how to explain artwork to someone who would have trouble seeing the image, as art is more than just what’s superficially seen on the canvas. There’s context, there’s relationships between elements, there’s time and space. Particularly more so for a narrative medium like comics.
There are plenty of resources online that helpfully provide advice on image descriptions, especially from museums where providing descriptions of objects and paintings is common practice. The Cooper Hewitt Guidelines for Image Descriptions are extremely valuable, for every context including social media and artist portfolios.
While the Cooper Hewitt Guidelines are godsent, it’s still too dry for my purpose. On the other hand, the transcripts available for the few webcomics that have them are also not compatible with the voice of the Alexander Romance.
A fair number of webcomics include transcripts that are more like podcast transcripts (or worse, with no indication of who is speaking). It is just dialogue and caption nothing else, which is a shame because the entire point of comics is getting story and emotion from the images. Though this style of transcript is good for anyone who can see the images but can’t read the font, it’s not inclusive of anyone who is unable to see the work at all for whatever reason. So much of the joy of story is lost.
In contrast, Broodhollow’s transcript is fantastic (afterall, it was written for the transcriber’s blind friend) but extremely detailed and almost literal, to the point of including comics devices like panel shapes and every visual element. This is a style that I’d like to commission one day from someone who is capable, but it’s not still not the correct voice for the Alexander Romance (it’s also a style I am not good at!). Additionally, it’s a bit too hefty, as I always imagine my transcript reader to be someone lying in bed or driving their car listening to the AI reading out the text, and I want them to get straight to the story and emotions without having the pacing be slowed down by image description. I don’t mean this in a derogatory way… just that the goals are different.
The best way I can describe my transcript is as if I’m translating a book written in one language into another. As a translator I’m working with the same content, but I have the task of figuring out how to convey it in a way that retains the spirit of the original while maintaining literary fidelity while not making it awkward or stiff in the target language.
Interestingly, translation also share the same debates of style as comics transcription: do you go literal or free?
Personally, in the context of comics transcription, I am on the free side, preferring to tailor the meaning for the medium. But I am the creator, so unlike an outsider, I actually know what I meant when I made my comic and my future plans for the story, so the meaning will always remain consistent and true to source. This style wouldn’t work for a transcriber who is not the creator themselves.
For the Alexander Romance, my transcript doesn’t exactly map one-on-one with the comic page, but equally evokes the feeling, the same epic narrative and emotional sense, of reading the comic. I use the word ‘evoke’ because my focus is not so much on describing every panel, but in making sure that the subtext a sighted reader might get from plainly seeing the panels is still clearly presented in the transcript, justformatted specifically for the unique qualities of prose.
In effect, I’m creating two compatible pieces of storytelling that are different in experience, yet with the same meaning and end goal.
Additionally, my comic owes a lot to epic poetry of old and classical literature, and is itself a visual-literary take of those textual forms. (I talk about experimenting with the concept of comics as poetry in the Chapter One Author’s Notes.) So I’ve built the transcript to actually function as a full-on poetic prose experience, much closer to its influence of the previous Alexander Romances.
The language of the transcript is inspired by clear, modern English translations of older literature, like Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey, Maria Headley’s Beowulf, Anne Carson’s series of Greek plays and Sappho’s lyric verse, and Sholeh Wolpe’s The Conference of the Birds. Similarly to these translators, I’m not interested in replicating a highfalutin, heavy, pseudo-ancient sound. The reason being, besides the argument for accessibility, is there’s no sense in introducing stuffiness into popular literature – which is what the original Alexander Romance is – inside a popular medium, comics. I always thought a 21st century work has to be in a 21st century voice, so that’s what it is.
The transcript structure is free verse. It has no rhyming scheme; how the lines break follows the rhythm of natural speech – as if I am speaking to you in an inn while I am telling you this story. The character’s dialogue is also broken down like this in both transcript and comic, though the way it’s done in the latter is by breaking up speech bubbles rather than line breaks.
The comic has occasional meta-moments when I talk to the reader directly in captions and asides, plus diagetic panels that elude to visual portrayals of Alexander in other works.
In the transcript, the entire thing is meta all the time. I am always speaking to the transcript reader, always referring to stuff from other works past, and there’s a bit more anachronism. For the aspects of the comic that can’t be integrated naturally to the prose format I have described them outright instead. This does cause some oddness sometimes, especially when the Author’s Voice in the comic and my voice in the transcript have to be treated separately instead of being the same entity. (it’s me regardless)
