According to Linda Hutcheon, adaptation needs to be viewed both as a process and its result. Adaptations do not simply repeat a creative process, they ‘affirm and reinforce [its] basic cultural assumptions’. This article looks at the comic as a central medium in an accelerating ‘convergence culture’, placed between traditional literature and film. Adaptations of novels, poems, even of songs have become a substantial part within the field of the so-called ‘graphic novel’ or ‘graphic literature’. And of course, the almost countless adaptations of comics to films provide an important source of revenue for both the comic publishers and the film industry, not just in Hollywood. To address the aesthetic uncertainties this may raise, and to sharpen the concept of adaptation, we are reconsidering the concept of translation. Drawing upon Walter Benjamin’s ‘The task of the translator’, translation can be thought of both as a mode of aesthetic transformation and its result: It appears neither as replacement nor as retelling, but as a sovereign artefact supplementing the original text. As such, the translation mediates between different ways of expression without overcoming their respective differences. This article takes a closer look at two translation processes: one from literature into comic and one from comic into film. Starting with Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli’s classic City of Glass (2004) and Dri Chinisin (2011) by Sascha Hommer, the visual aesthetics of the comic are examined as an ideal place of exchange between textual and pictorial culture. Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez’ iconic Sin City and Tatsumi (2011) by Eric Khoo are employed to illustrate how the translation into moving images can offer an acoustic and narrative supplement to the original comic, while also drawing attention to the aesthetic differences between these two media.

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Animation and the medium of comics clearly can be, and often are, distinguished from each other. Regarding their aesthetics, however, they share a common ground: cel and stop-motion animation, computer-generated images (CGI) and comics are not only all (hand-)made artefacts, but they can also expose this 'madeness' in aesthetically specific ways. The variety of materials and techniques that can be used to make animation (see Furniss, 2008) by now constitutes a substantive area of research, covered by dedicated scholarly journals such as Animation Practice, Process & Production (2011-). These practices can result in artefacts with divergent aesthetics, revealing (or concealing) their 'madeness' to different degrees-something that animation studies have accounted for by situating both live action film and animated images on a continuum between mimesis and abstraction (Feyersinger, 2013; Furniss, 2007[1998]). Comics, for their part, have long been conceived as artefacts whose aesthetics result from the process of hand drawing, a notion that remains influential even after the advent of digital production and distribution technologies (Stein, 2015). Recently, however, the processes and practices of making comics have been examined in more detail (Brienza and Johnston, 2016; Wirag, 2016), while an increasing number of studies focus on the materiality of both printed and digital comics, showing how their 'madeness' includes, but is by no means limited to, the aspect of drawing (Thon and Wilde, 2016). To systematically address these phenomena, and to explore possible connections between them, the AG Animation and AG Comicforschung (working groups for animation and comics studies) of the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (Society for German Language Media Studies) hosted their first joint conference in November 2016. Under the title 'Zur Ästhetik des Gemachten in Animation und Comic' ('On the Aesthetics of the Made in Animation and Comics'), the conference was organized by Hans-Joachim Backe (Copenhagen), Julia Eckel (Bochum/Marburg), Erwin Feyersinger (Tübingen), Véronique Sina (Cologne) and Jan-Noël Thon (Tübingen). Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, the event took place at Herrenhausen Palace Conference Centre in Hanover. The three-day programme included 2 keynote addresses, 7 panels with 19 papers and a panel discussion. As a consequence, there was no need to run sessions of parallel panels, which allowed for a continuous and fruitful conversation among the up to 50 participants (see the full programme in German at https://aesthetikdesgemachten.wordpress.com). In their opening remarks, organizers Julia Eckel and Véronique Sina addressed both general and specific aspects of 696460A NM0010.