City native adapts comics in Marvel/Soleil pact

A former Oklahoman is working on bringing comics from Europe to American shores.

Putnam City North graduate Paul Benjamin is involved with industry leader Marvel Comics as part of a partnership with French publisher Soleil.

Benjamin is adapting “Universal War One” and “Scourge of the Gods” for Marvel/Soleil.

“My work on the Marvel/Soleil books is called ‘localization,’” Benjamin, who now lives in Austin, Texas, said in a recent interview with The Oklahoman. “Imagine typing every word balloon in an oversized French graphic novel into an Internet translation program. The translations I get are a little better than that, but they are far from feeling like they were written by an American. It’s my job to take the translation and massage it into something that not only feels like it was written by a native English speaker, but that keeps all the idioms and emotional range that exist in the original graphic novel.”

“Universal War One” is a sci-fi series about a group of military pilots facing courts-martial. The series was originally written and drawn by Denis Bajram.

These pilots “take on missions no one else would dare,” Benjamin said. “They hold the future of the solar system in their hands as they work to prevent the first universal war.”

“Scourge of the Gods” is a fantastical sci-fi series loosely based on the war between the Roman Empire and Attila the Hun. Writer Valerie Mangin and artist Aleksa Gajic were the French creative team.