Catalan Communications

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Page five from New York/Miami (Catalan, 1990) by Jacques Loustal and Philippe Paringaux, translated by Elizabeth Bell.

Catalan Communications was a New York publishing company, operated by Bernd Metz, which mainly focused on English-language translations of European graphic novels, presented in a series of high-quality trade paperbacks.

The company published through the 1980s from a large loft located at 43 East 19th Street. Metz was the editor, and Elizabeth Bell provided English translations for the French titles, including Max Cabanes' Colin-Maillard (Heartthrobs). In 1990, the Cabanes graphic novel was the winner of the Grand Prix at France's Angoulême International Comics Festival. One of Bell's translated books for Catalan revealed errors in an earlier Heavy Metal translation of the same story. James Keller translated the German edition of Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs (Guido Crepax) in 1991.

Some outstanding books published by Metz were Jacques Loustal's Love Shots, Lorenzo Mattoti's Fires and Barcelona artist Marti Riera's The Cabbie, with an introduction by Art Spiegelman. Published in five languages, Trip to Tulum by Federico Fellini and Milo Manara, with essays translated by Elizabeth Bell, was selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the best trade paperbacks of 1990. PW reviewed:

A beautiful woman falls into a pond chasing Fellini's windblown hat. Under the water's surface is an eerie world of preserved shipwrecks and planewrecks, a resting place for ghostly references to Fellini's films. Inside a submerged seaweed-encrusted 747 the woman is astonished to find Fellini himself. He sends her off with a very handsomely drawn Marcello Mastroianni--Fellini's alter ego--to make a movie of unknown content. They stop in Los Angeles and finally reach a grand hotel on the Mexican coast where magical transformations abound. Fellini and Manara have brought the dreamlike beauty of Fellini's cinematography to the comics medium. A consummate linear draftsman, Manara's deft portraits of Fellini and Mastroianni are complemented by his dazzling imaginary architecture, his characteristic lyrical eroticism and the playfully self-referential exchanges between Fellini and the characters in his story.