Here’s a point I never see raised: Are Japanese audiences required to read translated western (English, French, etc) comics from left-to-right. I’m betting that they flip those books for the Japaense audience. In the end I think the non-flipping policy is far less about aesthetic purity than expediency and cost cutting.

Bah!

The dialogue in any translation from Japanese, be it subtitles in a film or word balloons in a Manga are what most often feel like half measures. I can’t say in most cases that I can propose better alternatives, but anyone with a passing familiarity with Japanese language and culture knows that people in Japan don’t say the same things to one another that they would in west. The back and forth of idiomatic politeness, the nuance of relationship between characters conveyed in the conjugation of a verb – direct translations of these always seem stilted, but converting the text to what westerners would say in the same situation strips the scenes of much of their meaning. In a story that consists mostly of swordplay, or magical toys, I’m sure that the flipped images are a bigger deal, but in things that I would want to read, having a good translator is what is important, and here I think D&Q has done as good a job as anyone in the field.

Red Colored Elegy ends up being one of my favourite manga because it remains challenging to the reader and open to much interpretation. Hayashi says so much with so little — entire scenes in an image or two, single lines of dialogue from an unspecified speaker – I can imagine how difficult this was to translate.

I understand why artists don’t like to see their art flipped, as holding a mirror up to a piece has long been a way for an artist to get a fresh view. But I’m not sure I buy it from a reader’s perspective.

For me, I’d much rather just read a flipped book. Having never seen the original unflipped pages, the imperfections revealed in their mirror images will probably go largely unnoticed. It’s worth suffering the occasional accidentally flawed image for the comfort of reading left to right, and for words and images flowing in the same direction. That said, if a book looks interesting enough, I’ll certainly suffer the awkwardness of reading it unflipped, as I likely will with those Black Jack and Dororo books…

I’d love to see an unflipped BotI — Dark Horse started publishing the series in 1997, before unflipped manga became commonplace, and I guess they’ve stuck with the cut-and-paste technique so as not to alienate the existing readers who are used to reading BotI left-to-right.

(Incidentally, to see the difference it makes, this is a discussion of how Samura constructs his action scenes using the Dark Horse cut-and-pasted edition, and this is a follow-up in which the panels have been rearranged to be in their original order. As the writer demonstrates, the visual flow of the scene is much smoother in the original.)

Ryan- I think it’s worth exploring the work as an object, and a foreign object at that, and I think this is a really interesting book to test that with. It’s very fashionable in a similar–though more Japanese and adult–way than a lot of contemporary manga available in English. I’m really excited about the book, it’s one that I’m really looking forward to in SD and I’ll make sure to come by the booth during that time!

If you want to come see it, we’ll have copies on hand at the Last Gasp booth at SDCC. I’m working the booth Friday 2-7pm, if you wanna stop by and say hello :)

KEEP HOPE ALIVE!
Ryan