usatoday article

I'm always in awe of those 500-page weeklies when I see them. Probably a considerable time investment, although if I could read Japanese (and buy them at 3 bucks an issue) I'd probably be tempted myself.

Weird. When I followed the link earlier today, there were several reader comments at the bottom of the page, which were the most depressing thing about the whole article (although not much moreso than the quote "People are losing the habit of reading.") I don't see them now, but the majority were childishly ugly denunciations of manga readers as fat, maladaptive losers or unAmerican or both. To closely paraphrase one comment, "Only liberals would be braindead enough to read this junk, between watching cartoons and Michael Moore" - I've often imagined there must be Americans who consider their countrypeople who consume foreign entertainment and culture to be unpatriotic and brainwashed by definition, but I'm not sure I'd ever actually encountered one before. I leave open the possibility this example was a deadpan parody - it's so hard to tell these days.

It's good, though, to have my instinct confirmed that the entire population of Japan is overweight, socially inept and politically liberal. And that the average American is getting both stupider and more vicious.

If I ever become a billionaire, I think the first thing that I'm going to do is buy everyone a copy of Scott McCloud's excellent book Understanding Comics (and maybe also a copy of Reinventing Comics while I'm at it). It makes a pretty convincing argument that it's ok to like comic books (or graphic novels or "sequential art" or whatever term you like), even comic books from other countries (there seems to be a certain amount of xenophobia behind some of the USA Today comments):

http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Comics...92910871&sr=1-2

100% agreed, Doran. I just recently read/looked at McCloud's book. Brilliant, one of those pieces of work that inspires you to look at certain things with a fresh eye, as if you're seeing them for the first time.


And for the record, I'm not a big reader of comix, American, Japanese or otherwise, although I keep meaning to look into them more.

Start buyin' those lottery tickets.

(Odd, I still don't see the comments. Maybe it's my browser - I see them via Internet Explorer on my work PC, but not via Safari on my home Mac.)

I confess -- I follow a few translated manga (Boys Over Flowers, Nodame Cantabile, Yotsuba and!) -- and one that has yet to be translated (Cat Street). The latter requires resort to a pile of dictionaries.

And I am a liberal.

;~}

There's a short American-made "manga" about the history of anime and manga on Wired.com that braindead obese liberals might enjoy :D :

http://www.wired.com/special_multimedia/2007/1511_ff_manga

Any time that something that's not traditionally "middle American" or has a distinctly foreign sensibility makes inroads into American pop culture, that's interesting to me. I did learn a few things from this short "manga," such as the fact that some publishers present their manga "unflipped" partially as a cost-saving measure. I also thought that it was interesting that a "manga" made by someone in Australia was nominated for an award in Japan.

Am I alone in thinking that having a "manga" that was originally written in English read from left-to-right like an unflipped Japanese manga is rather pretentious? Of course, I've actually only read a handful of "unflipped" manga, and I didn't really like any of them very much (of course, it may just be that they happened to be manga that I wouldn't have liked much flipped either). I think what Dark Horse does with Blade of the Immortal is a pretty good compromise (althought it's probably fairly labor-intensive): wherever possible, the panels are re-arranged to read from right-to-left rather than being flipped.

BTW, I'm not really a huge manga reader, but lately I've become interested in work by Osamu Tezuka and some other 60s/70s manga.

I don't know if this is the reason for releasing manga "unflipped" in the U.S. or not, but when you look at anime based on manga and compare the animated image to the printed pages of a "flipped" manga, it's like looking at a mirror image of it and it kind of throws you off. So, for that reason, I like manga to be "unflipped." (Also, I think it's probably a lot cheaper to publish it unflipped in the U.S., although I'm not sure why that would be so.) So doing an American manga and having it read right to left is a little on the unnecessary side. Without checking the link, all I can wonder is if the publishers just want readers to think it was originally Japanese or, more likely, to think it's "cool."

Wired has a nice write up on the why's & how's of manga in the U.S. today (in manga form):

How Manga Conquered the U.S., a Graphic Guide to Japan's Coolest Export

1) This link will open up a pdf

2) Start at the bottom and work your way up

An informative read given the current discussion

If a manga uses any sort of complex page design, one really HAS to present it in the Japanese manner -- unless one wants to muck up how the page was intended to look,

It really takes very little time to get used to going backwards. ;~}

My preference is for "flipped" manga. Typically, if it's a good manga, the fact that it's flipped horizontally usually becomes invisible to me pretty quickly. I'm capable of reading unflipped manga from right-to-left, but it just doesn't feel natural to me, and for me it breaks up the "flow" that a well-designed comic book page should have. If I read more unflipped manga, I might get used to it, but the way that my brain is wired to read comics from left-to-right is difficult for me to override.

Some of the Osamu Tezuka titles released in the US in a "flipped" format like Ode To Kirihito and parts of Phoenix include some pretty funky page layouts, but flipping them horizontally never really bothered me.

Well, all I can say is it bothers the heck out of me. ;~}