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Originally posted by: theredbaron
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Originally posted by: ricarleite
Manga is generally released in a mirrored way over there? Over here, most comics are right to left, because of purists and as a commercial gimmick, sort of like"ohh, look, it's opposite" - but mostly to keep faithful to the original, sometimes the contract made with the japanese publisher asks for it to be published this way (when I grab some "ocidental" comic book I sometimes forget about it and look at the last page first).

Then again, if the text isn't still in Japanese...I dunno. I'd definitely expect a comic to read 'backwards' if it was still in Japanese, but if it's been translated, well...wouldn't that include translating the format?

I mean, I'd get a kick out of a right-to-left comic, and I've got tonnes of Japanese Dragonball comics at home, but isn't that the point of translating and yada yada yada?

Manga here is translated, but not altered. While there has been reversed manga released here until the mid 90s (Akira was such a case), nowadays there is no manga released in such way, they are all in the original right to left form. The translation is only on the dialogue areas, keeping the ocidental reading only WiTHING those areas. So you would read a dialogue, and move to the left, and read the other one. When this might get confusing or ambiguous (very rare), the text is written up to down. Sounds and text written on walls or props or whatever are not translated directly, instead a translation is put in small prints bellow the panel.

This whole thing started back in the mid 90s, when Dragon Ball was re-relased. Tired of seeing his job buthcered, he ordered to keep the original form and not to translate non-dialogue text, keeping the kanji-hiragana-katakana. This was deemed as a commercial suicide by publishers here, and they expected no sales, but went foward with the release anyway, promoting it as a commercial gimick ("See! The Dragon Ball manga the way it was supposed to be read!"), and the whole thing was a huge success. There was some original right to left manga back then, but it was not so popular. After Dragon Ball, every single manga publisher decided to do the same (except for Slayers, which keeps the right to left but butchers the art and censors some stuff). There was even a book, the Kenshin Kaden, which is the official guide to Rurouni Kenshin, which was released to read from right to left. Some local made "manga" are from right to left. The whole thing has become part of our comic book culture.

At the same time, american comic books, which dominated the whole market, started to fade away. Now only graphic novels, and a few publications by Marvel, DC, and Spawn are released, in a very limited distribution.

I remember exactly 10 years ago when I was talking with a then famous anime and manga critic (and comic book writer), and he told me how he wished the publishers would stop being cheap bastards, buying stuff pre-made from Japan and the US and started doing the REAL stuff and doing some local comic books... While there has been some good publications (specially in the adult comics area), things are pretty slow...

And while this whole thing might have sounded a but off-topic, I say I kept within the topic, which was manga related...