Comics212.net
I used to be a "flipped-manga" guy, to avoid the "zig-zag" effect of reading left-to-right text on a right-to-left page. But now, I'm an "unflipped" guy all the way. You want to know why?
I had to work on "Super Manga Blast".
SMB was done in Photoshop; series like "Seraphic Feather" and "Shadow Star" couldn't have been flipped before then, because the effects were too heavily integrated into the art. Pat Duke was the lead on that project, and the finished pages wound up looking fantastic.
But I noticed a couple of things while working on it. First, the subtle art distortion that every series suffered when flipped. It was like making a picture of your face using only one half: it looks like a face, but it doesn't look like you.
Second, I never realized just how much redrawing was needed to flip a manga. Word balloons had to be resized, signs had to be reversed... effects that took up a certain amount of space in Japanese took up less space in English, and all the negative space had to be filled in. It's not something I could quantify, but there was significant redrawing in every panel of SMB that I worked on.
That's why I'm for unflipped. The reading zig-zag is a small price to pay for the benefits of integrated artwork.
I'd have to pick a nit with Lianne and say that my favorite way of handling sound effects is to keep them, but put a tiny translation of the effect right next to it. Usually there's a small enough area of white space nearby that you can place it -- usually at about 8 pt font size -- without being intrusive. Saves the trouble of flipping to a glossary.
I too prefer unflipped manga, all things being equal (and Will Allison's comment gives me more reasons for preferring it), but I'm having trouble following your "transposed balloon" example. In your example, the larger balloon, since it comes first, would be on the right in the Japanese work. When the artwork is flipped, wouldn't that put the larger balloon on the left? And wouldn't that mean that the first, longer utterance would go in the larger balloon, just as in the original? (I'm tired, though, so maybe I'm missing something obvious.)
It made sense in my head when I was writing it. I'll see if I can find an example.
- Chris
I knew what Chris was getting at with the "transposed balloon" comment. In a straight flip, it's not so much of a problem, but with a cut-and-paste job like "Blade of the Immortal" it can be murder.
The more common problems in manga production are things that aren't caused by flipping, though.
One we came across was the vertical word balloon. Since Japanese can be read vertically, sometimes no amount of hy-phen-ation could get the text to fit. Time to redraw the balloon!
Another was the difference between Japanese statements and English ones. They're almost like mirror-languages: what's terse in English is elaboarate in Japanese, and vice-versa. So, we'd have to actually transpose the balloons ourselves, sometimes.
One more was the contextless balloon. Since the Japanese language has many specific forms of speaking, two balloons without any tails (or even the speakers in the panel) still made sense. In English, those distinctions are lost. Proteus always did wonderful jobs "recontextualizing" the dialogue, but we still had to add a lot of balloon tails. With some of the non-Proteus stuff I've seen, panels like that turn into random hash, with no clue who's talking.
That's the thing: it's not the right-to-left that makes so many of these manga seem half-translated and half-baked, it's the crappy translation and production. We really lost a lot when Studio Proteus closed shop.
To Will, yeah I think that is what bothers me most about Bill's article. Flipping is really the least of the issues in my mind. As you said, good translation is the most important thing.
Though I also think that some people put too high a value on pure production values (I don't think the manga boom would have happened without the price down to $10 each) a certain level of competency is always important. Some of the stuff out there is pretty inconsistant.
I agree with Pata that small subtitles next to the sfx is the way to go. DMP does this and it looks very nice. Glossaries are annoying, but still better than TP's "we won't translate it at all" approach.
Besides sports, I've encountered other issues with flipping. Like a wordless moment in Clover made me pause and would have really confused me if I didn't know it was flipped. One character pressed their hand to another's chest, but they were really touching the area of the heart.
I'd like to do an article with pics on how I don't think flipping is that big of a deal. Yes the movement of the panels is contrary to normal, but you know what? Every time you read a paragraph of text, your eye has to move back to the left for each new line.
In r-to-l, you simply move a bit farther to the left on that last line. It isn't like your eye doesn't have to move in various directions in a western comic book. I mean who here has heard instances of someone trying to get an adult reading a comic book, and they have problems reading it, of knowing where to look next?
The problem is if they didn't read any comics as a kid, they could very well have trouble with the basics of "comics literacy". It is a similar thing with manga. If you've been reading l-to-r comics your whole life, you may very well be set in your ways and have trouble adapting.
But that doesn't mean it is actually that hard or unnatural if you got used to it at an earlier age. And it depends on person to person. My Mom got r-to-l reading down after only about a book or so...
I was disapointed by Randall's essay. As others have pointed out he conflates shoddy production values and artistic purism.
His argument that unflipped manga are "at best only half-translated" assumes an r-l sequence of pictures is actually a different language from a l-r sequence. It's silly to argue that a sequence of images should (or even can) be "translated", and makes about as much sense as saying uncolorized manga are only "half-translated", since westerners are used to reading comics in color.
The Tezuka example was interesting, but again he's making a major assumption, that Tezuka (or comics artists in general) are conscious about running the flow of the dialog text with the flow of a panel/page composition. When I read a comic I always compartmentalize reading the text (or at least the expository text or the word/thought balloons) and the images into separate tasks, so the only strongly relevent connection between the two that I can think of, would be placement of the balloons - not whether the text moves in the same direction of the panel-breaks.
I can think of a few artists (Will Eisner being one of them) who incorporated the non-sound fx text to their compositions in any meaningful way. I'm not sure Tezuka did much of that, but I'd be curious to see how Eisner's comics might look in a Japanese translation.
Commenting by HaloScan
