There are a lot of Japanese-language alternative manga that are as good as, or better than, most of the English-language alternative comics that have been critically lauded. There are only a few English-language publishers who license and translate alternative manga, and their collective output of manga is a trickle compared to the wealth of material out there. So why do I fear the possibility of Drawn & Quarterly licensing one of my favorite manga? Because of how they publish their manga. I’ve expressed my opposition to the way Drawn & Quarterly publishes its manga in comments here and elsewhere, so I’m grateful to Noah for inviting me to write a post on the subject. It won’t be a very long post, because the case against Drawn & Quarterly’s method is so straightforward that it requires no elaboration.
In Japan, almost all comics are read right to left. This means that every row of panels is read starting from the right. Currently, almost all English-language manga publishers that I know of leave things this way. They exception is Drawn & Quarterly: when they publish manga, they rearrange the panels on each page so it reads left to right.*
If you only consider the panels in isolation, Drawn & Quarterly’s way might seem to be best: it preserves the original orientation of the panels, while not requiring the Western reader to read right to left. But by rearranging the panels, the visual relationships between panels are destroyed, as is the overall composition of the page, thus destroying the page’s integrity.
Someone might retort: “Drawn & Quarterly’s manga look perfectly fine to me.” In the first place, the composition and especially the relationships between panels probably affects the reading experience more on a subconscious level than a conscious one most of the time. In the second place, even if a page in Drawn & Quarterly’s manga looks as good as the original, it still isn’t the page the artist drew. It’s pieces of that page, cut up and shuffled around. Any aesthetic value the new composition and panel relationships may have will be a fortuitous accident. (In some cases, the adapter may be able to affect this to some degree; but at best (s)he will have a very limited number of options.)
Sometimes it’s argued that Drawn & Quarterly’s method is commercially necessary, but this is belied by the fact that virtually all other current publishers of manga, including publishers of alternative manga (e. g. Fantagraphic, Top Shelf, Picturebox) publish their manga right-to-left, leaving the art as it is. And if Drawn & Quarterly feels it has to make its manga read left to right, it would be much better to simply reverse the entire page including the art, as if it were reflected in a mirror. This has its disadvantages — for instance, right-handed characters become left-handed and vice versa — but the page’s integrity is preserved.
In other comments on the subject, I’ve called Drawn & Quarterly’s method “mutilation.” I’ve refrained from that here. For one thing, I now think that as far as the result is concerned, it goes a little too far. For another, the people at Drawn & Quarterly clearly believe that they’re being respectful to the manga, even though objectively they aren’t.** What’s so frustrating is that they’re bringing over worthy manga, which otherwise would probably never get translated into English; but they’re doing it wrong, when it would actually be easier and cheaper to do it right.
*They may not do this all the time. They don’t seem to have done it with The Box Man, although I can’t say for certain.
**To avoid misunderstanding, I’m not asserting that they’re being disrespectful to the manga artist, but to the manga itself.
For what it’s worth, their latest manga Onwards Towards Our Noble Death (I hope that’s right, too lazy to look it up right now), is in the right to left format. Not sure if that is an isolated case or a shift in policy going forwards.
Has D&Q ever addressed this? Adam can’t be the first one to have ever raised the issue….
I brought it up in a comment thread to a review of Suat’s, I believe… other than that, I’ve never seen it discussed. When I talked to someone involved with the production of Drifting Life, he told me he thought that the prevailing opinion over at D + Q was that it was the classier way to go, and that flipping the whole page was a cheap cop-out.. Never mind how it changes the relationships on the page…
There’s some discussion of the effects of this here-
https://hoodedutilitarian.com/2010/09/yoshiharu-tsuges-red-flowers/#commentspost
Like I said, this is the only place I’ve seen this discussed. produced like this..
Hm, well, that’s half of the discussion I remember. I’m sure the other half is somewhere out there.
Stephanie Folse (one of your columnists!) had a couple posts on Blade of the Immortal that discussed panel rearranging. The image links in those posts are broken, otherwise I’d link to both of them right now.
Speaking as a reader, I had no trouble re-orienting to right to left reading but, to be fair I had grown up with Hebrew school, so the idea of reading a “reversed” language was not unfamiliar to me.
As a manga fan, I appreciate when publishers do the least amount of manipulation possible with a page.
As a publisher, I understand that, when a large percentage of the target audience is not a priori manga readership, there is a good business case for the flipping of manga. And, as a publisher I can assure you that it can be done so that the flow of the manga stays the same, just read in the opposite direction.
I read A Drifting Life and never even noticed I was reading it left to right. Only now, when you said that, did I realize I had. Yes, I prefer it to remain right to left, but I cannot agree that the story was mutilated any more than it was by being *translated.* Those were not the creator’s words, they were an approximation. If the flipping bothers you, then surely so should the translation.
There is a way to fix this problem of course. You can learn Japanese and read the original, drawn and worded *exactly as the creator intended.* Then nothing will have been mutilated.
I am in no way being facetious – I learned Japanese precisely to be able to do that very thing, because I did not much like the translations of the manga I was reading. I still prefer to read manga in the original.
I understand the pain of the localization of localized manga, but there is an option, if it’s worth it to you.
Adam reads Japanese.
Vertical mirror-reverses the pages for English reprints of Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha series. It seems to work well, less disorienting than having to read back-to-front, at least for the non-Manga-astute. (Though really either one seems to work fine once you get the hang).
Though obviously, Erica, your point applies to those of us who don’t!
i vaguely remember bill randall arguing that unflipped manga was a half-translated cop-out method in an essay in one of those comics journal special issues, i’m curious where he stands on this.
i’m not bothered by flipping or leaving it unflipped, but my personal preference leans towards unflipped simply because it preserves the orientation and panel relationship as it was originally created. as someone who started out with marvel before getting into manga, the adjustment from l-to-r to r-to-l felt pretty intuitive and easy to me. i think part of the argument that i’ve heard against this is that the l-to-r english text blocks work against reading r-to-l panel-wise, but this seems like quibbling since the text is rarely more than a few words per line and a speech balloon can usually be read at a glance anyway – not at all like reading a solid page of text.
i agree that the cut-n-paste method is really egregious though. blade of the immortal isn’t that great to begin with but the cutting and pasting nearly ruins it for me. what’s more, i think they even do some flipping of panels (I seem to recall swords inexplicably switching hands mid-battle in a couple cases). the action sequences in that manga are just a mess. i’m not sure how much of it might have been the fault of the artist but it would be nice to know for sure.
Thanks Noah. Then it makes more sense that he feels so strongly about it on the one hand, and not really at all on the other.
And it still makes me wonder why he cares about the integrity of the art, but not the words.
(I realize that I am the only person who reads manga for the words more than the pictures. ^_^ I barely notice the pictures. But…still….)
Erica,
Notice he’s complaining about this particular type of localization, not necessarily flipping a whole page mirror-style. The rearrange method completely changes the visual storytelling, the majority of the time to the detriment of the clarity. And for what reason? So that there are no left-handed samurai? So people’s kimonos are tied correctly? That’s the reason for completely changing the flow of a page?
Well…the issue is bad translation vs. decent translation, surely? And the D&Q option, as Sean says, seems just willfully disrespectful of the page layout. There’s another better option easily available, so why use the worse option?
i read japanese too, but i adjusted to r-to-l long before i started learning. like i said i’m okay with flipping. i imagine there are a lot of ideosyncratic personal preferences with this sort of thing. for example sound effects: translated or untranslated? i prefer untranslated not just because they look nicer but because at a glance they have more of a subconscious “this is a graphical representation of sound” effect for me since i still think in english. when i see a sound effect in english i actually have a hard time not stopping to read it. i imagine it could work differently for other people though. i still have a hard time imagining cut-and-paste translations not completely disrupting page compositions for anyone unless the page was carelessly composed to begin with.
hmm. three more posts snuck in while i was writing that, not it sounds like i was responding badly to them rather than just appending my first post.
As Noah says, I do read Japanese, and do read manga in the original as much as I can. But so far I can only read Japanese slowly and laboriously, so translations are a godsend. Besides, this isn’t just about me; I want this great stuff to be accessible to English-speaking readers.
I do care about the integrity of the words, but translation is a necessity for nearly all English-speaking readers, while what Drawn and Quarterly does isn’t.
Derik,
That’s good news, although I don’t know anything about that manga.
For what it’s worth, when Eclipse (I think) first brought out “Lone Wolf and Cub” in ’87-’88, it was rearranged as described here–supposedly at the insistence of Kazuo Koike, who wouldn’t accept simple mirror-flipping, because he didn’t want all those samurai fighting left-handed. When Dark Knight later re-released it, they mirror-flipped it, and it read a billion times better: the pages flowed the way they were supposed to flow, and looking back at the old editions, I could see how clunky those earlier re-arrangements had been, with the eye-paths, which had been so carefully arranged by the artist, all off-kilter.
My personal preference is for mirror-flipping: the compositions are preserved, and you don’t have the awkward contradiction of words in balloons reading left-to-right while the balloons and the panels read right-to-left. I never can quite get lost in a r-to-l comic as I do in a l-to-r one. Yes, it’s cultural conditioning, but it’s not that easy to overcome.
ave, replying to your first comment, when that (commissioned) essay went online, everyone called me an idiot for preferring flipped translations. My main point was that, at the time, Tokyopop had begun marketing unflipped translations as more “authentic;” I said that to be truly authentic, manga’s read in Japanese on the train. Translation means compromise. Going with unflipped pages compromises the reading conventions of English. Still, I cared more about what I saw as half-assed, cheap-and-fast publishing with dubious marketing.
Then unflipped manga exploded as a publishing category. Oh well.
For what it’s worth, I find the rearranging of unflipped panels is a double-compromise, though D&Q’s ugly fonts bug me more. As for Tezuka, I believe he wished his work flipped; then again, shortly after TCJ ran Tsuge’s “Screw-Style,” the Japanese journal “Book & Computer” groused over its being flipped.
So I’m happy to forget it all. Besides, I’d rather be remembered for championing Daisuke Nishijima, Yuichi Yokoyama etc. Also, this.
dark horse released lone wolf and cub.
dark knight beat up superman. ;)
that’s interesting about it being done at kazuo koike’s assistance because he was the writer but not the artist for lone wolf and cub. i wonder if goseki kojima had any opinion on that or even knew of it.
hey bill, thanks for clarifying. i don’t have any desire to get into a pedantic debate over the rhetoric of an article i half-remember (though i might have been one of the people who called you an idiot at the time). i’m happy to remember you fondly as the man who published an article that included a drawing of a guy with axeheads for buttcheeks. i mean, assuming you don’t top that before you die.
Yeah, Dark Horse, not Dark Knight, d’oh. And it was First, not Eclipse. This was based on recollections of something that I read years ago, so it might have been Kojima too (but I think I read it in an interview with Koike). But do compare, if you can, the two editions–the difference is stunning.
ave, yeah. Thanksgiving at the Randall household was awkward that year.
GakiDeka!
Adam: Here’s the page on the latest D&Q manga: http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/shopCatalogLong.php?st=art&art=a4cb61ca4344d4
Subdee: Oops, I forgot that those pages were broken! I’m in the process of switching my domain name to another service and it’s not fully up yet. Hopefully it won’t be too long before it’s all fixed.
I was actually surprised by how well I could read BotI when it had been rearranged, and put it down to Samura’s art skills. :)
Aha, so if done properly is right to left in the original Japanese on a Japanese train, then if reading manga on an American bus, I should be reading left to right panel swapped manga with badly translated text, to get a proportionately downgraded experience all around.
unless we’re counting EROS titles, hasn’t Fantagraphics only put out two volumes of manga? The unflopped Hagio and the flopped Tori Miki?
Fanta’s planning a series of manga under the editorial direction of Matt Thorn, though…and they’ll all be unflopped, like the Hagio.
Wait, why in the world should EROS titles not count? Porn comics are comics, no?
I didn’t know that Eros had manga titles!
Oh, sure, at one point in the ‘9Os Eros manga titles were one of Fantagraphics’ most important moneyspinners.
One of the porno guys they translated, “Oh! great,” eventually became a pretty big thing among manga readers… there was a whole uproar a few years back when DC’s manga line tried to edit his Tenjho Tenge series down to salability to a broader age group…
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The last time I read any manga in English was when “Screw Style” was published in TCJ. It was flipped, and the result of it was that on the very first page, the translator was left with a conundrum. The main character says he is bitten on his left arm, which in the flipped version became his right. What did the translator do about it? He translated it as “bit on the arm”, thus leaving out a whole realm of interpretive possibilities from this rich story. I figured if even Fantagraphics couldn’t be bothered to try harder than that, then there was no point in even bothering to look at translated manga any more.
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I know this comments section is long dead, but I can’t help posting… a large part of my internship with Fantagraphics was spent sitting with the customer service employees, who spend much of their days answering inquiry after order after inquiry for Eros manga titles… I once had to make a list of every Eros comic that involved tentacles, which involved skimming through the whole catalog…
More pressingly, in defense of D&Q, I once spoke with someone from the company about this, almost accidentally. It’s been a long time since I heard the story, but I believe D&Q received permission to publish the Tatsumi titles through a contract signed by Tatsumi, (which might have been transferred to them from another publisher.) The contract was made before the Tatsumi’s death, and specified that the comics would be flipped. This request was legally binding… also, it was what the author had requested, probably because there was less of a precedent for unflipped English reprintings. Again, I’m not super sure about the legalities at work here, and its been about five years since I heard it, but that’s what I remember hearing.
Love that Eros story – people still looking for Eros titles decades after the line started.
Also, Tatsumi is dead? When did that happen? Haven’t heard anything about this and he was certainly alive when the manga were published.
It’s a bummer that, in this age when children can handle Naruto, Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon unflipped, publishers still need to flip if they really want to appeal to the supposedly more sophisticated adult “mainstream” comics crowd. Unfortunately, that is the case: If you want your manga read by people who typically only read American comics, you’ll need to flip, which is why Vertical still does it with all their Tezuka.
I agree that D&Q’s flipping style is cringe-inducing, but I wanted to point out that mirror-flipping is not always easy. To do it right, you need to not only deal with the right hand/left hand issue (embarrassing when it turns out to be a major plot point), but you’ll also need to retouch (re-flip, really) any iconography that’s part of the art. Someone commented to me that Vertical’s recent (mirror-flipped) retranslation of Tezuka’s Adolf didn’t bother to retouch the Nazi iconography, so now you have a book full of backwards swastikas, which is jarring to say the least.
If anyone has ever made a picture and then flipped it on a computer, you’ll know how much of a nasty shock it is. Seeing one image at a time like that is bad, but seeing whole books of your work like that should give you a heart attack.
I’ve seen artists write blog entries about how horrible their work looks flipped and I’ve heard that many manga artists have freaked out on seeing their books like this. Some artists work looks normal flipped, but many others work just looks weird and awkward. And not just the drawings, some are precious about their panel arrangements.
Putting all that work in and then seeing it all flipped or rearranged should feel totally gutting.
Hearing that manga has been flipped or rearranged strongly puts me off buying it, especially if they are more on the illustrative side.
I know people who barely even read comics at all who can read manga with ease. It taken me a few seconds to adjust, and in early days after reading lots of manga, I would accidentally start reading American comics the wrong way.