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Manga in English, For Better or Worse
by Bill Randall
from The Comics Journal 2005 Special Edition
Panel from Epic Comics' 1991 colorized and flipped version of Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira; ©1988 MASH ROOM Co. Ltd. & Kodansha Ltd., Tokyo

What started as a bad idea has become a flood. When translated Japanese comics made their tentative first steps in the American market, very few people thought Western readers would accept them. So they tried to fit in, adding color and appearing in thin pamphlets with flipped pages and retouched art. It was a far cry from 500-page black and white weeklies. Despite the changes, most readers and retailers didn't know what to make of them, but a few companies persisted, and as the market started to grow, new ones joined in. Color disappeared first, then the pamphlets, and translated manga soon looked more like the originals, appearing in 200 page chunks. Now, the standard of quality for many readers is manga that's as un-translated as possible. Un-flipped pages are considered more authentic than flipped, and original sound effects preferred to any changes to the artwork. Whether that's more "authentic" or not is an interesting question, as well as whether some of these books merit translating in the first place. With this surge of manga, it's probably easier just to shut down rather than sift through all the books looking for the good ones. Yet many of them are worth a look, some more than once.

Unfortunately, those books are rare, and skimming the cover gallery can be just as satisfying as plowing through the things from front to back. In a way, that's not a problem. After all, manga resembles nothing so much as pop songs: they get rewritten year after year, and each new generation gets to discover the same pleasures of living to their accompaniment. Kids today (ahem) listen to formulaic punk and hip-hop, but now and then someone will discover the Sonics or the Sugar Hill Gang. So too will those fans interested enough search past whatever spin-offs Cartoon Network has this week. Sadly, these discoveries happen rarely. Because manga is an overwhelmingly disposable medium -- the weeklies get read, and left, on the train, while huge "recycle" stores like Book-Off literally move tons of used books -- there's little impetus to originality. Usually one or two older manga deserve a look because they started a genre, and as is usually the case, those older, less polished works far outstrip their grandchildren in terms of invention and effect. Few such works are available in English.

Nonetheless, one of the main pleasures in reading popular manga comes from a different definition of originality. Rather than the triumphant originality of the Artist-Hero, invention in manga usually comes in a few telling changes to an old formula. Thus, enjoyment comes from seeing how the artist has played with our expectations in a genre we know very well. Thus, the differences in the romance in comics like Video Girl Ai and Maison Ikkoku, or the subtleties of the fight scenes in Bastard! compared to Fist of the North Star. His or Her Circumstances scores its points by spinning innovative twists on its look at youth, while Harlem Beat and GTO have obvious antecedents. An afternoon in the library will acquaint you with any given genre's ins and outs, as well as its best artists. For many readers, this predictability is the main pleasure.

English-language manga publishing has focused on the predictable, and churned it out en masse. Perhaps because they're trying for volume, publishers have streamlined the translation process as much as possible. Flipping pages and retouching art is a very labor-intensive process, especially when done as well as Studio Proteus did it. So leaving the pages as they are, pasting some bad typesetting into the balloons, and calling it "more authentic" has caught on, unfortunately abetted by many of the artists themselves, who know very little about the target culture or language, yet can't bear to see their work altered enough to make it easily readable. This despite the fact that some artists routinely hold their artwork up to a mirror to see it as other people might see it, one step removed from the mind that made it. As it stands, un-flipped manga is readable, but not intuitively so; moreover, while Japanese reads easily from left to right, right to left, or top to bottom, English reads easily only from left to right. Thus, un-flipped pages set the flow of the words and the flow of the images in opposition to one another. For an artist like Osamu Tezuka, who designed his pages with remarkable attention to guiding the reader's eye through the page, the best way to preserve his panel-to-panel continuity is to flip it so it reads left-to-right. For some lesser artists, it's not that much of a concern. That Hiroaki Samura can effectively cut and paste his panels in Blade of the Immortal to read left-to-right format says more about his use of the panel rather than the page as a basic unit than it does about flipped versus un-flipped artwork.

That said, un-flipped translations are at the very least readable. So are badly timed, typo-ridden subtitles on a fifth generation vhs bootleg. As to the question of authenticity, if it's that important, move to Japan, learn Japanese, and read it on the train. The point of a translation is to make a work intelligible to a completely different culture, to interpret it so that the barriers of language and custom are no longer insurmountable. Un-flipped manga is at best a half-translation, and while they are popular at the moment, it's a fad. The peculiar enjoyment of reading something from another culture is made more exotic because it's un-flipped. In the end, such pleasures fade to be replaced by new ones, and it makes good sense if manga publishers don't count on a momentary trend to define their publishing practices.

What makes even better sense is the proliferation of high-quality translations of high-quality works. Then readers can graduate to read something else once their generation's Yu-Gi-Oh! doesn't do it anymore. I'll gladly applaud two hundred volumes of Sexy Knife Wakige if it finances putting Iou Kuroda or Kazuichi Hanawa into English. Fortunately, a small but growing number of high-quality works can be read in English, and the next few years should have many more surprises. What follows is a list of what I consider the most rewarding manga in English. It's not complete, but it is a start, and there are worse places to start.

Barefoot Gen, one of the first manga translated, perhaps the most important, and certainly one of the best handled. Its early edition should have been a model for later translators.

Katsuhiro Otomo's works Domu and Akira, finally uncolorized and released in one integrated edition, though the original Epic version had the only good coloring job ever done on a manga.

Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, a masterpiece of fantasy, far more satisfying than the movie. His short version of Porco Rosso also appeared in an old issue of Animerica in color.

The works of Osamu Tezuka: chief among those must be the available fragments of Phoenix and the series Buddha and Adolf, representing his "mature" work, and Astro Boy and Black Jack as his more popular pieces. Over 40 volumes of his work are now out, but it's still just a small portion of his total output.

Monkey Punch's Lupin III, the classic caper series that made its debut in 1967, displays consistently high levels of craftsmanship, with cartooning on a level with his idol, Mort Drucker.

The handful of works by Yoshiharu Tsuge, none of them in an ideal format: an in-print collection. Among them are "Red Flowers," "Oba's Electroplate Factory," and "Screw-Style."

Cutting up the three collections of underground manga, Saké Jock, Comics Underground Japan, and Secret Comics Japan, should yield one thick volume with no filler. In it would be works by Imiri Sakabashira, Nekojiru, Yuko Tsuno, Kiriko Nananan, Kazuichi Hanawa, and Hideshi Hino. Also notable are the Hino Horror collections, and his books Hell Baby and Panorama of Hell.

Among the increasing number of bilingual manga being published in Japan, I would single out The Genius Bakabon, a gag manga that's both hilarious and historically important; Sazae-san, the seminal daily life strip; Tezuka's Princess Knight; and Doraemon, the classic kid's comic about a robot cat. These make the list because they're good, available, and unlikely to be translated otherwise.

Sanpei Shirato's Legend of Kamui, while not his 18-volume masterpiece Kamui-Den, makes a fine introduction to this seminal artist's work, and should outrank Lone Wolf and Cub, Blade of the Immortal, and Vagabond as the touchstone for the swordplay set.

Some other volumes worthy of consideration include the works of Taiyo Matsumoto, Black and White and Number 5; the frenetic Bakune Young; the hard SF novel 2001 Nights; Junji Ito's horror work, including Uzumaki; and Moto Hagio's science fiction works A, A', and They Were Eleven.

Finally, Version: perhaps the one real tragedy of manga in English, this quirky, engaging story freely plays with the hard-boiled and science fiction genres, and has at heart a deep engagement with the complexities and fascinations of nature. Unlike anything else translated into English, it has never been finished and never collected. A casualty of the market's contractions in the mid-'90s, the upswing in manga hasn't resurrected this fine story. Single issues, with terrible computer-art covers, can be found in the quarter bins of comic shops. The market is surging, so perhaps this book will reappear somewhere down the road. One can hope.


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