Forum - View topicAnswerman - How Did American Manga Releases Become Right-To-Left?
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thenix
 Posts: 265 |
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I would always try to get people to sit down in the cafe at Borders and read instead of standing in the aisle, I think I got turned down every time. At the time poor highschooler me would take a book to the cafe, buy a drink and read.
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ANN_Lynzee
ANN Executive Editor
 Posts: 3053 Location: Email for assistance only |
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Having been in a B&N recently, believe me, manga cows still exist and are still infuriating.
I had a bunch of those single-issue comics (I had a subscription box at my local comic book shop when I was about 13) that included Sailor Moon (why did I let my mom give these away?), Ah! My Goddess, Ranma 1/2, Card Captor Sakura, and one manga that greatly suffered from flopped format: Gunsmith Cats. The story takes place in Chicago, so every flopped image has Rally driving on the wrong side of the road with the steering wheel on the wrong side of her Shelby Cobra. Dark Horse used to have fan write-in sections in the back of some of their single issue comics, much like Western releases and they addressed it there once. |
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Wrial Huden
 Posts: 149 Location: McKinney, TX |
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That really bothered me! Every panel featuring Rally or Minnie May driving got me to question; is this taking place in Chicago or London? On another note, I was just happy that English-language manga became available in the late 80s when Viz (in a joint venture with the now-defunct Eclipse Comics) released titles like Kamui and Mai the Psychic Girl. They were probably flopped as well. I'll have to check my Mai TPBs to see if I can spot anything unusual. |
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Ryusui
 Posts: 463 |
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I haven't yet forgotten Tokyopop's, ahem, "work" on the .hack manga and novels. You'd think their translator didn't even realize there was a "rest of the franchise" to stay consistent with. And even then, stuff like "Zawan Shin" was frickin' inexcusable.
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WashuTakahashi
 Posts: 415 Location: Chicago, IL |
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Seems like I lucked out and got into anime and manga JUST after the change happened (By my rough guess, I discovered manga around 2003) I remember practically living at Borders, waiting every week for my 20% off coupon to go buy a new manga xD Manga online wasn't much of a thing yet either, so there were a lot of series were I bought 1 or 2 volumes of it to try, discovered it was trash, and left it to rot on my shelves forevermore.
I hated these people with a passion. Especially since our local library had a really good selection of manga, and a network where you could easily loan out manga from nearby libraries for free (I'm sure I went through no less than 500 manga in my high school years, all thanks to the library) The worst was if you were actually there to buy something, and someone was on the floor reading the only copy -_- By my sophomore year of high school, I already had the nickname of "the library" among my fellow manga/anime loving friends, and that was only with maybe 50 manga and a few dvds outside of my FullMetal Alchemist ones that I bought as they came out =P |
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Darkmagick
 SubscriberPosts: 472 |
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That was what I did too. I felt somewhat less guilty that way, because at least I was giving the store money...Also, why would you want to sit/stand in the aisles when there are comfy chairs available? Or even regular chairs? Just...why? (I actually buy books now that I have an income, I swear!) |
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Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 10040 Location: Virginia |
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@Wrial Huden
Mai the Psychic Girl was flopped. I have both the individual comics and the three volume graphic novel set. Before Tokyo Pop did their first unflopped graphic novels, Viz issued two series in both flopped and unflopped versions in both comic and graphic novel form. I think I remember reading that this was contractual rather than a change in their business plan. I know Evangelion came out this way. That is two versions of each comic and each volume of the graphic novel. I still have the comics in both formats and the graphic novels in the unflopped format. I'm not sure of the other series since I didn't buy it but I think it may have been Dragon Ball. |
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PurpleWarrior13
 Posts: 2035 |
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I own exactly one flipped manga: A.D. Police: Dead End City (1993 release from "Viz Communications") because there's no way in hell that's ever being reissued, and I might get the Tenchi manga too for the same reason. I personally find the practice distracting, and it alters the original art too much, but I can understand why they did it before the medium took off.
But growing up in the late 90s/early-mid 2000s, I remember manga being a huge deal with my generation. Even Scholastic Book Fairs and catalogs had manga and Shonen Jump issues, as well as my school libraries (and it was often obvious they didn't look inside the books! LOL). I subscribed to SJ for a while, and I remember me and my brother being big collectors of the Dragon Ball/Z, One Piece, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Legendz (yes...) manga. I still love collecting it, and bookstores still stock it. Once you read a few pages, the reading format is not hard to grasp. I still LOL at the "You're Reading the WRONG Way" blurbs at the back of each book. I did own some of DBZ in old monthly-comic format, but it was still unflipped. Apparently, the Dragon Ball series has never been flipped over here per Toriyama's request. Even Viz's mid-90s graphic novels were unflipped. Also, manga is published better today. Tokyopop in particular always had the worst quality with sloppy translations, and bad, blotchy artwork. Kodansha USA's reissues of Sailor Moon and Tokyo Mew Mew are a million times better, not just going by the translation, but they're also neater, cleaner, and the pages don't fall out. Viz did a good behind-the-scenes look at their "remastered" release of Ranma 1/2 on their Blu-ray release of the anime. Their old early-90s editions of the series were really sloppy-looking, not just for being flipped, but also they were working with photocopies of the original Japanese comics, and they would literally put white-out over top of the kanji. Now with digital technology, it's a bajillion times easier. And we STILL need an unflopped Akira. The current editions in-print are identical to Dark Horse Comics' 2000 flopped editions. We did have that awesome 80s/90s Marvel edition that was flipped AND colorized (the very first comic colored with digital technology), and even approved by Otomo, but it's hard to track down now. It's bizarre we still don't have a faithful representation of one of the most famous and ground-breaking manga ever. |
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Freyanne
 Posts: 216 |
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One thing that would bother me the most about "manga cows", even more than blocking the shelf/aisle, is when they end up damaging the book while reading it.
I still remember one Saturday going into my Borders store and noticing a girl reading the newest volume of FullMetal Alchemist. The way she was reading it, she has part of the front bent/folded behind the other half of the book when she wasnt reading on that page. (Hard to explain - if you ever use a spiral notebook or sketch book, think of it like that). It was so bad that after she put that book back on the shelf, the front cover was "stuck" open, along with a few pages as well. A month later, the same volume was still on the shelf. I can't remember if it was that same book store, but I know it got to a point where they had to put "no reading" signs in the manga section because of how many books would end up with messed up or damanged pages/covers due to careless people. |
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WashuTakahashi
Posts: 415 Location: Chicago, IL |
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I had a friend who read manga like that. I had lent her a manga, only to get it back in that bad shape. I didn't connect the dots until I saw her reading a school paperback in the same way. She asked to borrow another manga at some point, and I was like "Not unless you swear you won't read it like that." Book killers... |
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RHorsman
 Posts: 151 Location: Loch Loman |
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"Man, is everybody in Japan left-handed?" -Me, before finding out about flopping
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Weazul-chan
 Posts: 625 Location: Michigan |
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I remember when we had a Waldenbooks in town still. man, that place had a manga cow problem and regional management wouldn't let them kick the manga cows out without reason on the basis it could drive potential paying customers away. so many manga volumes were in less than new condition. it got to the point with series I was following I had them keep a volume for me behind the counter when the new volumes came out.
they loved when I stopped in to buy or browse tho. I was a regular paying customer who spent a good amount of money at the place my coming in gave them reason to shoo them out on the basis a disabled regular customer deserves to be able to actually get to what they're looking to buy unobstructed. which really helped me too, since sometimes there wasn't enough room for me and my cane to maneuver thru the manga aisles because of manga cows who were so self centered they wouldn't move on their own. |
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Red Fox of Fire
 Posts: 345 |
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I remember starting to read manga soon after the switch. I read a lot of them in the traditional right-to-left format first, and then when I got my hands on some older manga that were localized left-to-right, it was ironically hard for me to read them.
And manga cows. Boy, do I remember them. |
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Wyvern
 Posts: 1608 |
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This led to my favorite silly unintended consequence of flopping: Tokyopop's original edition of Parasyte forced them to change the name of the parasite that had taken the form of the main character's right hand. Originally named Migi (which just means "right") the English version renames him "Lefty the parasite." The funny thing is, I was STILL expecting a left hand pun when I began watching the new Parasyte anime last year. It wasn't until Migi got his name that I slapped my forehead and went, "Of course! Flopping!" |
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Jacquipuff
 Posts: 274 Location: Silver Spring, MD |
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Ah, I remember when this change happened. It seems like manga has been unflopped for forever now, so it makes me feel ever so slightly old.
I know exactly what you're talking about. Whenever I see people reading like that, I just want to say "Nooooo, stop damaging that poor book!" Obviously, it's much worse when people do it with books that don't even belong to them, but I just love my books and manga so much, I can't stand to see people damage any. It's why I don't lend books to my sister (she doesn't just dog-ear them, she folds the page down until it lines up with the exact line of text she left off on). |
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