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August 2008
The Elements of Manga have so much variety and range in Japan. However, the elements of publishing manga in Japan, discussed last time, do not take into account the publishing elements of producing manga in America. The history of producing manga in America has taken a very interesting and varied approach, starting off as a sub-market of American comic books to eventually becoming its own market that American comic book are trying to break back into. It's a very odd and bizarre creature that has modified, changed, and evolved to serve the market, but at the same token has abandoned some elements that gave manga a different feel in America.
The first main element in publishing manga in America was the attempt to bring over popular and critically acclaimed manga series that American writers and artists had discovered, usually un-translated, but full of raw energy that hopefully the American market would feed upon. Several companies jumped in originally: Eclipse, First, various other companies, and a very early version of Viz. First is notable for trying to bring over Lone Wolf and Cub in a regular comic book edition with color covers by Frank Miller. Miller's love of the series is well recorded and throughout the series run at First he did covers and had an introductory piece that started each issue. Not a bad early manga attempt huh? Well . . . maybe but it had a lot of problems and finding that perfect balance between east and west was far from perfect.
The early manga forays into English suffered from several "problems" and the solutions to solve them were uniquely American. First "problem", manga are traditionally printed in large magazines with a chapter or chapters, plus other series that have the same format. So a weekly magazine may only have 15 to 20 pages, but that is weekly leading to over 60 to 80 pages a month! American comics, by and large are always published in a standard format of 22 pages plus 8 pages of ads (though this can vary) coming out every month. Also manga magazines are oversized, larger then a comic book standard size, with about 400 to 500 pages of various series for $5, and when collected are shrunk down to a book size, which publishes one series, usually covering up to about 200 to 250 pages of the series for about $5 a book. American comics have a pretty standard form, no matter the series or publisher, and when collected are kept at the same size but their price point is all over retailing for anywhere between $12 and $25, depending on the amount of pages. Also manga . . . almost always black and white; American comics almost always color. "Problems" these were, and the solution was? Manga must conform! Except it really didn't.
First, for instance kept Lone Wolf and Cub in black and white, but printed it on glosser paper and instead of 22 pages aimed for around 48 pages, letting them up the price to around $4, back in the 80's a good amount, and gave the issues color covers. The "issues" though were printed more as graphic novel format and kept a consistent numbering, similar to a normal American comic book and were the same normal comic book size. Other publishers tried different approaches. Eclipse when it published Appleseed, did black and white as well, but published it as monthly issues, with the issues being numbered as a mini-series, with the mini-series ending where the original book ended. The artwork was published at the comic book size still, not a huge change, and on normal comic book paper. Viz did several different formats, some more like First, but most like Eclipse, which were monthly published mini-series. One difference, notable on the famous Ranma ½ series Viz did, was that they published some series in color, to be even more like the American comic books that they were trying to be sold next to. But the two formats also had two big differences that were altered with very mixed results . . .
Traditionally manga are published in right to left format (thought some Japanese books are published the other way), where American comics and books are published left to right, so the books open the opposite way and are orientated the other way. So if you open to a two page spread it should be looked at starting from the right to the left. To account for this most English language manga publishers "flipped" the artwork so it could be read left to right. However, this "mirror" effect caused other problems . . . any writing not in the captions, or on the characters, example shirt logos, would be "flipped". This would give the artwork a weird look and often led to dissatisfaction from the original artists on how their books looked. In addition this led to the second problem, sound effects. Manga usually have sound effects drawn onto the artwork, in Japanese, that one . . . were flipped as well, so they didn't look right, and they were unreadable by most English speakers anyway! So the artwork, after being flipped had to usually be touched up and redrawn with American sound effect noises. These "changes" became the biggest problem that manga fans in America had with these efforts, because they felt they changed the original works too far from their original intent. (Now the validity of that idea are debatable, and often American manga fans are still not entirely happy on how the format is published, wanting the manga to be "authentic", which is a challenge unless you learn Japanese and just go ahead and read the originals . . . but remember fan is just short for fanatic . . . )
Nevertheless these changes became standard with manga becoming a "genre" of the normal American comic book market. Most early attempts of publishing and collecting manga in America were done as comic sized trade paperbacks. Considering the look of the manga market now this approach, now over 20 years old, seems strange and alien. Most publishers collected manga in this form . . . if they collected it all. Despite the popularity and huge market share collections now enjoy, 20 years ago this wasn't the most common way to find comics or manga. Manga collections, particularly those from Dark Horse looked like trade paperbacks, and Dark Horses' early forays into manga were published the standard way: flipped, comic book length, translated sound effects, and then collected. However, Dark Horse began some of the first changes to this system. First, the displeasure of the original manga-ka over the flipping of their art was addressed by letting them retouch their artwork. (Though when the manga-ka is Shadow and the manga is Ghost In The Shell . . . you are more likely to get what you want.) Next the addition of glossier paper and including color became staples for manga, especially through Dark Horse. Such changes became ways of attracting that Dark Horse was publishing a higher quality of manga . . . but none of these are part of the staples of manga publishing that so many recognize as being the way manga is done now and close to how America now publishes manga. But those elements of manga publishing will have to wait till next month.
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