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I own a lot of manga. Well, at least a decent amount that’s been building since 2009. I have manga from pretty much every publisher: Vertical, Seven Seas, Viz, Kodansha USA, Gen Manga, Yen Press, and even own some from publishers that shut down (CMX, Tokyopop) or no longer publish manga (Del Rey). So don’t ... Read more
Is the idea of new and casual readers so unusual to you? Why not inform the 70-year-old granny who accidentally picks up her first manga title in a bookstore (because the cover was colorful and caught her attention) how to read the thing? Publishers don’t want to alienate potential readers, that’s all there is to it. Obviously once you’ve read a title or two, the instruction is redundant.
On the other hand, manga has gotten so popular that the MegaTokyo comic puts a warning at the end of the book, saying “this was origninally written in English, and reads from right to left.” Here’s one of the pre-publication end pages:
http://www.megatokyo.com/scr33n/scr33n_2010-03-30_38773.png
Wow, I was convinced that you were Keima in real life so seeing the real you is interesting!
A good, fun article to read after a hectic Friday. I’ve always found it odd that companies worry so much about the right-to-left page order since I just start reading books from whichever side the front cover is printed without consciously noticing the direction (unless it’s Blade of the Immortal, where their determination to avoid Japanese page order at the wish of the creator led to a distracting visual continuity error in the most recent English language book). It would be weird to determinedly open a book backwards when the cover is facing the other way, wouldn’t it?
I think considering most publishers aside from Viz/Seven Seas it seems are moving away from including that, maybe it is unusual.
To be honest, I don’t know if that’s alienating anymore. Manga has been in English for a long time now. I think we can do fine without the diagram. But that’s just me though.
Well, hey! Maybe it still does serve some use. I wonder if that’ll change in the future…
lol but why, whyyyyyyyyyyyyy???
Well, as pointed out in the comments, you never know who will pick up a manga, and that’s a fair take. Does including an extra page instructing new readers cost a lot? Probably not. So maybe it does serve some use.