Editorial: Why the Bum Deal for Manga Fans?

Note: I've been holding off on writing about this for a while, just because when I think about it I get riled up and start rambling. But since the exchange is still down, and I just spent $500 on a shipment of manga, now's as good a time as any to get this off my chest. Hopefully I don't spin out of control.

When manga is translated for a western audience certain things are to be expected. Just like the transition between manga to it's anime counter-part or a book to a movie, when Japanese manga undergoes an English adaptation certain concessions have to be made. Some of them okay. Some of them less than.

Maybe it's an obscure Japanese play on words or catchphrase turned into "A stitch in time saves lime." Maybe it's a wacky variety show being referred to as Celebrity Squares, for American localization. Maybe onii-san becomes brother. Perhaps even the main character's name switches from "Raito" to "Light". And fair enough, a company's gotta make some money. You gotta make things a little easier for the mainstream audience. And I expect a US publisher to do this sort of thing. What I don't expect however, is for them to violate my grandmother. Yet this appears to be considered fair business practice for some reason.

Crap adaptations make Yomiko cry.

You could be talking about CMX's Stalin'esque editing/censoring of Tenjou Tenge's artwork, Del Ray's blatent disregard for Negima! (oh I'm saving a special post for you guys, but let's just say that "lazy editing" and "loose translating" would be a generous way to describe your work), or ADV's minor localization of a gag which later screws up an entire chapter of Yotsuba&! I picked those off the top of my head, but with just a bit of searching on your favourite forums you'll most likely be able to find problems of the "And you guys are a business HOW?" variety for many other series.

But even let's just say it was only the above titles. CMX is obviously making enough money to justify the ongoing censorship of TenTen, and Negima! usually hits pretty well on the bookscan chart from what I recall. What's crazy is partially that publishers are forging on ahead, carefree, riding on the waves of payola. The other craziness is that, aside from censorship which will get anyone worked up, many manga fans seem to just accept adaptation work which can only be described as "sloppy" as ain't no thang.

If an Anime company was to pull off the same kind of stunts, they'd find themselves drawn, quartered, and laughed at naked by raging otaku. Doesn't seem to be that kind of fervor in the manga community from what I've seen.

So what's the deal, I got a lot of questions here. Exactly why is it that anime gets a more respected treatment? Do the hardcore manga crowd not bring in enough money? Are more people familiar with fansubs than they are scanlations? Are we just not vocal enough? Are we so happy to see titles being licenced that we just don't care? Is editing manga just so easy for a publisher that it's practically impossible for them not to try? Or is it just a matter of time, and companies will eventually give us a respectable level of quality once manga is past it's infancy, like it did with anime?

I'll be the first to admit, I'm no manga expert and I don't own thousands of tankubons, so perhaps I'm reading the community and publishers wrong. But when you still have a forum dedicated and regularly updated with manga edits I would go out on a limb and say that us manga fans are not in an ideal climate right now.

Also, what else is that because of previous experiences I've had and how I see other people's series getting treated, I know that I'm scared shitless to buy english translated manga. That is definately not right.