Hey, it's February, and I'm answering comments from December! I rock so hard. I did actually read this back in December, but I remember looking at it and say, "Wow, this is a very dense comment, and everything in it requires some thought." But now, I'm in grad school, and I'm trying really hard to avoid doing work by writing long, involved comments on Scans_daily. ^_^
If I recall correctly, they were thrown by the superheroes who show up in the first chapter (the superhero RPG Alex plays in), the concept of supervillains (not villains, just the specific supervillain concept as it relates to superheros), the secret identities, and all of Molly's discussion pertaining thereto, and the discussions among the kids about how to use their powers, and should they fight crime, and so on--and yes, given the extent to which Runaways tries to avoid tapping into that stuff, I was amazed it still didn't process, but it didn't.
I thinking, maybe crime-fighting vigilantes don't serve the same function in manga as they do in American comics? In manga, you certainly get people with superhero powers, and you get powered people with spectacular costumes, and you get powered people working for crime-fighting organizations, but whenever it's the latter, there's invariably some element of the institutional about it. Sometimes you have your ronin loners, and they'll fight for justice, but they don't patrol the streets, looking for thugs, and they definitely don't get paired off against Galactus.
Oh yas, manga has its own conventions. In truth, even when we did manga titles, we'd often spend a fair amount of time explaining some of those conventions, or cultural context, because someone would get confused. The superhero thing might have seemed more exceptional to me because I was, for all intents and purposes, the only translator for that in the room--I was explaining as much to my co-host as to the kids.
I'd always thought all-ages non-manga and kids' manga could co-exist peacefully; now I wonder. I really hope they can, and I will do my damndest to cross-sell them to people.
On the other hand, there are very few translated manga in the indy-comix, underground, art-comics mode, very few translated equivalents of Eightball or Maus (Barefoot Gen, sure, but not quite...) or the Acme Novelty Library.
Yeah, there's some, but not a lot. It's so hard for me to really know, because as a monolingual English speaker on this side of the Pacific, everything I know about untranslated manga has to come through interested third parties, and I can't get an accurate gauge on what the bookshelves look like from that. I know there's not much of that type in translation. I don't know what exists to be translated (definitely some) or when, if ever, the American market will be ready for it. (Here's the million dollar question: how will the manga audience age? What will they want when they get older? I will set fire to anyone who opines they'll grown up into Batman, but I'd be happy to listen to anyone with a thoughtful take on that. God willing, the answer will be, "enough josei titles to support a magazine.")
pt 1
If I recall correctly, they were thrown by the superheroes who show up in the first chapter (the superhero RPG Alex plays in), the concept of supervillains (not villains, just the specific supervillain concept as it relates to superheros), the secret identities, and all of Molly's discussion pertaining thereto, and the discussions among the kids about how to use their powers, and should they fight crime, and so on--and yes, given the extent to which Runaways tries to avoid tapping into that stuff, I was amazed it still didn't process, but it didn't.
I thinking, maybe crime-fighting vigilantes don't serve the same function in manga as they do in American comics? In manga, you certainly get people with superhero powers, and you get powered people with spectacular costumes, and you get powered people working for crime-fighting organizations, but whenever it's the latter, there's invariably some element of the institutional about it. Sometimes you have your ronin loners, and they'll fight for justice, but they don't patrol the streets, looking for thugs, and they definitely don't get paired off against Galactus.
Oh yas, manga has its own conventions. In truth, even when we did manga titles, we'd often spend a fair amount of time explaining some of those conventions, or cultural context, because someone would get confused. The superhero thing might have seemed more exceptional to me because I was, for all intents and purposes, the only translator for that in the room--I was explaining as much to my co-host as to the kids.
I'd always thought all-ages non-manga and kids' manga could co-exist peacefully; now I wonder. I really hope they can, and I will do my damndest to cross-sell them to people.
On the other hand, there are very few translated manga in the indy-comix, underground, art-comics mode, very few translated equivalents of Eightball or Maus (Barefoot Gen, sure, but not quite...) or the Acme Novelty Library.
Yeah, there's some, but not a lot. It's so hard for me to really know, because as a monolingual English speaker on this side of the Pacific, everything I know about untranslated manga has to come through interested third parties, and I can't get an accurate gauge on what the bookshelves look like from that. I know there's not much of that type in translation. I don't know what exists to be translated (definitely some) or when, if ever, the American market will be ready for it. (Here's the million dollar question: how will the manga audience age? What will they want when they get older? I will set fire to anyone who opines they'll grown up into Batman, but I'd be happy to listen to anyone with a thoughtful take on that. God willing, the answer will be, "enough josei titles to support a magazine.")