Being a manga fan can be really frustrating, and trying to direct people towards new manga can be even MORE frustrating. Manga reading is a seriously expensive hobby, and I feel terrible when I encourage Wordcandy readers (many of whom are young and strapped for cash) to spend their hard-earned allowances on promising titles that turn out to be dead ends.

Frankly, the odds are not good for new series. As part of K-M, I worked on volume eight of the popular manhwa 'Goong'. K-M dropped the series when we discovered it had been licensed, and I went ahead and began promoting the licensed version on Wordcandy—and watched as the official publisher (ICE Kunion) only produced one volume before falling off the face of the planet. I've done my best to encourage our readers to buy the licensed volumes of Kiyohiko Azuma’s ‘Yotsuba&!’, and now ADV has put the series on ANOTHER lengthy and unexplained hiatus. As part of Wordcandy, I dutifully reviewed the first volume of Eric Wight’s ‘My Dead Girlfriend’, and it was never heard from again.

It’s possible this is just a problem for the series I read (maybe I’m jinxed?), but I doubt it. The manga industry is disorganized and financially shaky, and scanlators provide several valuable services: they introduce readers to new titles, they build buzz, and they finish series left hanging (this last is particularly important to me, because I’m more likely to buy and/or review a series if I’m confident that somebody, somewhere, will finish it). I certainly don’t want to be taking food from manga artists’ mouths or undercutting the work of the English-language publishing companies that produce consistent results, but I honestly think scanlators do more good than harm. Their work benefits both readers and English-language publishers, and that means more money (eventually) for the creators of the original works.

[I am now in a cheerful mood because I am now holding my copy of the first Miyamoto Kano book published in English. That love was going to go to DramaQueen but now Deux Press is the recipient of my gratitude. My monkey has been placated.]

I still think translators should include notes on who uses atashi/watakushi etc, though. I think that's almost as important to characterization as honorifics but it is much harder to leave that in. XD;;

-The slang in NANA. Why does everyone, including the punk rockers, sound like a Valley Girl? Please, god, just make it stop.
-The lack of honorifics in Skip Beat! Sigh, just once I'd like to hear someone call "Kyoko," "Kyoko-chan." Also how people refer to each other is actually quite important to certain (romance)-plot developments. Leaving out the honorifics hurts some comphrehension of the story.
-ADV. Just in general. Because god, what a stupid way to run a *business* which really needs fans to support it. JUST EXPLAIN YOURSELF ONCE IN A WHILE AND MAYBE PEOPLE WOULDN'T KEEP POSTING ABOUT THE DEATH OF ADV.
-DramaQueen. Oh dear, I want to give these nice ladies money, but until they figure out how to function as a *business* I can't. I just hope they get their ducks in a row before the summer ends otherwise things are getting a little nasty out there in fandom.
-Tokyopop -- why does every title you put out (save Fruits Basket) have such shitty print quality? I mean, I can *guess* why but man does it annoy.
-Viz. Would it kill you to put in a color page on a regular release once in a while? If Tokyopop can manage it, you probably could as well.

Yup, this is currently what is making me so cranky about the manga industry about the moment.

In spite of the fact I buy books from all those people and will continue to do so (although I'm seriously rethinking my commitment to Tokyopop releases thanks to recent to developments. sigh).

That being said I rather like translator notes and think what honorifics people use should be included in those, along with speech habits like how people refer to themselves (ie do they use boku or atashi or ore?) and if they have any other tics like Chichiri's "no da" , things like that.

Still, it seems that honorifics are demanded by the English-speaking manga community at large and so, translation preferences aside, from that perspective I think they should be left in.

.......Err, uhhh, wait, was this topic about scanlations and fansubs? Oh, yeahhhh.....

Hmmm, I've watched many fansubs but all the ones that have been licensed I have happily bought. =p I've bought the licensed version of most of the terrible, awful Chinese bootlegs I've seen, too. I mean, the translations of the bootlegs are usually pretty hilarious but the licensed versions are much better quality and usually are more fun to share with others (with the exception of those few people who completely understand the joy that is stumbling through awful translations.)

Now if only someone would license Mahoujin Guruguru....

Oh yes- I am fully aware of what a privileged position I am in and what a sense of entitlement I am displaying, so I think I am trying to say that even when you are aware of the reality of a situation, the voice of common sense can still gets drowned by the howling of the monkey on one's back.

Moving to a [hopefully] less contentious issue, honorifics- I like them and what they reveal about the relationship between people. I don't think they are a real barrier to readers/watchers as you can work out what they mean quite quickly and then it adds something to the experience.

and I would also like to see more transparency/communication between companies and fans (see ADV’s recent silence over their situations, which led to weeks of bad press and speculation over the company’s future…)

This remains my biggest beef with most of the U.S. companies. It takes SO LITTLE effort to tell the consumer what is happening and can often buy a great deal of good will just putting forth that minimal amount of effort. I'm right there with you on this *sigh*

thanks for the clarification on the Macross issue -- being a mana person first and anime fan second, I tend to not have very little knowledge of the historical dust-ups / points of tension between R1 companies and the Japanese copyright owners.

John -- thanks for stopping by! I hope it is clear I am totally on the side of including honorifics! (Like I mentioned with an example from NANA above I think something is definitely lost, certain inter-personal dynamics between characters for instance, when they are left out. However, I do think there are some arguments that make sense -- from a business & cultural perspective -- why they might not always be needed (in spite of the fact I personally like them!)

Oh, and the Macross thing. Yeah, it's pretty ugly and kind of confusing when you get down to the details of the situation. What basically happened was that a dispute arose in Japan between the two companies who financed the show and the animation studio, Studio Nue, who created the show. They argued over who owned what- characters, designs, merchandising rights, video rights, etc. While all that was going on, one of the financers licensed the rights to the "Macross" name to an American company, Harmony Gold. HG have militantly maintained their strangehold on the license, suing any company that released anything with the "Macross" label on it without consulting them first, even if it fell out of the realm of things they had any say over. What further confuses the situation is that it turns out the Japanese company HG licensed Macross from had no right to do so. The Japanese courts ruled against that company's claims on the property. So, basically HG have been enforcing a license they don't technically own, but which nobody feels like challenging.

And THEN, on top of that, you have music rights issues. The second series, Macross Seven, is basically one long musical, as it deals with music being used to combat the invading aliens. Their are a ton of songs in the show and the word from the R1 companies for years has been that the music rights are SOOO expensive, there's no way an R1 company could turn anything near a profit on the show's release here.

I think that with anime some of the main complaints around time and cost are generated by the dubbing requirements. Why not have two releases? One with subs, that you could watch online or download for a nominal cost, and then a full release with both in nice box-sets and extras etc? I am never going to listen to the dubbed version- I am not from the States so the voice actors grate no matter how good a job they do, especially when my ear is expecting the tones and intonations of the Japanese voices.

And this doesn't paint me in a good light but I think it illustrates the feeling of resentment pretty much perfectly- I am hooked on Bleach. When I started reading them, Viz was releasing books every two months, which is fine. Then they went on their Naruto blitz and started releasing Bleach every four months. So far I have managed to resist the urge to read the scanlations but honestly, it's getting harder every week. I am 140+ chapters behind the current story and falling behind further all the time.

So then I started watching the anime, only the legal releases of that also ran out very quickly. So now I am watching the fan-sub versions and am almost past the point where vol 22 finishes. I am frustrated because I really really want to give Viz my money but they seem to want to produce every sort of Bleach-based item except for the actual books. I'm not going to buy special Bleach pencil cases and shoes! Less paraphenalia, more books please!

And now I have worked myself up into a big fit of frustrated fan-dom, at the start of my work-day.

Frustration over pricing, release patterns, show availability, shows cancelled/left incomplete in R1, etc. It’s that element that is causing the licensing companies to point more of a finger at the fansubbers and put some of the blame on them for the declining R1 anime DVD sales…

This starts to become a chicken-and-the-egg argument at some point for me -- do we blame the U.S. media companies for being inconsistent and pissing off fans or do we blame fans for fansubbing the licensed stuff? Either way, both have negative impacts on how fans and companies relate to each other and I think the manga / anime market really depends on those groups working together at some level (now the fansubbers and R1 companies really appear to be at cross-purposes which is why the market here in the U.S. really stinks right now.)

1) They should be left in because the reveal information about characters' relationships to each other (use of "chan" versus "kun" versus "san" and so on).

2) Japanese society doesn't really rely on honorifics (as much) anymore or they don't mean as much so there is no point to translating them.

3) We don't have honorifics in American society so they shouldn't be translated for the U.S. market.

I will say I kind of miss reading Yasu call Hachi "Nana-chan" at times in the official version of Ai Yazawa's NANA and so I kind of dig honorifics when the reveal those sorts of interpersonal dynamics (here a kind of big-brother / little-sister vibe between the two characters.)

As for scanlations, I don't usually like them much. o_o; I generally only read them if the manga I just bought has no furigana (oh, I am too reliant on furigana for comprehension! T_T) or I there's a one-shot story by an author I like that I can't find anywhere. But in the end I'd rather have the hard-copy so I can lovingly peruse it anywhere I desire.

On the other hand I won't condem people who read scanlations as I know alot of them are high school students with no income or broke college students paying for their rent....jut because *I* can afford to buy manga doesn't mean it isn't a luxury item. ^_^; There should be more manga in libraries! And more manga coffee shops and such.

Yup, yup. Manga! It is awesome. I support the buying of manga. =p I don't think there was a point to my reply other than "YEAH, MANGA!! WOOHOO!" but ummm that's a good point, right? XD;;