I’m sitting here trying to decide if I have anything to say worth reading in the blog tonight. I guess there’s the fact that Viz media put their digital comic app back on Apple devices. I don’t remember when it originally was released but it must’ve been quite some time ago. Around the time My Hero Academia was first being published. I decided that I was going to go digital with manga instead of having to deal with physical media. Then Viz had a falling out with Apple over something and took the app off of their store. I’m not sure if it was still on other devices, but they weren’t on Amazon ones either and those were the two platforms I had access to. You could use their website to read your archive but it was pure shit as a reading experience. So I learned my lesson about digital media the hard way. I repurchased 22 volumes as takobon, which is something on the order of $176 worth of books. The rest of the titles were out of print, or only available as box sets which I couldn’t source the money for at the time. Although I was willing to pay to get physical media of MHA I wasn’t going to buy all of Hikaru No Go, or Shokugeki No Soma up to that point again. Honestly, if I had the means I would buy them as actual books but I don’t think either series has been actively in print in nearly a decade at this point.
Anyway, I happened to notice that they were listed in the Apple app store again, so I downloaded it to the newer iPad I inherited after my grandmother passed. (In my family the oldest members tend to have the best tech and we get hand me downs as they upgrade, or die in this case.) The Viz reader is the best comic reading experience you can have digitally IMO. No bullshit, just flip the page, read it, flip to the next page. Comixology was hot garbage and Kindle was lukewarm garbage. Now neither exist for comics after Amazon decided to buy Comixology, intigrate it it into Kindle, then ruin both. I do use pirate sites for things I can’t buy legally, or stuff I already own that I don’t want to get down off the shelf, but the filthy nature of those sites is always off putting. I do like the tendency of fan translators to actually translate things literally and then add notes for context or what have you though. I’ve purchased all the official volumes of Komi Can’t Communicate, but I read them all as fanslations first and that’s the only reason I know that every character’s name is an on the nose pun in Japanese. If I used a similar naming convention Thomas would be called Main Character, Carol would be Bitchy Redhead, Ed would be Napoleon Complex, and so on. It’s amusing in Japanese but I wonder if I could tolerate it in English. Osana Najimi literally means childhood friend in Japanese but Komi Can’t Communicate treats it as a perfectly acceptable character name. It’s not really even a pun. All of the names would just go over my head if I had only read the official releases. Some of the names aren’t quite as on the nose but none of them are what I would call subtle.
I prefer, generally, the more blunt nature of fan translations, and their tendency not to change things based on their belief systems the way many modern professional translators have taken to doing. There’s also small things like how in Frieren the spell Soul Track has become Zoultract in the official release. I’m not sure which one if more correct, but I prefer the fan choice to call it Soul Track because it sounds more like a “real” special attack to my ear compared to the more made up sounding Zoultract. At the same time I’m perfectly willing to accept Avada Cadavera as a spell name, so clearly I can’t be trusted.
Anyway, I guess that all as may be. I don’t intend to buy anything digitlly, but I have enjoyed rereading Hikaru No Go on the iPad. I really like it and took a lot of inspiration from the facial variety it has. It has some of the most diverse facial designs of any series I’ve read. Most of the main cast tend to have that smooth face anime look, but the characters who dont get a huge amount of screen time vary wildly. They have all kinds of noses. Nose diversity is something you don’t get a lot of in Manga, and when you do a lot of the time it isn’t taken very seriously. HNG has so much variety. I also like that they depict westerners in a lot of ways but also kind of play into the stereotypical look that manga likes to tend towards with them. Often looking extremely square jawed and generally angular. That said they still have a variety of looks for those wacky westerners. Although now that I think about it I don’t think there’s a single black character in the entire run of the comic. I’m curious how the artist would draw them now, since they have a good eye for various designs. I should look up the artist and see if they kept drawing different kinds of people for other books.
Well, anyway, I guess I’ve gone on long enough without having made any kind of point either, I think.

As ever, links above to support the comic. Keep your wits about you over the weekend. I hope to see you back here on Monday. Until then, keep squeezing them monkeys, lads.

Posts authored by Jackie

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