2629 Boigas.

by

Patreon
Subscribestar
Comic Vote
Reddit
Wiki
Presents List
Shirts & such.

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.

29 Comments

Keep squeezin them monkeys lad? Did you seriously come here with a WIZARD reference? Well done@

Heh. Ed was theduthed quite thome time ago. Ice. TThis is something I talk to New Zealanders about when they talk about their OEs (Overseas Experience). They cannot fathom why ice is a thing in the US. I can’t explain, I’ve been saying ‘no ice’ and enduring the side-eye since the 80s. But I do attempt to explain ‘iced tea’ which is close to the perfect summer drink.

Glasses full of ice aren’t really a thing in most places outside the US. In most European countries you might get a couple of cubes but not much more. Since unlimited refills on soda is also mostly an American thing, it’s understandable that people would prefer more beverage and less ice.
I’m also not a big fan of too much ice in my drink, but it’s less of a problem now that I rarely have anything but water at a restaurant. (Cutting way back on the cokes helped me drop some weight.) After all, it’s not like melting ice is going to water down my water.

I fill a large beer mug with ice, then a little lemonade or spruce beer, then ill t rest with water. Lovely. Not too sweet.

Spruce beer is a soft drink, like ginger beer but made with spruce instead of ginger.

Given the rest of the food there I’m prepared for those to be the best burgers in town.

And it looks like “beautiful” has again “let her guard down”.

I read my manga on aggregator sites (boo! hiss!), partly because the translator sites often are so unreliable. The most recent one decided to just kill off their site with no warning. Great. Regarding bizarre ads, my old mom stone facedly clicks past the latest bikini night elf, so I guess it’s no big deal, but ad block works well for me.

Fan translations often seem more lively than official ones for some reason. I can prefer them for that reason. (Nodame is one example.) It can get iffy when the translation group changes — all names must change spelling! — or far worse if someone decides to “just use AI”.

I read Komi for a long time but have now stopped. The main characters were charming but the side characters all turned out to be creeps of some sort. This is part of the back story but I got tired of it and it’s gone on too long past the natural end IMO. Even so, there are so many other excellent manga around to follow that it can be hard to choose.

Also, the character naming convention is a bit like 19th century novels, isn’t it? Except more on the nose, I guess.

The only app I use for comics is Chunky (iPad), but it just organizes what you drag into its lair. I have to collect and throw in the new issues myself, which I guess you don’t have to do with the official apps. Still, works well enough within its limitations.

I see that my Chunky collection is also mostly manga, but there is some western stuff too. Carl Barks and early Charlie Brown, of course. Bone. Krazy Kat (an acquired taste, but now I can’t quit). Frank Miller. Jack Kirby. Guido Crepax (extremely odd stories but he drew slinky women like nobody’s business. Apparently he was a fashion illustrator for his day job.) Love and Rockets by the Hernandez bros (I nowadays think it’s main characteristics is that, well, there is no love and no rockets. But worth reading; I like the later years more than the early years.)

And no doubt others I can’t recall now.

I finally remembered the name of this comic! I had started reading around 2009-2010 and had kept up with it for years before life got in the way.

I just finished re-reading/catching up and now I remember why this is one of my favorite webcomics. Absolutely wonderful slice of life that’s very comfy. So happy that it’s still going strong after all these years and hopefully for many more to come. :)

she’s in hammer lane now wonder how much booze she can drink makes you think some people can drink more then other in this world some people are use to it built different each and every way of life.

Potentially some on-the-nose names really are valid names as well, since most Japanese names do have meanings. Like Ichiro meaning first born son.

A lot of English names actually do have meanings as well, but a lot of the meanings are not as obvious because so many of the words are borrowed from other languages and changed from their original versions over the centuries. Jonathan in English derives from a Hebrew name meaning “Gift of God” or “God has given”, for instance. It’s just most of them are no longer words that are used in everyday language in the same form, so it isn’t as obvious as other languages. It’s a little more obvious with some English last names since a lot of them were derived from a person’s employment at some point.

the anime subtitles and what not seem to have gone with zoltraak which I think is leagues better than zoultract (seriously where did that second t come from?), and given the original scripts furigana for it (zorutoraaku) I think it’s a good spelling to settle on

honestly I expected the spell to be a germanic word (as so much else in the world is), but that doesn’t seem to be the case. it being so close to soul track I do think could be intentional, however, based on the large amount of loan words for names

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.