Comix Influx Blog: New Engineering
When Ellen and I were in St Louis recently, Ted May showed me a new manga by Yuichi Yokoyama called “New Engineering” (published by Picturebox). It was something of a formalist exercise, rather than a traditional narrative-driven comic, and one of the main points was the use of Japanese characters within the artwork as sound-effects. As with Sewrgent Laterreur, these were so tightly integrated with the art that it would be almost impossible to do a translated edition without significantly redrawing every page.
Picturebox have gone with a very Comix Influx-esque solution, although taken one step further: it puts a translation at the bottom of the page, with a number beside it indicating the panel, but it also had a mini-diagram of the page indicating the panel layout, with the appropriate numbers within the panels themselves. This is particularly useful for manga as some are published in their original orientation, with the panels read from right to left, while others are “flipped” so they read from left to right (in fact, this book compounds the problem by having, for reasons I cannot discern, some strips right-to-left and others left-to-right).
Talking of right-to-left strips, I went to a preview the Manhua! China Comics Now exhibition at the London College of Communication, curated by Paul Gravett. There was lots of original artwork on show, and I was surprised to see that the panels in pages of Manhua (Chinese comics) read left-to-right! No cognitive dissonance! Apparently Manhwa (Japanese comics) also read left-to-right.
