Quote:
Originally Posted by MMM
I think censorship has gotten better in recent years. Dark Horse got a little criticism for a censored page in Blade of the Immortal a few years back (it was a graphic image involving a child, if I remember correctly) and they since have entered a "censor-free era". If a title has a single image they don't feel comfortable publishing, then they won't publish any of it. This seems like is is more of the direction some publishers are going. I hope it stays that way.
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I think the awful translation thing is changing, but I remember a few years ago my housemate coming back complaining about this police manga she'd bought and the translation edit was pretty shoddy. There were blatant typo's and random off-setting, bad re-formatting for the sound effects, and for some ungodly reason they'd gone overboard with translating the slang japanese to this weird 1980's sort of ghetto-patter. The entirety of my manga collection consists of some old sailor moon manga I got way back in 2000, but most of them have hiccups in the edit here and there, like "sha" instead of "she". It's sloppy. It wouldn't be acceptable in a novel, but for some reason with manga, it's let slide by the people who should be controlling for it.
I guess its similar to my refusing to buy classics printed by this certain publisher (also bad for edit); if there's typos and the proofreading has clearly been done in a slap-dash way, you feel like a) the publisher doesn't give a crap about the quality, or the reader or the material, they just want your money and b) it's overpriced for a bad deal, even if it's cheap. If I can then find the same material online for FREE with a better, more considered finish, darn tooting I will opt for it over the printed copy. The difference being with classics is that they're usually out of copy-write so it's not illegal.
And I can appreciate why censorship would get people's goat as well, but perhaps with volume manga they could differentiate as they do with difficult books like The Grimms Fairy Tales. Instead of lumping all the bindings under one category, (ie, manga) they could put child-friendly manga in the kid's section, and anything inappropriate for kids in the adult section. Ok, so maybe for some countries a few titles would jump up a rating, but much of the stuff with gay/lesbian side plots, sex or mild violence is aimed at teens anyway and could slot into the teenage section with ease. Those kinds of themes are present in teen literature already, so it shouldn't be an issue.