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An Incomprehensible Panel is The Worst Thing You Can Do


Mr Poltroon

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Allow me to write down a short complaint.

Why is it that, so often in manga, I find myself unable to even understand what is drawn? Never mind ugly drawings, when the reader can't understand what's represented on the panel, something is seriously wrong.
I can forgive H-Scenes for this. Shot angles in those are traditionally bonkers and I've given up understanding what kind of anatomy those characters have, as its certainly not human (how'd you even get your leg over there?).

Now, when I'm trying to follow my action story, or even just a simple romance, and I can't tell what's happening, something is seriously off. Most recently, I'm accusing Sankarea of this, but it's definitely not the only one, or a particularly bad offender. Were I to try and find a pattern, I'd say that older works tend to be harder to follow, but it's definitely no hard rule.

There's nothing like a good camera shot that seems to be focusing on... a wall??? Or is that the ground? A step in a staircase? A corner? A windowsill??

 

This leads right into the next issue, and that's crappy speech balloons. In Japanese, it's rather possible that characters speak very distinctly from each other, and that makes it so its not often necessary to clearly indicate who's saying what. However, in English it's not only harder to differentiate what's being said/speech patterns, the translations themselves are not good enough to do it (incidentally, anecdotally I've found that Yuri works have the best translations).
Bad translations are by themselves a big problem, and they are likely to be even worse a problem than not being translated at all. Wedding 2 (the sequel) is likely the worst translation I have ever read in my life, making the whole sequel unintelligible -- you basically had to to go by the drawings. A translation existing severely decreases the chances that someone will pick it up again, but it's still possible. Case in point, I have reason to believe that more than one translation of this sequel exist, and that's something I'll have to investigate.
Going back to the balloons, the first thing they should do is ban balloons without a 'tail'. Those (ironically) devilish things, when coupled with the ridiculous, stupid habit of focusing the camera on a character that is not currently speaking, make for some needlessly painful reading experiences. Then there's the conversations between characters, which are so tight and packed in like sardines, sometimes the tail is actually pointing to the wrong character. Or maybe, since the bubble are on top of one another, the author erases the borders, making for a multi-level bubble with speech from more than one person and only one tail.
There are nice, generous authors that doodle the characters in the bubble to make it clear who's saying what, but I'm not sure whether to blame generic designs or lack of doodling skills, but those don't always help like they should.

 

But alas, I still love manga. I just wish more of them were within my sphere of comprehension. And easier to buy.

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I also have problems understanding what the hell is currently being illustrated in manga sometimes, and I'm never sure if I'm just terrible at it or the artist was being unclear. Unclear balloons actually lead to some headaches in translation as well because it can sometimes be hard to tell who said something even if you know some Japanese.

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