Picture Perfect Paranoia

Remember this story I carried a few days ago?

Well, Fred himself got “summoned” to The Engine and respond to his comic’s acquisition, “licensing” and adaptation for the Japanese market (presumably it’s the otaku demographic).

Since the reply by the man himself is very long (he admits saying it), so I’m going to capture some snippets of his response. Here:

There is a terrible irony in my life sometimes. I finally get to announce this news, something that i’ve been excited about for about 11 months now (we were originally looking to do this back in December of last year, so you can imagine how much hair i’ve torn out in the intervening months ^^ ) and Tuesday turned out to be one of the craziest, most Murphy-ish, SNAFU days i’ve had in a while. Not 15 minutes after the PW article went up, Comcast decided to take my neigborhood offline, so i couldn’t even post the press release to my own website ><

The most remarkable thing about it is that Kodansha approached me. Kodansha emailed me a few days before SDCC last year wanting to discuss the possibility of publishing MT in Japan (mostly because they wanted to know if they should talk to Dark Horse or DC or if they should talk to me first). My response, of course, was “Sorry, not interested”… ^_^ Seriously, you don’t get emails like THAT everyday.

For those in doubt of the wise choice Kodansha made, he responded:

Now, as exciting as this opportunity seemed, i was (and still am) worried about some things. First impressions are important, and my biggest worry was that this opportunity to show my work to Japanese readers was from years ago, and really doesn’t represent the kind of work i do now. Sure, Volume 1 is amusing, a decent read, has lots of randomness too it, but the artwork is painful at times (most times, honestly) and i was worried that readers would end up dismissing it after looking it over and never get to see the more decent, recent work. I suggested that we look, maybe, at trying to condense the first two books and try to get things moved along to where the artwork was more palatable (in my view). They understood my worries and considered this, but in the end Ohta and his people decided felt that i was being too hard on my earlier work and that Megatokyo was a good and amusing read (especially the commentary in volume 1) and they wanted readers to have the same material english language readers got. So, with that, they moved forward on licensing volume 1 from Dark Horse.

I have heard a lot of people say that much of the American style humor will be difficult to translate and that things like l33tsp34k will be almost impossible to convey, but these are challenges that the translator is actually quite excited about trying to tackle. People forget that the same translation challenges existed for japanese manga being introduced here (i mean, come on, we’ve learned to read the stuff backwards. Go back 20 years and tell people that we’d be reading japanese manga backwards and it would be one of the fastest growing segments of the book market, and they’d think you were a total nutter. :P) and that the Japanese have been exposed to our media for a lot longer than we have to theirs.

One reader asked Fred about his understanding of Japanese Culture, and he replied:

I got an email once in Japanese from a reader who was amazed the depth to which i seemed to ‘get’ and understand a lot of Japanese culture. I’m sure he was being mostly nice, but his main point was is that he felt that most American works have a simple, stereotyped view of Japan and Japanese culture that it was refreshing and fascinating to see something that took it far more seriously and made real efforts to understand it. That’s probably one of the best fan mails i’ve received to date

I think Fred was glad and worried at the same time when he did this interview. Just my opinion, though. ^^

Kudos to Brigid over at MangaBlog for originally writing about it.