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Does anyone here read Japanese Manga?

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kusunoki:
I like some of the old school stuff from Japan quite a lot. The last few years have been good for this in North America, with English translations of a lot of Tezuka's work and of Lone Wolf and Cub (quite possibly my favorite comic ever) coming out. A lot of great stuff is still only available in Japanese, though. It's a damn shame that non-Japanese readers can't enjoy the work of people like Ishinomori Shotaro.

vaillant:
@Narfstar: In fact, in the early decade, characters were serialized in magazines like Shounen, with a limited amount of pages each, in a similar fashion to the features you have in american golden age books, with the only difference they were continuing episodes.
Also, the storytelling approach was for this reason quite more relaxed (I am speaking for Tezuka), than in the final versions he started to draw for the paperback reprints. In fact, there is a huge difference, and to reply to kusunoki I would venture to say this goes for most of the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s productions.
Reading Ishinomori or Tezuka in the recent editions issued by Dark Horse & al. is slightly misleading, as a key ingredient, which is a lot of spontaneity and raw fantasy and sense of wonder came to be a little reduced in "polished" final versions.

To give you an idea, I attach the cover to an original Shounen supplement (from 1957), the only one from my own collection, whose story has been totally redone in the final versions (as in the Dark Horse complete edition). And the magazines were even more fascinating and attuned with that "golden age" (coinciding with the flourishing of comics towards the end, and immediately after, the war).

vaillant:
Side-note: The story presented here is the second part of the "Yellow Horse" adventure, which is entitled "Duel on the [Japanese] Alps", and features the kidnapping of Atom parents by a gang of drug-smugglers. The scene depicted on the cover is the final showdown of Atom with the giant brain-robot which remains mostly unaltered in the final version (although the ending is pretty different).
One for all: in the original version Doctor Tenma has a prominent role (which highlight the complexity of his character, and his love for Astro in continuous conflict with his own mental instability).
Of course, I do not read japanese, but pictures are pretty revealing.

narfstar:
Wonderful cover. How many pages would you say an original Astroboy story arc would have run during this time?

paw broon:
The idea of a few pages of continuing story per issue was common in Europe as well as Japan.  Something JVJ and I sort of disagree on.
Back to manga.  I have tried some English translations as I can't read or speak Japanese.  JVJ mentioned Viz but my favourite, of the very few I enjoyed was published by Eclipse - Mai the Psychic Girl.  Very powerful stuff, I thought. The first few American issues of Lone Wolf and Cub caught my eye but palled after a while. I was hoping to cite other titles but they made such an impression that I have forgotten what they were.
However, I'm now curious about original Astro Boy and I like that cover.
It is a shame that more early manga has not been translated but, oddly, I noticed in one of the big bookshops in Glasgow a bookcase full of translated manga.  A lot of the books I opened were drawn in a style that I just did not like, perhaps do not understand and were about topics that do not interest me.  Before you say it, maybe I haven't delved enough. And throughout France and other European countries, there are comic shops with ever expanding manga sections.
As an aside, the argument about not enough Japanese comics being translated into English is also true for large quantities of French, Belgian, Italian, Spanish etc. comics and strips which are of a very high standard and are not translated into English. And in most cases, nary a superhero in sight.  For every Tintin, Asterix, Scorpion, there are umpteen marvellous books useless to those who read only English.
I've been desperately trying to remember the title of the huge hit Japanese comic that was made into an animated film, post-apocalyptic thingy, I think.  Anyway, when I had the shop, we couldn't keep it on the shelves it was so popular.  I tried it thinking, how could so many punters not be right. Did nothing for me.
Akira, that was it.
Thanks, kusunoki, I'll try to find examples of Shotaro's work.
Finally, that bit about telling a story in a few pages.  I refer you all to Ragman #3? wherein Kubert delivers an almost wordless story, beautifully done in a few pages and easily comparable to the the Hugo Pratt wordless segment in Les Celtiques, featuring Corto Maltese.  Pictures can be revealing.

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