Reading Manga

I’ve been hovering around the edges of manga for a while now, wanting to read it without quite knowing where to start. Or how – reading backwards? Just getting through the initial learning curve put me off. (My personal analogy was shifting between driving an automatic and driving a manual; I switched cars a lot a couple of years back, and for a while I had to consciously remind myself what I was driving, how hill starts worked etc and it all took so much effort; and then, one day, the whole thing just clicked into place, and I could swap between them (a more literary reference might be Laura learning to switch directions in William Sleator’s The Boy Who Reversed Himself)).

Anyway. So I picked up random volumes (and put most of them down again), and read reviews in a fairly unplanned fashion, and finally something stuck. The first series I finished was CLAMP’s Chobits, which, yes, has what could be politely described as gender issues (review up soon - I just need to look up all the character names), but was also well-paced and interesting, and got me hooked on the storyline enough to drag me through all my attempts to misread it, which results from mechanical confusion (see below) as well as a tendency to get characters mixed up. This is particularly bad if I’m trying to read manga in which everyone has flowing long hair and refined angular features, which astute readers will realise does not narrow it down a lot, and my attempts to read more CLAMP are suffering a bit because of this.

Mechanical misreading – my brain initially seized on the reading backwards concept as a *complete* reversal of my normal reading process, which means I read not just right to left, but bottom to top as well, particularly when the right hand panel was a full length vertical strip. What’s helped with that is reading online – having one page at a time rather than a two page spread makes me read vertically rather than horizontally, and I get less distracted by following speech bubbles regardless of the attached art. Using a manga viewer (I’ve got FFView, which is for the Mac) has made this a lot easier than just opening up twenty-seven oddly sized windows in Preview. Reading telophase's posts on the visual structure and vocabulary of manga ( - listed here) has also been massively helpful, and I now actually notice some of the visual cues. And becoming totally obsessed with Full Metal Alchemist, which I’m watching and reading (I’m ahead on anime, at the moment, but disc 9 is corrupt and I’m going to have to order another one, so I may catch up on manga) has also helped, in the sense that if there’s anything else like that out there I want to find it.