why del rey manga is fail

So, as I've had some free time recently, I discovered Mushishi, a seinen manga by Urushibara Yuki about a mushishi (roughly translates to "mushi master") that travels the countryside searching for mushi (a character that means "insect" in normal Japanese, but here used to represent mysterious supernatural spirit-like creatures that float unseen in the world all around us). The main character, Ginko, "wanders from town to town to find people, young and old, who have been affected by the mushi. He offers explanations, sometimes medication or direct intervention to try to cure the afflicted of their mushi-related problems."

The artwork is quite lovely, particularly some of the color pages (click for close-up):





I find it very rustic. I can't stand big, sparkly-eyed shoujo manga nowadays. It just annoys the heck out of me.

In any case, the scans I was reading online were partially LQ/MQ scanlations, partially Del Rey's English version directly scanned into the computer... and in fact, Del Rey really bothered me.

First, the way they do their sfx. Especially on WATERCOLORED PAGES.



They just layer it on in standard text, regardless of whatever the actual sfx looks like! I mean, even something like this:



Oh yeah, just slap it on there. I find that "sploosh" incredibly offensive. Especially on top of such lovely watercolor (it should be in color, I'm assuming it's in black and white because the person had a black and white scanner - unless Del Rey converted all the color pages to black and white, in which case I have even less respect for them). Besides, "zaba.."? How the hell is that a "sploosh"? It's the softest noise of someone emerging from underwater, which, I admit, there is no good sfx for in English (maybe "splrsh" at most?), but translation notwithstanding, they made no effort whatsoever to match the font or the color. If you're going to standardize the sfx font, then DON'T LAYER IT ON TOP and ruin the image; the author does it because her sfx is hand drawn and a part of the image as a whole, but that. Just. No.

(You see that ザバッ..? See how lovely it is? How different it probably feels from the SPLOOSH?)

Also, they are simply lazy with their typesetting.



Look at that! How much effort does it really take to white out the Japanese ellipses and put in some horizontal English ones? Besides which, English does not use 6 ellipses when it comes before the word; we use three. The 6-ellipses is a primarily Asian language thing. Which is fine. IN JAPANESE. =.= I mean, they even have horizontal ellipses right after "Kai". In the same bubble. Honestly. How much uglier and inconsistent can you get?



All right, I admit. This isn't as bad and it's marginally acceptable for the sake of fitting everything into the bubble. I have to say, though, that is some ugly typesetting in the upper left hand bubble there...



Guh. The top one is still all right, I can see why they might do it that way to keep the centre of balance, but that bottom one? Here's a closeup.



That's so badly centered I could cry. I mean, don't they even consider the fact that it would look so much better, say, like this?



Right, that's wildwords because I don't have their font, and it could probably be done better than I just did, but the point is - I'm not even an editor. I'm a translator. And that took me about twenty seconds to do.

Just. So sloppy.

T_____T DEL REY YOU HURT ME WITH ALL THE MANGA YOU HAVE LICENSED AND WILL RUIN FOR THE PUBLIC.

/cries

In other news, happy February, everyone.

edit: ( see cut )