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Pancho Jueves posted:One last hurrah for The Demons of Baseball in the 2023 thread! I am now getting into pages that I've decided should not be rushed after all, so go ahead and close the old thread. Thanks for hearing me out on that.
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Jan 3, 2024 09:05
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Jan 3, 2024 22:50
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Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 05:43 on Jan 5, 2024 |
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Jan 5, 2024 01:35
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Chicken Parmigiana posted:It's extra annoying because I'm sure earlier in this story, the mum was on the phone to Keith like, "Oh, I'll explain all about Jughead tomorrow." And then... didn't, at all. This Mary Worth story is kind of fascinating in that it basically takes the position that wanting an explanation for a person's behavior is aggressive and hurtful. Keith learned from his initial meeting at the restaurant with Kitty that it was wrong of him to want to know why she never told him he had a daughter. So, when she doesn't bother to so much as even explain who this fake vegan guy was or why he's on dinner terms with her family, Keith refuses to follow-up in the belief that this would cause another fight, and just deals with the entire situation himself. The moral arc of the story amounts to saying that aggression is bad, but passion-aggression is good. Or at least, less likely to cause interpersonal drama. It's a bizarre narrative choice but a fairly logical one when you remember that the whole premise is trying to resolve an MRA thought experiment without questioning any of the very broad inherently misogynist assumptions you have to make in order for that thought experiment to make sense in the first place.
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Jan 5, 2024 04:20
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csammis posted:Is this a translation error or a source error or something in the last panel? If Planck Oh's playing first base and Hardy Choi throws home how did Planck get the opportunity to make an error? Correct! My bad, and the original post has been fixed. As reward for your due diligence, another update- The Demons of Baseball      
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Jan 5, 2024 05:46
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I'm not a great baseball-knowing guy but I'm fairly sure the "right" play would be 2B / shortstop, whichever Hardy is, to 1B for the out.
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thisusedyet posted:May be a translation error, but I'm thinking 'send it home' as in on target. This was what I was thinking metaphorically but literally this was one hundred percent a translation error caused by me jumbling baseball metaphors with actual baseball. The text definitely explicitly states that Hardy is throwing the ball to first base. Usually I'm careful to note things like the baseball announcers always using clear, unambiguous technical language but, well, this was one reason I decided to stop rushing these translations to fit my imaginary schedule. Despite mostly remembering what happens in this volume from when I first read it there's a lot more dramatic ambiguity in the moment than exists in my memories, probably because what the story is going for only really becomes coherent when you actually get to the ending and even then not so much.
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Jan 5, 2024 09:06
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Jan 6, 2024 02:33
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Drimble Wedge posted:
     
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Jan 6, 2024 07:07
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Jan 7, 2024 07:33
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Haifisch posted:So you're trying to tell me Jon's not a horrible pet owner for feeding his cat lasagna??? Does Jon ever actually feed Garfield in the comic itself or was that just a cartoon thing? It's been awhile since we've seen Garfield in the thread but I'm not sure it ever really shows up there. Incidentally Willo567 you might find a more receptive audience to Calvin and Hobbes chat if you were regularly posting comics for us all to read and discuss on these prompts more slowly and naturalistically instead of being purely abstract and big picture about it. I mean, heck, just start from wherever you are right now if you're reading through them all. The last person to post them never finished that run and there's no rule saying we have to start comics from the beginning.
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Jan 8, 2024 01:18
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Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Jan 9, 2024 |
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Jan 9, 2024 07:56
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Transmodiar posted:Modesty Blaise: With Love From Rufus Last thread or maybe the one before that Modesty's age was canonically stated in one of these as being twenty-five. I seem to recall that most of us agreed that seemed like an unrealistically lowball estimate for a woman we'd assumed had to be at least thirty. Moments like this where Modesty is acting like she'd be a cradle robber for hooking up with a twenty-year-old definitely do a lot to back up that headcanon.
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Jan 9, 2024 20:35
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The Demons of Baseball        I'd like to explicitly clarify, since I'd misremembered this from the first time I read the comic, that Sohn didn't have a heart attack because the Cowboys lost, but because he realized Planck was going to do the Ultimate Defense poorly on purpose to cripple himself and the aggravation caused by that killed Sohn before he could stop the game. There's no way for any other character to know this, though, since we only saw it from Sohn's internal perspective. edit: The original post had one of the thought bubbles not translated, sorry. Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Jan 12, 2024 |
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Jan 9, 2024 22:50
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Jan 10, 2024 07:05
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Jan 11, 2024 01:35
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Giant Ethicist posted:I'm just glad the comic ended with Copper Ma being permanently and unequivocally owned while still being completely Copper Ma about it. Well, how I tend to interpret the story is about the conflict between economic success (represented by Copper Ma and Director Sohn's obsession with high quality baseball) and social values (Planck and Maggie's doomed love). Planck and Copper are foils of each other. Planck sees baseball as a means to an end, of making him worthy of Maggie's love. Copper sees it the other way around- Maggie's love is important because it empowers his ability to play baseball. This all happens off-panel, mind you, but he seems to break up with whatshername because all of the political bullshit at the Meteors' front office is just a distraction which doesn't actually have very much to do with Copper's talents as a baseball player. Copper sees objective success as more important than political power. This is the apologist right wing view of modern South Korean history- what mattered about the dictators wasn't that they crushed political dissent, but that their actions eventually created economic development. Debatably this could apply to Copper himself, but we don't really see enough about his family background to say for sure. Director Sohn's beliefs are similar, but way more big picture. While Copper's focus is on individual achievement, Sohn believes that individual achievement is meaningless without national unity, and he barely even puts up a fight against being fired from the Meteors because despite this success, he knows that this team's Copper Ma centered success will never break into the level required for South Korea to be a meaningfully competitive world player. Sohn believes that true transcendent achievement requires a goal beyond just success at baseball itself. Planck's brutal backstory, Toppen's desire to impress his son, Winnie's desire to exceed the shadow of his father, Hardy's anger about being short, and Two Guns' indignation over getting blacklisted for sticking up for his best friend, all represent rebellion against South Korea's increasingly individualist, empathy-lacking culture. By harnessing this strength, Sohn achieves true power- ironically by the definition of the very system these characters were rebelling against in the first place. Planck rejects this paradigm entirely, ultimately sacrificing his newfound power for his original goal (love for Maggie) and never giving up on his ideals. Planck can't really hope to achieve much more than that, as he's not a revolutionary, just an individualist who values love over power, and rejects a society that doesn't share those values. This same value is at play with Maggie's story, with her inability to have faith in Planck compared to more immediate, concrete improvement in her material conditions having a deleterious long-term effect on her mental health as much as Planck's. They've achieved social prowess in a society they don't even like all that much, and which doesn't really like them in turn, placing no value on their mental health, a now famously stereotypical representation of South Korean culture which was at the time still quite recent. In this way Demons of Baseball reframes the generally positive social value of "never giving up" as being a flawed one if there's no greater purpose to your goal. In the end, Prudence Hong valorizes strength as beauty in part to argue that the spectacle of the game (with her show literally being called Pro Baseball Spectacle) has aesthetic value regardless of its motivation. South Korean culture in general moved to this idea of political thought through the eighties, with even the Democratization Movement succeeding culturally less because of its political aims (the first two democratically elected presidents were still basically right wing dictators) and more because it was a movement willing to succeed at nearly any material or ideological cost. That much is a bit of editorialization on my part. Obviously Lee Hyun-se didn't know anything that was going to happen in the succeeding decades, but you can clearly see especially in any part of the story that deals with Japan how national insecurity is a constant, driving background motivation, the long shadow of which precludes any sort of sentimentalist thinking about national identity. The Demons of Baseball is also notable for not having a sentimentalist view about American style democratic ideals at all. Despite such values being critical to national identity in the democratized era, even the actual United States in this setting is pretty clearly implied to not actually have any kind of lofty moral beliefs. The short of it is that South Korea used to be a lot angrier about basically everything really with contradictory, impossible to resolve ethical beliefs, and that this energy which used to drive the country's cultural and economic development has largely trickled out ever since as platitudes have come to be more acceptable than results. The Demons of Baseball represent a philosophical era where the ends were considered as important as the means, whereas these days it's the means at best that are considered worthy of discussion. The ends barely even factor into it, everyone just takes hellworld capitalism for granted now. The politics of The Wandering Culinarian from the aughts which I'll do next are an interesting intermediate state between the eighties and today. The political content is very helpfully frontloaded, and food culture at all levels is discussed as something quintessentially Korean that doesn't necessarily have to be competitive, although the story inevitably gets into competitive arcs. Beauty without strength, basically. I'll be taking a bit of a break before starting up with that.
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Jan 11, 2024 03:22
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CzarChasm posted:So now, even if the Demons win the next game (putting them 4-1 in the series) they get recognition, but not paid right? Sohn's dead, Plank's a vegetable, and the team is going to be disbanded regardless of any game outcome? What a story! Now that we're actually finished finished, some of you may have noticed that the question of whether or not the chairman paid up is left unresolved. It's worth noting that Sohn was paying the Demons out of his own pocket this entire time with his personal savings, and the payday from the chairman was just to reimburse him for all that. So, it's not clear who would have even gotten the money now that Sohn's dead. The contract did specify that it was up to the chairman's discretion whether to pay Sohn or not in the event of a loss- since I knew this was where the story was going, I was careful to translate the exact technical language of the contract scene. In my headcanon the chairman probably sets up some sort of charity in Sohn's honor with the money, since Prudence Hong's book almost certainly mentioned his attempt to rig the game and the Cowboys would have been facing a public relations crisis if he'd tried to weasel out of it. Also, I missed one line and I guess everyone was too shocked by everything else that was going on at the time to notice. The corrected page-
Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Jan 12, 2024 |
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Jan 12, 2024 22:01
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EBB posted:the end no moral dot jay peg So funny story, almost. By sheer dumb coincidence, I kiiind of ended up going through similar stuff as Planck while I was translating this. And believe me, the constant reminder of "remember what Planck did? Don't do what Planck did" was borderline therapeutic in getting through all that. Anyway, I have a general query. As some of you might have noticed, I attempted to use Phoenix Wright style localizations for names in Demons of Baseball instead of directly transliterating them from Korean. I did this for text box reasons, making them easier to remember, and also maintaining some of the thematic implications (Planck's Korean name is not a common one and literally translates as planet, for example). I'm now mulling over whether to do the same for the Wandering Culinarian. Thoughts? As a more specific aside to this question, there's a really stupid pun for two of the characters' names where they can be combined to form a four-letter phrase meaning something like grand feast. That's the sort of thing I'd like to at least try to reproduce in English instead of banishing to a translator's note. So far I've got Hanks and Gillian (to approximate Thanksgiving) but knowing the tendency of some posters to try and translate the untranslatable Fingerporis, I figured I'd open this one up to the floor.
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Jan 13, 2024 06:32
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Forum accident posted:Ziggy The joke for this feels kind of ruined by having Ziggy ask it with a smile. He should be dejected, like he's spent hours searching for Where's Waldo and just not had any luck at all. Vargo posted:Heart of the City Further undermining the moral of the muffin pyramid scheme arc- the reminder that the demand for muffins was higher than the supply Heart could sell on her own, which was the whole reason why she started subcontracting in the first place. Yes, I am still mad that Heart of the City implied that all forms of franchisee licensing are pyramid schemes. Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Jan 14, 2024 |
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Jan 14, 2024 00:44
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Strontium posted:Intelligent Life Why are they even answering the phone if they hate him so much? What did they think he wanted to talk about?
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Jan 16, 2024 06:49
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Darthemed posted:Popcom The framing of this as being an irrational superstitious fear is ridiculous. If you live in a place where gigantic flies can pick up children and take them to faraway nests to eat them, then of course you're being punished for living above ground! That's like living next to a swamp and being surprised that alligators keep grabbing your kids! The better question is how our superior edit never mind Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Jan 21, 2024 |
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Jan 21, 2024 22:39
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Jan 29, 2024 03:28
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Jan 29, 2024 07:13
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Green Intern posted:Is there a reason these were translated to an eye dialect? Because they're also transliterated in eye dialect in the original Korean.
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Jan 29, 2024 21:12
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The Wandering Culinarian    The decrease in eye dialect isn't because of Green Intern's coments, but because it's also scaled back in the original text. Hard to tell whether this was because readers were complaining or whether the locals in-continuity are actively code-switching once in the presence of someone who they're not sure can understand their dialect.
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Jan 31, 2024 09:13
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Jan 31, 2024 23:48
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Feb 2, 2024 01:45
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Feb 3, 2024 06:47
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Feb 5, 2024 18:08
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Feb 6, 2024 04:09
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Feb 9, 2024 03:40
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Feb 13, 2024 01:15
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Feb 13, 2024 16:39
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Feb 14, 2024 21:37
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I'm at a bit of a crossroads in life, and something just recently occurred to me. I've been translating comics for this thread for a really long time. The Wandering Culinarian is the sixth one, or maybe seventh or eighth depending on whether you consider different eras of Chief/Boss Dharma to be the same comic. None of them have been commercially viable projects, which is to say, none of the companies officially translating Korean comics would take a second look at them. They're too mundane, too political, and require too much explanation for a general audience that's more interested in genre work. What I'm debating right now is how much interest there would be in these comics for a fringe audience. Like say, this one. I actually got a PM recently from a Korean-American expressing interest in the Wandering Culinarian just based on my offhand shitposty description of it in another subforum. So naturally it occurs to me, that aside from the usual comics slash history slash internationalist nerds, there might be genuine interest in a more semiformal collection of these projects just from Koreans in diaspora who want a vision of their ancestral home that's not just...well...look, I imagine a lot of you are at least kindof familiar with the sort of Korean content that is commercially viable and can appreciate how the stuff I've been translating for the past decade differs substantially from all that in terms of tone and the impression it gives. What I'm getting at with all this is, if I tried to manage some sort of zine style Patreon based project that remastered everything I've done (that I can find anyway), would anyone here actually be willing to donate money to keep that going? This is a risky idea, less for the money than because of the potential for legal action. Although frankly speaking I'd still consider the latter case to be a win. Goodness knows nothing else I've tried in terms of getting professional notice from Korean media companies has ever worked. It's the culture change I've always been after, but without financial stakes, I don't think this can ever go beyond the hobby level, if that makes any sense. Simple replies to the extent of "yes I think this is a good idea" or "no I think this is a bad idea" are fine, but anything more complex than that, like involving hard numbers, I'd appreciate receiving via PM. I'm quite serious about this. And I'd like to get more serious than just, random updates when I feel like it.
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Feb 14, 2024 22:55
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Feb 15, 2024 20:39
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Feb 16, 2024 00:04
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The Wandering Culinarian    And that's it for the first story of The Wandering Culinarian. I'm unsure whether to continue with this, as the response has seemed kind of tepid. But then again, I don't have any alternate idea that wouldn't require research that's very difficult to do when I'm not physically in Korea*, for comics that are less likely to be newspaper comics. The next story is way shorter, for what it's worth, although glancing over it I'm surprised it still doesn't feature any recurring characters aside from Haddish. *A big part of my motivation for my asking about that Patreon idea. Which seems like it might work better as a Kickstarter idea at first, if at all, but yeah, my conversations irl on this haven't been very encouraging.
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Feb 18, 2024 17:39
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Hippocrass posted:Gasoline Alley(September 29, 30, 1919) I just wanted to let you know that I did notice (only saw the second day and not the first) and I also sympathize, as someone who is struggling to get my own system back ontrack which among other things has led to me falling quite far behind on the thread. I only check newer posts long enough to see if I need to make corrections. Speaking of which- Doomykins posted:I like it. I do want to see what happens when he catches up to his parents and the rural antics and dialects are entertaining. Maybe the response seems less electric because Demons of Baseball was going bananas on audience response from the start of the second half? A new story needs time to get going. James isn't actually the main character of the comic, Haddish is. We do eventually find out what happened to James, but years later as a setup to a completely different story. That threw me off the first time I read it too, since he's certainly presented as such. The Wandering Culinarian is less about plot so much as it is building stories around arcane Korean food trivia. There was, unsurprisingly, more of a market for this in aughts-era South Korean newspapers than most other times and places, although this isn't the kind of statement that I can really explain without writing a really long essay on the topic.
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Feb 18, 2024 20:10
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