1At the tail end of the 20th century, Japanese comics (or manga) became a publishing phenomenon outside of Asia (Brienza 2016; Malone 2010). Even though manga’s newfound success was attributed, at least in part, to the discontinuation of old practices such as coloring or page-flipping (de la Iglesia 2016), still a certain degree of glocalization was needed to adapt these cultural products for the local readership (Robertson 1995). In peripheral publishing markets like Argentina, albeit one with a long tradition in the medium (Vazquez 2010), manga was introduced in a more mediated manner: apocryphal, unlicensed magazines printed by publishers quick on their feet who took advantage of what Pellitteri (2010) calls the “spontaneous synergy” generated by anime’s success on TV; and through the import of unsold books from Spain, which could be described as secondhand glocalization, as these Japanese comics were selected, translated and designed without ever having in mind the Argentine readership.
2When Ivrea became the first official Argentine manga publisher in 1999, they went out of their way to differentiate their books from the Spanish imports by adding locally produced content (but still advertising their edition as faithful to the Japanese original). The main way they did this was by using paratext: mail sections, in which the publisher and readers discussed the work, and translation notes. In the latter, translator Agustín Gomez Sanz not only violated Venuti’s (1995) principle of invisibility by revealing the challenges of the practice, but also offered copious information about Japanese history, culture, and society. However, even though paratext became a distinctive feature of Ivrea’s manga catalogue, as the introduction of new publishers further developed the manga market in Argentina, its use in their books tended to fade.
3This paper explores the origin, rise and decline of the use of paratext in Argentine editions of manga linked to questions of translation and cultural transfer through the analysis of a corpus of selected books published by Ivrea. Other primary sources include interviews with the publisher’s editors and translators. The paper is organized into three sections: first, a brief state of the art of the existing scholarship on comic and manga translation. Secondly, an overview of the Argentine case focusing on the history of foreign comics publishing to establish the ways in which Ivrea’s translation policy represented a break with what preceded it. Lastly, a review of recent publication practices by Ivrea to assess the position that paratexts currently occupy in them, and to venture an explanation of how their use changed over the past two decades of manga publishing in Argentina.
4What role did paratexts play in earlier manga volumes published by Ivrea? And why did the publisher begin to phase them out? Did translators’ practices or readers’ demands change? The answers presented here aspire not only to clarify the trajectory of paratexts in manga translated and published in Argentina, but also, in a broader sense, to illuminate the peculiarities of the glocalization of cultural products in a peripheral space inserted in a global market.
5The past decades have witnessed a robust development of both translation studies (Venuti 1995; Buschmann 2015; Berman 2021) and comics studies (Lent 2010; Stein and Thon 2013; Cohn 2013; Frey, Baetens and Tabachnick 2018). It comes as no surprise that comics translation has solidified as a topic of academic interest within the same time frame (Zanettin 2014). Due to comics’ very nature, this form of translation goes beyond text and demands the consideration of other dimensions of the visual (Kaindl 1999; Borodo 2015), as a comic’s materiality informs its storytelling and varies for “practical and historical reasons” according to “the tastes and expectations of the different reading publics” (Rota 2014, 124).
6It could be argued that the global manga phenomenon was a major driver in the development of the study of comics translation, as supported by the high percentage of papers, theses and books dedicated to manga, as seen below. On the one hand, the cultural distance that separates manga from other comics traditions, whether European or American, tends to increase the visibility of all the symbolic and material glocalization operations necessary to adapt it for consumption by non-Japanese, non-Asian audiences. On the other hand, it is likely that the urgency with which local manga editions were dissected, especially by academics from the United States, stemmed from the novelty of a foreign, non-Western cultural product succeeding in a market dominated by a cultural industry used to doing the exporting.
7Obstacles to manga translation begin with the Japanese written language, composed of four different types of characters (Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana and Romaji), of which only the latter is alphabetic (Borbély 2014). They continue with the onomatopoeia created from said syllabic signs (Sleeper and Iskos 2021), the need to redraw speech balloons designed for vertical writing (Huang and Archer 2014), and extend to other more semiotic aspects, such as “graphic emblems” (Cohn 2013). And then there is the content itself, “openly draw[ing] from folklore and traditions” that are specifically Japanese, prompting publishers to introduce “extensive text introductions” and “glossaries” to make it an easier read for non-Japanese readers (Rota 2014, 143).
8As Valerio Rota (2014) points out, formatting must also be thought of as another part of the translation process, insofar as conventions that govern the print object called comics are also part of its “cultural specificity” (124). Many authors go so far as to attribute the failure of past manga publishing experiments (Malone 2010), or the limitation of their success (de la Iglesia 2016), to the decisions made by publishers who deemed the original format, the Japanese tankōbon (11×15cm soft cover book, ca. 192 pages, black and white printing, right-to-left reading direction) too alien for a reading public that associated comics with a light, colorful magazine filled with superhero adventures. Conversely, the global success of manga in the 21st century is heavily correlated with renewed glocalization policies that now hem more closely to the original formats (Brienza 2016).
9At the heart of the fluctuations in manga publishing strategies over the past decades, we find a conceptual pair that has been central to translation studies (Watson 2019): domestication and/or foreignization of the translated text (see Venuti 1995; Berman 2021). Much to the surprise of publishers who had initially bet on the contrary, it turned out that readers “want[ed] their manga to look Japanese”, manifesting this desire in foreignizing preferences regarding the linguistic, graphic and formal aspects of manga (Jüngst 2014, 96). This preference can be partly explained by the social dimension of reading, as “one of the communicative functions of manga is, in fact, to make the reader look like a manga connoisseur” (97).
10Nowhere is the intersection between manga translation and fandom’s desires more present than in a fan practice that has attracted much scholarly attention: scanlation (O’Hagan 2009; Douglass, Huber, and Manovich 2011; Lee 2012; Fabretti 2017). A portmanteau of scan and translation, scanlation involves scanning manga as published in Japan, digital editing and translating by amateur fans, and distribution over the Internet through a variety of digital modalities (Deppey 2005; Rampant 2010). The discussion of scanlation is particularly pertinent for this paper, as paratexts play a big role in said fan practice. As Fabretti (2016) points out, for scanlators, translator’s notes play “an advertising role, insofar as they call attention to the nature of scanlated manga as mediated texts” and also allow them to differentiate their work from that of other amateur groups (15). On the reception side, “the majority of readers of scanlated manga doesn’t simply tolerate the presence of [translator’s notes], but actually favors them” (16). Although it is difficult to ascertain, scanlation likely remains the main way of consuming manga outside Japan (Douglass, Huber and Manovich 2011; Fabretti 2017).
11Two corollaries must be kept in mind in the following section: first, that Fabretti’s point on paratexts calling attention to the mediated nature of translated texts opens the door to call into question Venuti’s (1995) famous sentence on the “invisibility” of translators. Secondly, and following from the first, that the proclivity of scanlators to “foreground the cultural and linguistic alterity of manga, and therefore the important work of mediation that translators carry out when translating from Japanese” stems from the amateur nature of their work (Fabretti 2016, 15). Both points will be put to the test by the Argentine case, here represented by the country’s main manga publisher Ivrea.
12Manga glocalization has been predominantly studied on the basis of national cases whose publishing industries are not only in a dominant position in the global publishing system but are also the strongest in their geolinguistic region (Sinclair 2004); for example, the United States for English (Brienza 2016), or Germany for German (Jüngst 2014). In Argentina, the publication of foreign comics has historically been dominated by foreign publishers, in what could be called secondhand glocalization. In the 1960s and 1970s, magazines imported from Mexico—mainly American superheroes, funny animals and cowboy comics—published by Novaro flooded Latin American newsstands (Vazquez 2010). These comics were translated from English into neutral or international Spanish, a version of the Spanish language created in mid-20th century Mexico as part of a strategy to delocalize and monopolize the dubbing of American films, especially Disney’s animated movies, for the whole continent (Llorente Pinto 2006). Today, neutral Spanish is understood as one of the main tools deployed by agents of the concentrated global publishing market in order to simplify the pan-regional distribution of Spanish-language books from their center in the old colonial metropolis (Arnoux and Valle 2010). In the 1980s and, especially, in the 1990s, imported comics came from Spain, as was the case with most of the manga that could be found in Buenos Aires’ comics shops, which were translated using the lexicon of said European country (Labra 2024).
13The vocabulary used in a Spanish translated comic can be read as a printed mark that reveals not only the multiple mediations that a cultural product goes through to travel from Japan to, in this case, Argentina, but also the asymmetry of that circulation. For this reason, within the Argentine comics field, the debate on translation, which in other latitudes appears articulated around the domestication/foreignization dichotomy, incorporate another layer of complexity on top of it. On the one hand, there is neutral and European Spanish, associated mostly with big Spanish-language multinational publishing corporations (and, thanks to Novaro, superhero comics), and, on the other hand, what among the actors in the field (including the readers) is called “Argentine”, “porteño” or “rioplatense” Spanish, that is to say, the lexicon used by those same actors, at least in the populous capital Buenos Aires and its surroundings.
14In the opinion of Argentine translator Agustín Gomez Sanz,
- 1 All translations from Spanish by the author.
[…] neutral Spanish is a mistake. I understand that many people appreciate it, but I feel that they appreciate it out of habit of seeing it on television. Neutral Spanish does not exist, it is not a language. It is the common denominator of a moment of other idioms, but if you are publishing a manga in Argentina for Argentina you do it in Argentine [Spanish]. There is no doubt about it. […] I feel [neutral Spanish] becomes very artificial. […] It is the language of someone who is trying to speak to a lot of people at the same time, not to a specific audience. (Gomez Sanz in Ritchie 2020a.)1
15“Unfortunately”, the translator continues, “it seems that the local public is accustomed to bad and inelegant translations, where everything is flat and the personality of the characters is totally lost” (Gomez Sanz in Ritchie 2020a). As a result of the secondhand glocalization materialized by the circulation of foreign comics published in Spain and Mexico, and due to the fact that most anime broadcasted in Argentina, including the adaptations of manga series published by Ivrea, was dubbed into neutral Spanish in Mexico and Venezuela (Rosain and Sayar 2018), this became “the archetypal language of comics and television” for local audiences (Gomez Sanz in Ritchie 2020a).
16Sadly, to this day there is a general lack of statistics regarding the comics market in Argentina, which makes it impossible to fully ascertain the breadth of the import wave that took place during the nineties. As subjectively summarized by Leandro Oberto (2000a), the “appearance of comics shops” filled the gap left by a national industry “pulverized” by the “extreme economic crisis” of the late eighties with “the unabashed import of products from Spain”, mainly translated manga, which only paid royalties to the Japanese publishers and creators for distribution in Europe and not Latin America (69). In order to even aspire to make it in this unequal playing field, upstart publisher Ivrea, founded by Oberto and Pablo Ruiz in 1997, had to offer something that European publishers like Norma, Glénat or Planeta DeAgostini could not. When they launched their manga line in 1999 with Rumiko Takahashi’s Ranma ½, a series of editorial decisions were taken to differentiate their books. First, they established a lower price point and wider national distribution through newsstands, as comics shops were mostly only found in the capital city Buenos Aires. Second, while imports were necessarily translated to be read by a Spanish peninsular audience, full of localisms and vocabulary foreign to the local reader, Ivrea’s manga line would be translated into Argentine Spanish. In this regard, Marling (2016) understands translation as another instance where symbolic (and also economic) capital is at stake (151), and Oberto would agree. The gamble paid off. Twenty-five years later, Ivrea is one of the biggest Spanish-language manga publishers in the world, with a dominant share of the market in Argentina and a considerable one in Spain, as well as a modest branch in Finland.
17Success was not always a secure outcome. To begin with, their bet on Argentine Spanish broke what Gideon Toury (2004) calls the “preliminary norms” of pre-existing “translation policies” and defied the field’s and, especially, the readers’ expectations (209). So much so, that he first comment that Gomez Sanz answered among all those addressed to the editorial staff of Ranma ½ was “I don’t like that [the characters] talk about ‘vos’ and curse […]” (Gomez Sanz 1999b, n.p.). Nonetheless, over the next two decades, the success of Ivrea’s manga line not only validated its translation policy, but also established Argentine Spanish as the go-to lexicon for translated manga among local readers. Both local (Ovni Press) and foreign (Panini) competitors ended up being forced by consumers to conform to the translation policy pioneered by Oberto and Gomez Sanz (Labra 2024).
18For the purpose of this article, two points are relevant about Ivrea’s manga translation policy. First, its defiance of the norms tended to make the act of translation more visible to readers and other actors in the field, and put a spotlight on the translator itself. The manga readership in Argentina is acutely aware that they are reading a translation. Argentine manga translators are far from invisible. They did (and do) their work under the attentive scrutiny of readers, appearing regularly in interviews on podcasts, YouTube channels and other specialized media (Ritchie 2020a; 2020b). Gomez Sanz is the paradigmatic case, being the first Ivrea translator and the most famous. He studied Japanese partly in language institutes and partly as an autodidact, and learned the art of translation through practice. Initially, the work on Ranma ½ was shared, with Oberto translating “from Italian into Spanish” and then Gomez Sanz correcting “from the Japanese”. It quickly became clear to them that “the Italians were making too much up, their translation had too many errors and my correction was too extensive” (Gomez Sanz in Ritchie 2020a). The following dialog in Ranma ½ no. 1 is representative of the general tone of Oberto and Gomez Sanz’s translation:
— ¡¡Pero me dijo que había tenido un hijo varón!! [But he told me he had a son!!]
— ¿¡¿¡Te parece que estas tetas son muy de varón?!?! [Do these boobs look manly to you?!?!]
— Hmmm… ¿Podrías cortarla? [Hmmm… Could you cut it out?] (Takahashi 1999a, n/p.)
19As can be seen in the example, the language used in the translation was colloquial and did not shy from expletives, such as “mierda” [shit] and “boludo” [moron, idiot] (Takahashi 1999a, n/p). From the fourth issue on, Gomez Sanz became solely responsible for the translation of the entire manga line until 2005. According to his own estimates, over the course of his first decade working for Ivrea he translated “around 400 manga volumes” (Gomez Sanz in Ritchie 2020a).
20Moreover, the translation policy was only part of a broader strategy on the part of Ivrea to differentiate their products from the rest of the competition, adding local value that imports could not replicate. At the center of this strategy we find, once again, Gomez Sanz. Wielding the symbolic capital afforded by his visibility and position within the field as Ivrea’s premier translator and star staff writer in Lazer (1997-2008), the publisher’s homegrown magazine and best-seller, he justified the deployment of a paratextual apparatus included in the manga. Going against the practice of professional translators, Gomez Sanz opened the doors of his workshop and established a dialogue with his readers, laying bare all the magician’s tricks, revealing his role as mediator, and tacitly acknowledging the difficulty of his work, the impossibility of pristinely transferring a text from one language to another. The main venue for his sharing of the trade’s secrets was the “Clarifications for the translation” section, which developed naturally from the translator’s doubts and the readership’s demands in Ranma ½ and ended up being a hallmark of Ivrea’s manga line.
21In Ranma ½ no. 4, Oberto (1999) apologized for the publication’s two-month absence from newsstands, arguing that the editorial production had been stopped at the behest of the Japanese company that owned the rights, Shogakukan. The issue was that the licensors “had not liked the fact that we had left posters and signs in Japanese” and now they had to “translate and erase every last and tiniest kanji that appeared” in the manga (n/p). This was a common stance in the early days of foreign manga publishing, when many within the Japanese publishing industry thought that the key to success was the erasure of all cultural particularity (Brienza 2016; Pellitteri 2010). Although the decision was unappealable, Oberto did not refrain from airing his “profound disagreement with this measure”, since in his opinion it made their edition “less exotic” (Oberto 1999, n/p). As he and Gomez Sanz assured to anyone who complained about Ivrea’s translation policy, their intent was to maintain maximum fidelity to the Japanese original (see Ritchie 2020a).
22In Ivrea’s manga line, all character names were kept in the original Japanese, although spelled in Latin alphabet. This was not the case in the Mexican-dubbed anime broadcasted in Argentina and the whole of Latin America (Rosain and Sayar 2018). The same translation policy was applied (with exceptions), in the case of the names of places, objects and martial arts techniques. Although as a general rule Gomez Sanz did not keep Japanese honorific suffixes (-san, -kun, -chan, etc.), references to Japanese social hierarchy are present. In fact, the only translation note in the first volume of Ranma ½ refers to the term “sempai”, which is included in romanized Japanese within the speech balloon, and defined in a footnote as a “term used in Japan to refer to peers of higher years” (Takahashi 1999a, n/p). That little note would grow into, first, an editorial entitled “The odyssey of translation” (Gomez Sanz 1999a) in the third volume and, in the fourth, the “Clarifications for the translation” (“Aclaraciones de la traducción”) (Gomez Sanz 1999c) included from that time on in many titles on which the translator worked.
23According to Gomez Sanz, the inclusion of paratext started with
[…] the annoyance of always reading things […] as I was saying, in other [translated] languages. You have to steel yourself to be able to stomach the Spanish […] or the Italian edition of Ranma and, you know, there are a lot of mistakes and shortcomings. I wanted to convey more than the work actually says, because there are cultural things that do not translate. At that moment, it was discussed with Leandro [Oberto] at length, “look, I want to include that extra section”, “I want to use the word bokken instead of wooden sword”, “I want to explain to the reader that when you shake hands [in Japan] it implies a little more than when you shake hands here in Argentina”. It seemed then like an experiment. (Gomez Sanz in Ritchie 2020a.)
24Looking back, the translator now acknowledges these paratexts as his “most important contribution to the craft of translation specific to manga, and to Ivrea’s identity as a company that publishes manga” (Gomez Sanz in Ritchie 2020a). His “clarifications” often transcended the minutiae of the translation of linguistic facts to delve into the translation of cultural facts about Japanese culture and society, especially in historical series, for example, Rurouni Kenshin by Nobuhiro Watsuki (2001), a manga set in 1878 Japan that combines fictional characters with fictionalized versions of historical figures. For Ivrea’s edition, Gomez Sanz wrote texts that delved into the context of the Meiji revolution, as well as language inflections that are reflected in the protagonist’s speech, religious and culinary references, and even the idiomatic root of sword and martial arts techniques.
25Fabretti (2016) states that glossary-style paratexts, as well as short monographic essays that provide context to Japanese history and culture are favored by the majority of scanlation manga readership (101). The success of Ivrea’s manga line and its “clarifications for the translation” corroborates and expands upon this hypothesis. The “truth is that people got really hooked on the clarifications, they worked very well at the time”, recalls Gomez Sanz (Ritchie 2020a). This type of paratext is also one of the best tools at a translator’s disposal to foreignize a translation (Fabretti 2016, 89). Gomez Sanz used it in that spirit, as having a glossary in which to develop the meaning of certain terms and concepts such as, for example, the above-mentioned bokken (木剣), made it easier to retain original (romanized) Japanese terms.
26This operation offered the reader a sense of proximity to the “otherness” of manga, of consuming a complete “cultural package” that conveys elements of the source culture (Sell 2011, 94-95). Said operation also influenced the book’s material aspect (Labra 2024, 186). At the beginning of the manga line, Ivrea adopted an ad-hoc format, a slightly enlarged half-tankōbon, read from left to right. After the success of Evangelion, which retained the original reading direction at the behest of its Japanese publisher, the local readership demanded that more titles be published this way (187). By the time Rurouni Kenshin came to newsstands and comic shops, only two years later, the full tankōbon with a Japanese reading direction format had been implemented. This change in glocalization policy was contemporary with Tokyopop’s “100% Original Manga” initiative, which normalized the tankōbon format in US bookshops (Brienza 2016) but represented a novelty in Argentina as imports from Spain and Mexico mostly resorted to “flipped” pages. Ivrea would slowly discontinue the “mirroring” of pages as the original line-up of series was completed, and over time even more original details were incorporated into their books, such as dust jackets.
27On the contrary, the other key paratextual strategy deployed in that first era of Ivrea’s manga line did not attempt to take the reader to Japan but, as the Argentine Spanish translation also did, to bring the manga to Argentina: readers’ mail.
28A readers’ letter column had already worked very well for Ivrea in Lazer. In what he recognized was the most popular section of the magazine, Leandro Oberto (2000b), who in addition to founding the publishing house and the publication acted as its MC, claimed that at its peak it received more than 2,000 letters per issue (87). The hundreds of readers who wrote to the editorial office every month did so to be read, to be seen. They wrote to share their opinions on the magazine’s content, to ask for the name of this or that anime character, when they would feature an article on their favorite series, and to establish contact with their peers via letter, telephone or in person. Beyond that, “Lazer Mail”, as it was known, developed into a safe space in which those who write could share their personal experiences and fears, becoming a fundamental venue for the formation of a manga and anime fandom in Argentina (Del Vigo 2019).
29In this regard, the incorporation of readers’ mail sections to its manga line allowed Ivrea, first, to establish continuity with the communication register that had been so successful for them in Lazer. Like the magazine, their manga spoke the language of “normal, ordinary people” (Oberto in Say 2018). In so doing, Oberto sought to avoid the same pitfalls he accused his competitors of falling into. They, he judged, had “[rested] on their laurels”, and had failed to adapt to a readership that had changed (La Nación 2000). With around 30,000 readers already buying Lazer (Clarín 2000), it was in Ivrea’s best interest to make sure the transition from their flagship product to the new manga line was as smooth as possible. In response to “the overwhelming number of letters and e-mails asking and commenting on different aspects” of their edition of Ranma ½ (Oberto 1999, n/p), starting with the fourth issue a correspondence section was included where Gomez Sanz answered doubts regarding the series and the local edition.
30With the growth of the manga line in subsequent years, some (but not all) of the new series also incorporated their own letter column. In Fushigi Yûgi by Yuu Watase, from the beginning the section was no longer conceived as the “typical readers’ mail in which we only talk about how hot the characters are” (Yepes 2000, n/p); like “Lazer Mail”, it was presented as a space for sociability and exchange among readers. María Yepes (2000), the graphic designer in charge of the lettering and onomatopoeia retouching, who also handled fan mail, called to take advantage of “the fact that the comic’s story focuses quite a bit on the relationships between the characters” to start a dialogue on “how you, the readers, live relationships with people of the other and the same sex”, “to clarify the typical existential doubts that you’ve always had about the opposite sex but can never ask anyone (I don’t know, which hole do women pee through, for example…) and make a sort of ‘collective consultation guide’ in which both sexes can investigate, clarify or even debate” (n/p).
31The dynamic of the “Fushigi Maîl” was successful enough to be replicated in “I ‘Mails”, the readers’ mail section included in Ivrea’s edition of I”S by Masakazu Katsura, published between 2001 and 2004. The editor in charge, Ricardo “Tati” Perez, himself in his early twenties, “proposed topics related to high school life, teenage romances, frustrations and successes in school, as well as doubts about sexuality” in tune with the manga’s story and theme. A readership composed of “men and women ranging from 15 to 30 years old”, mostly “teenagers who were finishing high school or starting college” consulted there “not only the editor […] but also the other readers” on issues ranging from “being able to talk to the person they like” or “how to overcome love breakups” to “whether masturbation is just a stage in life that ends with marriage” (as cited in Del Vigo 2019, 9). It was also common practice to publish the writer’s e-mail address to facilitate contact with others. As Del Vigo (2019) points out, the “readers of I”S formed a community, liquid, ephemeral, appropriating platforms that had commercial origins, but were won by fans, dictating the agenda of peer-to-peer content” (9). Perez would go on to host a similar section in Video Girl Ai, also by Katsura, published between 2005 and 2008 (Katsura 2008).
32Although “clarifications for the translation” and letter columns were the two paratextual sections most prevalent in Ivrea’s manga, they were not the only ones. One could also find, particularly in the earlier years, other types of paratexts such as song lyrics from anime adaptations’ openings and endings, anime episode guides, and other complementary materials mostly replicated from Lazer (for example, Takahashi 1999b, n/p; and Sadamoto 2000, n/p). As time went on, however, all paratextual add-ons began to be phased out, including those that had distinguished their publications from the beginning.
33Starting in 2005, Gomez Sanz shared translation duties on Ivrea’s manga line with Marcelo Vicente. Three years later, he decided to leave amid tensions with Oberto (Gomez Sanz in Ritchie 2020). Although he would eventually return to translate several titles for the publisher, his departure opened the door to staff renewal. In 2010, Nathalia Ferreyra, now Ivrea’s senior translator, joined the company. An incomplete list of the recent roster of translators includes Laura Antmann, Christian Ernesto Caccioppoli, Pablo Farias Alves, Damián Gaggero, Sol Jennerich, Lenny Murogate, Pablo Nalogowski, Alina Pachano, Martin Parle, Gabriel Peña, Guido Rosano, Nicolas Shimura, Pablo Tschopp, Esteban Volta, among others. As the list shows, unlike in the US (Brienza 2016, 105), in Argentina there does not seem to be a feminization of the profession. In a reversal of the secondhand glocalization of the nineties, today Ivrea commissions translations in the most neutral Spanish possible from its Argentine translators, to then have editors in both Spain and Argentina add local flavor to the dialogue (Farias Alves in Ritchie 2020b). In this way the company cuts costs, concentrating work where wages are lower.
34For his part, Gomez Sanz invested the economic and symbolic capital he accumulated by founding F3 Planning, a company dedicated to providing integral solutions for manga publishing, from the negotiation with the Japanese right holders to the editing process of the books themselves. They worked with competitors of Gomez Sanz’s former employers, such as Deux Manga, Ovni Press and, mostly, Larp Editores, where they completely handled the manga line (translation, layout, etc.). This included titles such as Death Note by Tsugumi Ōba and Takeshi Obata, Naruto by Masashi Kishimoto, One Piece by Eiichiro Oda (2015) and Vampire Knight by Matsuri Hino (2014).
35Recently, Gomez Sanz stated that his current policy is to translate everything that is “translatable”, leaving notes only “when things require something more complex, more specific”. If it can be “referenced within the speech bubble, within the confines of the direct reading of the manga itself with a footnote or with a small asterisk, I prefer to do that, so as not to interrupt” the flow of reading. Being able “to read the manga from beginning to end without hindrance” became his new gold standard. Looking back on his old “clarifications for the translation” section, he recognizes in retrospect that the demand of the readership “transformed it into something that had to be mandatorily included”, even when the actual translation did not merit it (Gomez Sanz in Ritche 2020a).
36Gomez Sanz’s change of mind and practices could be framed within the ethics of the translator’s invisibility proposed by Venuti (1995), the same that led the American manga translators interviewed by Brienza (2016) to judge the use of paratexts to highlight the foreignness of the text as a “lazy”, unnecessary thing, solely done to make the translator itself “visible” to the readers (117). In this sense, a continuum can tentatively be established, ranging from the paratext-filled amateur translations of the scanlators studied by Fabretti (2016) to the professionals of the US publishing industry interview by Brienza, with the use, or even the quantity of paratext serving as an indicator of the level of professionalization in the field of comics translation.
37Much more than translator practices have changed in those twenty years. After the end of Lazer in 2009, much of Ivrea’s exchange with its readers moved to the then-novel social networks. Today, these and the publisher’s official blog are the main channels of dialogue (Chibi Japan Weekend 2014). The digital era had other, more profound effects. After all, manga as an art form was, from the start, informed by the development of technology and market forces (Rousmaniere 2019, 20). The spread of digital manga, first through illegal scanlation repositories and, more recently, through official channels such as Shueisha’s Manga Plus (Pineda 2019), as well as online phenomena such as unboxing videos, booktubers, etc., have contributed to change the nature of the readers’ relationship with print. On the one hand, it is no longer necessary to have a printed book to practice the act of reading. On the other hand, social media highlight the aesthetic value of books and the pleasure of owning them, of assembling (and displaying) a personal library.
38A concept coined by Reggiani (2010) comes in handy: “shelf-ification”. According to the cartoonist and academic, in the 21st century there was a “radical modification of the publishing mechanisms and formats” of comics in Argentina and, “consequently, of the corresponding reading contracts”. In the process, “the abandonment of the anthology magazine sold in newsstands” led to the rise of the “book” sold in bookstores (1). Comics as a medium was stripped of resources typical of the press and began to incorporate those of books and literature, which were “imitated” in order to accumulate “social legitimacy” (7).
39In the case of Ivrea’s publications, this transformation took the form of a transition from tankōbon that included forms of paratext normally associated with periodicals, to tankōbon that boasted more book-like features. What their manga shed was the inclusion of advertisements for Buenos Aires’ Camelot Comic Store found in early titles (Sadamoto 2000, n.p.) and, most importantly, paratext such as the reader’s mail sections mentioned above. Instead, book features were incorporated: for example, flaps with paratexts like the authors’ biographies or comments appeared in Ivrea’s second edition of Evangelion (Sadamoto 2018). Another change was the distribution channel. As previously stated, in early years retail was done mostly through newsstands, but as the circuit began to prosper and expand nationally once again in the latter half of the aughts, Ivrea shifted its sales strategy towards comic shops and bookstores (Labra 2024, 211).
40In the face of the challenges posed by competition from digital reading and new expectations regarding print objects, as well as the emergence of bookstores as a retail outlet for comics (Páez 2021), Ivrea’s catalogue has evolved in recent years into an offering that is meant to be collected and treasured, as much as read. This, in turn, underscores a change in reading practices, as the actual act of reading manga increasingly happens online. Motivated by these changes in habits, and by an increasingly competitive market due to upstart new national publishers like Ovni Press and the arrival of multinationals Planeta and Distrito Manga (an imprint of Penguin Random House), Ivrea has been producing lavish volumes. Deluxe (re)editions have become frequent for successful series—see for example the gold-plated new edition of Clamp’s best seller Cardcaptor Sakura (2018). In a tour of Ivrea’s online store (www.lacomiqueria.com.ar), one can find books with unusually large dimensions such as A5 (15×21cm), material details such as translucent or metallic pages, covers with hot stamping and different textures, etc. In this sense, the proliferation of digital reading has not only not contributed to the extinction of the paper book but only increased its symbolic value among the most ardent fans, making collectors out of readers.
41As for the paratexts analyzed in this article, they mostly disappeared as Ivrea’s manga publications traded the newsstand for the bookstore (with exceptions, such as Gomez Sanz annotations on Ivrea’s One Piece [Oda 2023, n.p.]). However, the shelf-ification of comics in general, and of manga in particular, opened up new ways in which text can be added to glocalized editions. For example, in Shintaro Kago’s Dementia 21 (2024), the first manga published by Hotel de las Ideas, a small publisher dedicated mostly to Argentine and European graphic novels, one can find prestige-inducing paratexts typically used in literary publishing (Reggiani 2010, 7), such as a foreword written by an academic expert contextualizing the work, and an interview with Kago by Gary Groth, reproduced from Fantagraphics’ English editions. Thus, paratext in manga, once used by Ivrea to differentiate their offerings from Spanish imports, then phased out as Oberto’s company secured the lion share of the market and their books increasingly became more lavish, now seems to take on a second life as publishers once again to seek added value and distinguish their manga books from growing competition, both local and international.
42The global manga phenomenon of the 21st century, with the challenges its glocalization presented for many different non-Japanese, non-Asian readerships, has very much driven the development of comics and translation studies for the past decades. The case of Argentine publisher Ivrea analyzed here contributes to shed new light on exactly how complex and mediated the required symbolic and material operations can be when facing the circulation and publication of Japanese comics in the periphery of the publishing world.
43Tasked with contesting the asymmetrical competition of cheap imported manga from more developed Spanish-speaking publishing markets, like Spain and Mexico, Ivrea’s founders Oberto and Ruiz devised a glocalization strategy for their manga line that highlighted their locality. As part of said strategy, and in complement to their norm-breaking translation policy into Argentine Spanish, translator Gomez Sanz and editors like Pérez and Yepes contributed to a variety of paratextual content that sought to be an added value against which foreign publishers could not retaliate. Chief among them were Gomez Sanz’ “clarifications for the translation” section, which straddled the line of linguistic and cultural translation and, in doing so, satisfied the readership’s demand for an ever more foreignized edition of their favorite manga, and the readers’ mail sections, a feature borrowed from periodic print publications like Ivrea’s own Lazer that offered an expanding printed venue for Argentina’s burgeoning otaku sociability.
44Over time, such paratexts began to disappear from Ivrea’s manga. On the one hand, manga translation became an increasingly professional practice, and professional translators tend to prefer a cleaner, less obtrusive translation that does not require additional reading. On the other hand, the migration of comics retail from newsstands to bookstores and the rise of digital manga (both legal and illegal) pushed manga publishers to produce publications that appropriate legitimizing formats and paratexts typically associated with book form. This means more lavish and expensive editions which are meant to be collected, and no longer contain features associated with disposable periodical publications, such as advertisements or a letter column. However, recent examples seem to include paratexts such as forewords, albeit those are more associated with literary publishing.