Reading Room RADIO BOY "Part 1"

Here's a never-reprinted 1987 manga/anime spoof...

...in, of course, glorious black and white!

Manga (and its' Korean counterpart, mahnwa) seem "weird" when colorized.

To be concluded and finished...Thursday!

Loosely-based on Osamo Tesuka's Astro Boy, which had achieved success as a translated anime in the early 1960s and opened the door for a flood of Japanese cartoons on American TV that continues to this day.

Note: Though Astro Boy is best-known in the US as a tv cartoon series, it began as a wildly-successful manga in 1954.

The premise of Radio Boy is that the creator himself did the translations for this edition, resulting in a mish-mash of syntax and tenses as well as some literal translations of Japanese phrases.

As a collector of foreign videos (including Japanese and Chinese DVDs), I can attest that the English subtitles on them often do read like the captions and copy in this spoof.

I suspect writers Chuck Dixon (yes, that Chuck Dixon) and Jim Engel had also seen some mis-translated films/videos, and wanted to re-create the experience on the printed page.

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