[MANGA] Scanlations and Mangas

Of the 5 main senses of the body, the eyes are the most important for me. In as much as I like to eat, to hear, to sing and to feel, I've always wanted to see everything first. I am a visual person. Anything visual stimulates me, that is why I always prefer music videos over songs or talking in person than texting.

If you have never been asked before, I'm sure you have thought of this question. "If you were to choose among these four, what will you be? Will you be a mute, a deaf, a cripple or blind?".

Me, I would pick being mute over the others any time (not that I want to *knock on wood*). It is, I think, the easiest to adapt to (not that it is easy). However, if the question was a wee bit different...say, "What is the least disability would you want to have?", I'd choose not to be blind in a blink.

Now, my friends always ask me why I find mangas fascinating. Mangas are Japanese comics (to put it roughly) in that they draw characters into images, illustrating them on books (usually read from right to left), with the characters' conversations written on balloons. On the other hand, scanlations are scanned images of mangas that have been translated from Japanese to a different language (usually English).

You see, my friends are perplexed by the idea of surfing the Internet all day to read comics and allowing a bunch of jpegs to consume 6gb of my hard drive just for the sake of reading. I do not attempt to explain because it is not easy to explain this fascination to others who have never been gripped by it.

I've always been a reader but mangas took my reading experience to a whole new experience. The awe, the excitement, the joy and the breathlessness that overtook me when I experienced my first manga was unbelievable. I've always been a fan of animes but reading them on mangas is so much different.

With the illustrations, the mangakas (writer/illustrator) allow you to enter their minds through their characters and visualize for yourself the world they have created. May it be shoujo (mangas for females) or shounen (for males) or josei (for adult women), mangas helped me be my own director or moviemaker as the images keep playing on my head.

I'll be forever grateful to these sites: Mangareader, Mangatraders, OneManga (dead), MangaFox, MangaVolume, Mangatoshokan and many more for providing me with wonderful scanlations. :))

~ Babble by brownbeat