Comix Influx Blog: Ubunchu!

I was recently directed toward Ubunchu!, a manga about the Ubuntu Operating System (a flavour of Linux). The comic was originally in Japanese but has since become the centre of a whirlwind of translating activity.

DoctorMO got permission to translate the manga from its creator, Hiroshi Seo, and did an English, left-to-right version in PDF format, which he posted on his blog (which is generally more concerned with Ubuntu than comics). This is effectively a (legitimate) scanlation, although DoctorMO had the original PSDs to work with.

Since then many other people joined in and have produced 13 other editions, including an unflipped English version (not reading so much Manga, I much prefer the flipped version).

In another post, DoctoMO describes the process of creating PDFs, for those interested in the gory, technical details.

And, while on Manga, Katherine Farmar recently gave a talk at the “Academic Perspectives on Comics, Manga & Graphic Novels as Intercultural & Intermedial Phenomena” conference at Växjö University, Sweden. Katherine’s paper was called ‘Why “global manga” is an oxymoron’, and she was good enough to spread the word about Comix Influx while she was there. Katherine says that there are plans to publish all the papers from the conference, which is great. As well as Katherine’s, there were lots of others which also sounded really interesting.