Each year, new series appear on your TV set or streaming service. And at one time or another, you’ve likely clamored for news about whether your new fave is going to get another season. Although some will draw to a predetermined or natural conclusion, many will get canceled before the creators wished. Perhaps it was low ratings. Maybe it was a lack of interest in continuing from the actors. Or maybe the studio was just looking to make cuts.
However, a small number of shows manage to have long, near continuous runs. Sure, the series may change formats and cast, but several generations may have grown up with new episodes. For instance, The Simpsons set records for the longest running animated TV show and has had generally the same main cast, while another long-running animated series, Scooby-Doo!, debuted earlier but has had different series names, formats, and even main characters — and no new episodes were made for years. There are also long-running game shows like The Price is Right who have had mostly stable hosts over their tenure, while late night shows like The Tonight Show has had drama over who gets the gig (and their name in the title). All are iconic in their own ways, with often-quoted lines and setups that have inspired the creation of other similar series.
Every country has their own shows like this. And if you’ve been a fan of Japanese culture for a while, you may have seen some of them — or at least picked up references in anime and manga. For instance, Mumen Rider in One Punch Man is an homage to Kamen Rider, a tokusatsu (hero live-action) franchise about a man or woman transforming into a hero who rides a motorcycle.
A manga about Kamen Rider just so happens to be the center of a lot of recent controversy.
Kamen Rider has been around since the 70s, and in its various incarnations, different people have been granted the ability to transform into the masked hero. As you would expect from a media franchise, there have been several manga adaptations and inspirations featuring Kamen Rider. Seven Seas rereleased the first manga run in 2022 as an omnibus.
In April 2022, Anime News Network broke the news that Titan Comics, under its new Titan Manga imprint, would be releasing the Kamen Rider Kuuga manga. Titan Comics (and Titan Manga) are a part of Titan Entertainment Group, a British company. Titan Entertainment Group owns a pop culture retail chain called Forbidden Planet, most of which are located in the UK, but they are more well-known for its book division Titan Books. A large number of their library are media tie-ins, from Marvel novels to movie and gaming artbooks to The Simpsons comics and more.
Kamen Rider Kuuga was not Titan Comics’ first license. The company has brought over tie-in manga like Sherlock (an adaptation of a BBC series) and Assassin’s Creed (based on the video games) for years along with originals like Ryuko. But with the announcement in March 2022 that they had rescued Afro Samurai, Titan Comics seemed to be getting serious about manga with its new publishing line.
This was followed up a month later by news of them teaming up with independent publisher Stonebot Comics to release Kamen Rider Kuuga and ATOM: The Beginning, an Astro Boy prequel.
An original Kamen Rider Zero-One series was also revealed to be in development.
The first volume of ATOM: The Beginning came out in October followed by Kamen Rider Kuuga volume 1 in December. But it was volume 2 of Kamen Rider Kuuga that brought Titan Manga’s release of that series to the forefront of the news.
As you can see here, English-translated images of Kamen Rider Kuuga accompanied the announcement. But these were not the final versions. Which, granted, happens a lot with early previews; there’s still time to make changes before a product is released to audiences and consumers.
But Kamen Rider Kuuga didn’t have just a few touch-ups or editing tweaks between the excerpts and full release. The translation and the lettering are both different.
Titan Comics would later acknowledge this.
Titan Comics would then disable responses to this post, likely because fans and onlookers were left wondering if this is not just takes by two different people but by two different means — one human, one machine.
This thread (which is also linked above) highlights many of the issues. Dedicated manga readers have likely noticed similar issues with stilted dialogue or bad editing in human translated official releases before, but the quantity, frequency, and even absurdity of some of these lines seem to indicate a failure of editing if nothing else. There are credits in the book for translation and adaptation, but there hasn’t been any official word from those individuals about their work on Kamen Rider Kuuga.
Again, you can view these excerpts for yourself and form an opinion on whether it’s machine translated or not. And honestly, I can’t say that the preview images are 100% better either; I hate the font used on Kuuga’s name being shouted out. May be good for a logo, but bad for comic dialogue no matter how short or obvious it is.
It seems some readers were hopeful volume 1’s issues were just an anomaly, but with the same issues in volume 2, that didn’t appear to be the case.
Shortly after, Stonebot Comics provided their own statement on the situation, saying the promo pages were based on the style of the Argentinian release but decided “to go on a different direction” to be more like “current manga localizations”.
Titan then announced they would be updating the first two volumes of Kamen Rider Kuuga and would take steps to improve future releases.
I think this outcome was predicted once the story broke. The story got too big to not at least promise an editor, which is probably the most straightforward — if not one of the most low cost ways — to improve the text. But what exactly are “extra internal editorial processes” and such beyond their current levels, who knows. I mean, I would hope that this means a qualified, professional translator(s) and any adapters/editors are on deck, but who knows.
Because based on Stonebot’s statement, I’m guessing the original plan was to release Kamen Rider Kuuga in English as a translation of a translation. And this likely would have meant few people would have noticed if it was a machine translation, as Spanish and English are much more linguistically similar than either are to Japanese. In fact, plugging in OVNI’s Kamen Rider Kuuga volume 1 blurb in Google Translate gets this most comprehensible English translation:
But it sounds like they didn’t want to get slammed for not translating from the original Japanese (as is the standard), so the English version ended up as is to keep costs down. Which, of course, led to blowback anyway.
As in a lot of other industries, there are a lot of questions about how much of a role machines and AIs should take in translation. Should it be used only on very niche series? Fine as long as there is human supervision? Keep it away from professional releases? Have the credits page include a note about what program was used?
If nothing else, once Kamen Rider Kuuga‘s release approached, Titan should have used excerpts from the finished version instead of the original preview images. Again, it is fairly common for previews to not match the final product — in fact, a judge recently ruled fans can sue over deceptive movie trailers — but the company should not have kept using the OVNI-translated pages in posts from December and January at least.
And while readers who own the eBooks of volumes 1 and 2 are going to be able to access the updated versions, physical fans are going to be forced to double dip or stick to releases that are rough and may not match volumes 3+. That’s one of the downsides of physical purchases, and especially the dangers of preordering. There are going to be a lot of people hesitant to preorder volume 3 and beyond, but yet preordering is one of the best ways to show support for a series. Plus, the print situation hasn’t fully resolved itself, and so if volume 3 is significantly better, readers could end up waiting a while to obtain a copy.
Still, waiting for further info is going to be a preferred option for many. And not just for Kamen Rider Kuuga but any future Titan Manga release. Because while no translation is perfect, this one definitely needed more oversight.