Or at least that’s what I should have said when I left for Paris on the 7th. Oh well, no harm done. The trip was pretty nice. Lots of beautiful buildings and stuff. But this post really isn’t about my trip to Paris; it’s more about a comparison between manga localization in France and the USA. Or course, I’m not a expert about this (hey! I was only in France for a couple of days,) there are a few glaring differences between manga in France and manga in America.

For this comparison, I’m only using Mobile Suit Gundam: Ecole du Ciel (published by Pika Edition in France and Tokyopop in America,) mainly because I couldn’t control myself when I saw that the bookstore in La Galleries de Lafayette had volumes 4, 5 and 6 for sale and I didn’t have enough money for any other manga. The first thing I noticed is that manga is cheaper in France (€6,95, $8.72 USD) than in the U.S. (€7,96, $9.99 USD, which came as a bit of a surprise since that’s the only thing I noticed that was less expensive in Paris than it was in the United States. Given all of the “extra” things French publishers do with the manga localization.

One of the “extras” included in the French version of the manga is the dust jacket. Although these dust jackets are often included in the original Japanese releases, American publishers never release manga with them, probably to make more of a profit. They aren’t really necessary in any way. In fact, they can get in the way while reading the book, but they would still be nice to have, if for only the aesthetic purposes (and some of them even come with reversible covers.)

Another difference between the two editions is the inclusion of original color content. Each volume of Ecole du Ciel includes in a small illustration gallery in the beginning of the book (except for volume 5, which doesn’t include the illustration gallery until the end of the first part of the story. Both Kodansha (the original publisher of Ecole du Ciel) and Pika Edition included those pages in color; however, Tokyopop decided, for whatever reason (probably to save some cash. Color is expensive,) to grayscale those pages. It’s quite a shame, too, since the illustrations were quite beautiful colored.

This may be a little unfair to Tokyopop, since they don’t grayscale ALL of the colored pages in ALL of their books. It just seems as though Ecole du Ciel got the short end of the stick from Tokyopop. And it’s not like the Tokyopop version is totally inferior to the Pika Edition version. After all, the back cover of the Tokyopop version at least gives a description of the contents of the contents inside the book whilst the Pika Edition version does not (which I found odd, but that’s probably because most American books come with descriptions on the back cover. I suppose the same doesn’t hold true for French books.)