Ranma 1/2: Nettohen

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Manga

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The original Ranma 1/2 manga was initially serialized in the weekly publication Shonen Sunday comics, starting in 1988 and ending in 1996. Shonen Sunday, as many other similar publications, publishes in its hundreds of pages chapters (about 25 pages) of many series. These japanese comics magazines are the size of a phone book, cost little more than a newspaper and most of them are printed in recicled paper, really thin and of the lowest quality. However, in each number there´s a special mention of one of the different titles being serialized. This means that some pages of that series´ chapter are printed in colors and the rest of them are in three colors instead of the classic black and white.
This voluminous publications as Shonen Sunday have a short life, they´re bought as something to read on the way home from work or school, or in bed. They end up in the trash as old newspapers do. Most of the readers aren´t fans of comics but people who seek something that can entertain them for a short while. With thousands of different themes and publications, directed to the most diverse groups, in Japan everyone reads comics and it´s a massive entertainment as any other.
But there are still comic´s fanatics and they want to have every chapter of their favorite series for ever at hand. Since it´s impossible to collect the weekly publications (remember they´re the size of a phone book), the fans buy the tankoubons. These are tiny books of about 200 pages that compile periodically the chapters of each of the most popular series of the magazine. They´re sold in book stores and can be found years after the serialization is over, just like any book in any book store in the world. Ranma 1/2 was compiled in Japan in 38 tankoubons, that contain everything that was published in Shonen. This books are printed in good paper, but the coloured pages here appear in gray scale and look slightly blurred. The foreign editions of most of the mangas are made from these tankoubons. The pages in the Shonen Sunday had 17x26cm, while the tankoubons have a little less than 20cm height.

Text extracted from the 2nd Ranma 1/2 volume published by Editorial Ivrea
in Argentina, translated and slightly modified by Pet-chan.

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