In a Bind
This post was supposed to be a manga review for Get Backers Volume 1. I’ll still be posting that review, but I have a few things I want to get out of the way first. Since some of it isn’t specific to that manga, I decided to write up a short rant. Lucky you.
I sat down and began reading GetBackers, and everything was cool. Had my coffee, had my manga and everything was right with the world. After a little while I began to think that there might be a little something wrong after all. The flow of action in the story was horrible. Jumping around with no explanation of what was happening. When I ran into the contents page around page 54 or so, I figured it out.
Misprint
The pages looked fine, they were just in the wrong order. Yep, somewhere along the way someone forgot to make sure the pages were properly collated. The book was bound wrong. I looked online for a scanlation to verify my theory, as I’ve done for translation questions in the past, but I couldn’t find GetBackers.
I finished reading the book, trying to mentally jump from story to story as I came across misplaced pages. I gotta say, the impression I got of this manga was not helped at all by this mistake.
My impression of TokyoPop has suffered somewhat as well. This sort of thing is much larger than a typo. Shoot, it’s even larger than a bad translation call. This is the type of thing that can get a company a bad reputation. This should have been caught before it made it to a retail outlet.
Update: More news about the misprint.
Manga, GetBackers, Get Backers, TokyoPop, Misprint

January 9th, 2009 at 4:08 am
[...] sent. If you don’t remember, or didn’t read those posts, you can catch up with the first post and the second [...]
January 12th, 2009 at 11:34 am
[...] glad I held off on the review until I could get a copy that wasn’t defective. The story is much better when you don’t have to figure out which part is [...]
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:13 am
[...] was looking forward to watching this anime. I liked the manga, in spite of all the trouble I had with it. Reading the story out of order was fun, though a bit confusing. Reading the story in the [...]
January 24th, 2010 at 12:45 am
Came across your blog in Bing