#let hirano's art speak for itself damnit

[sacchiri]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts, I'm so glad you enjoyed reading my haphazard notes!!

I was also surprised by a few things during my reread. (One of those things being how relatively often Alucard calls Integra by first name alone instead of "master" or with some kind of honorific, which I started keeping track of for the purposes of this post.) I also agree with you regarding Integra's development; it's really interesting to compare her hesitation in the Rio scene versus the level 0 scene where she's like "Kill them all; don't let a single one leave the island alive" lol. And maybe it's because she is defending her home turf in the latter scene (which is already thoroughly fucked tbf), but she really seems to have grown into her role during the relatively short timespan of the story.

I'm also glad you found that minor translation difference interesting!! I actually reread this post a week ago and thought to myself, "Most of these are such /minor/ things, I don't think anyone will care very much??". I do plan on continuing this, so expect future installments to be in a similar vein (i.e. kinda... boring and non-earth shattering lol)

I'm probably not the best person to speak on manga vs Ultimate differences since it's been so long since I've watched the anime proper, and I've only seen a fansubbed version and not the official english dub. I know there were some scenes were cut or moved around, and the differences could probably turn into a hefty post on their own. But here's one moment that I do recall being cut-

-and it's another rare instance where Integra shows apprehension about the coming war (the Major even calls her out on it). So you might be onto something about the anime having less of these moments.

woah, so I guess owners of the English volumes just get a bonus 2 millimeters of juicy Hirano art that was never released in Japan??(‼️) Lol. My first reaction was to assume it was a publishing mistake and some settings got messed up during the localization process, but who knows?

(I haven't seen any of the English volumes in person so I'm curious since you own both if there are any noticeable physical differences between the two. How do things like paper quality and print quality compare? Just where do they put those weird Hirano doodles that the JP volumes have underneath the jacket cover? Are the books even the same size etc..)

There's also the fact that there are at least two Dark Horse editions floating around (not counting the omnibus releases) since I've seen some images online that include the back-cover illustration from the Japanese volumes, and some that don't.

The newer edition (on the left) mentions "translation revisions" so I wonder what that entails exactly...

I recently bought the jp volumes of Hellsing along with the guidebook, and since I'm reading the series in its native language for the first time I might as well share some random things that stood out to me in no particular order.

This isn't meant to be an analysis of translation differences, I'm too lazy for that. Also it's been 12 years since I've watched the anime and read the low quality fan scans of the manga so some of these comments are just "Lol, forgot this was a thing"

Volume 1

... I really want to know who this guy is at the beginning, yelling at Alucard in overly familiar language to "Get your shit together!" and "You're the only one we can count on!!". We know from the style of speech that it's a dude, probably just some Hellsing rando, and maybe it's not all that strange since he has probably been working with the same soldiers for years--but it's still funny.

"I know, it's just so nice out :("

..The way "HELLSING Organization" is spelled out like this reminds me that apparently the name is supposed to be an acronym. No really.

...

God they're so silly.

Now that I think about it, the only thing Seras has done this chapter since being turned into a vampire is say "I'm sorry" over and over.... girl you got shot in the lung, why are you apologizing

Not a huge difference, but what Integra actually says here is "Leaving a corpse here for 20 years... You're a terrible person too, Father" and not "What were you thinking, Father?" as the Dark Horse translation suggests (note the lack of question mark in the raw version). I thought that might be of interest to some.

Something else I thought was interesting is the first line Alucard ever says to Integra, and how uncharacteristically polite he sounds.

O-kega wa gozaimasenka- That's two honorific 御's back to back! (He even said them in kanji, even Walter isn’t that straightlaced and he’s literally the butler.) This is also the only time Alucard uses this overly flowery gentlemanly language with her, and good thing too because it would be so annoying if he spent the whole manga ending his sentences with ~gozaimasu.

What I'm trying to get at is, after seeing this sentence in the Japanese version, I'm like 100% sure he actually heard her when she was mumbling to herself about hoping to find a knight in shining armor, and he was totally going the extra mile in playing into that role for their first encounter. Which is kind of sweet.

Lol they misspelled Alucard on the top left... or rather, they incorrectly spelled it right?

One would normally expect Alucard to be written アルカード, and indeed pixiv dict lists アーカード as a misspelling (the u sound is weak in Japanese, so it's easy to mishear arukādo as ākādo). Hirano was definitely aware of the correct spelling though, since he used it in the pilot chapter and in his old character sheets. It was only when the manga officially began that he switched to the アーカード spelling. I doubt it was because of copyright issues because there is already a long precedent of vampire characters named アルカード in various old manga, OVA, and games in Japan that have coexisted without issue (like this guy Hirano mentions in volume 1's afterword).

Most likely Hirano simply thought it looked better, or was a means of differentiating his character from the others somehow. It certainly makes life easier for Japanese fans searching for fanart since アーカード is only going to bring up Hellsing and not the Castlevania character.

Jan Valentine even pokes fun at the spelling discrepancy later in volume 2, but since there wasn't a good way of expressing this in English it was left untranslated.

(Speaking of spelling inconsistencies, there's a lot of minor details I'm noticing now, like half the time the furigana for 吸血鬼 is written バンパイア and the other half it's ヴァンパイア... anyway)

Um, just noticed literally everyone's wearing glasses What should I do

Hirano's habit of jotting random comments underneath his panels is one of the underrated perks of reading the manga

The Dark Horse translation almost makes it sound like she's looking forward to seeing this battle play out, while in the Japanese she simply sounds apprehensive. Almost as if she's worried about them? And she's going out on the field personally to make sure nothing bad happens? Aww

Ok this is a weird tangent, but I just noticed the scans of the Dark Horse version I've been looking at use a slightly larger image range than the Japanese version does. It was only noticeable when I got to this part:

The second image is what the Japanese version of the scan looks like and I can confirm that this is what it looks like in my physical volume as well. You shouldn't be seeing the messy borders of the inking on the bottom like that.

Manga manuscripts are set up so that there are a few millimeters of bleed border around each page. You're supposed to color and line all the way up to (4) while keeping in mind that printing and paper cutting may result in the image being trimmed up to (3).

Either Hirano didn't color his lines all the way to (4) (this man has been drawing manga for years but this is Hirano we're talking about so it's very possible), or Dark Horse didn't honor the original bleed borders of the manuscript. I'm kind of leaning towards the former since there was a Hellsing exhibit in Japan a few years back where you could look at Hirano's original manuscripts and there's one where you can clearly see that he spilled a mug of tea or coffee across the entire page

Anyway, it's weird, and I'm curious to see if someone that owns a physical copy in English can confirm whether theirs actually looks like that. It's volume 1, page 141.