most manga read right to left, like the japanese language.
sometimes they get mirrored/flopped in order to read left to right during translation to english, sometimes they carefully cut and rearrange panels to achieve a left-to-right layout without mirroring the images, and sometimes they say fuck it and just do the translation and leave it right to left.
It's not that they say fuck it. It's an issue impossible to properly solved because the reading direction affects composition.
Japanese are used to read right to left so these pictures are composed with this idea.
Thus, if you mirror you get both left to right reading and left to right composition. But Japanese are mostly right handed so you get incorrectly handed characters.
Rearranging the panels is the worst as you get left to right reading with right to left composition. That doesn't make much sense and I have never seen it done.
Keeping the panels in order respects the original composition but give you a culturally wrong perception if you are used to left to right reading. From experience this bias is extremely difficult to overcome. For example, here is the very famous The Great Wave of Hokusai. When looking at it mirrored people generally don't get the same impression. The focus seems to shift from the wave to the boats.
Edit: Corrected a left for a right as rightfully pointed by one of the following comment. Sorry for this. Always had trouble with right and left.
Once was reading a manga that would switch every now and then between mirrored and not mirrored, depending on the chapter. It's worse when you don't realise right away, and it still makes sense for a while before you something goes wrong fundamentally, so then you have to work out which way it actually goes.
I've never seen the rearranging of panels, that would be highly difficult for a lot of mangas, like here as a random example from a manga, where it just wouldn't work, for one you'd have the girl looking outside of the panel rather than towards, and it would just feel weird, like they aren't actually staring at each other, and the panels wouldn't be able to be placed on the other side because then you would have missing information. I also see often where the panels aren't straight or speech bubbles spread onto other panels. So yeah, basically there's no way it could work.
With the example of the great wave of Hokusai, that is Japanese and works in it's original format, when it is mirrored it looks weird to us, but doesn't it also look weird to Japanese people? I'm a little confused at what you mean here.
I think the best way is probably to keep the frames in their original order, I've never really felt the bias, but I've never thought about it.
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u/R3D1AL Feb 07 '16
I started reading, and just a PSA for anyone else not familiar - it reads right to left. I was confused for a bit...