Who's Who In The CBU Update 2008

Who are... Park and Barb?

Barbara Lien-Cooper writes the comic GUN STREET GIRL at Panel 2 Panel, was an original founder of Sequential Tart, is the managing editrix of the 2004 Eisner award-winning print magazine COMIC BOOK ARTIST, and was named by Mark Millar (The Authority, Ultimates, Wanted) as one of the three most promising new talents in the next wave of comics writing.

Park Cooper started writing about comics at the now-defunct DC FANZINE website.

Life Is Better With Dreams: The Alethea and Athena Nibley Interview

By Park Cooper

First, we noticed that the translators on Tokyopop's Fruits Basket seemed like they must really know what they were doing. Then we realized that the same two people were translating the first manga Barb adapted, Atelier Marie and Elie -Zarlburg Alchemist- Volume 1 and we saw that they were really as good as we thought they were. So we interviewed them:


Park Cooper: Who is this? I mean, specifically?

Alethea and Athena Nibley: This is Alethea typing. I do most of the typing.

PC: Yeah I'm the Typer for my team…

PC: Okay. Barb has questions. Questions about Fruits Basket. I am going to try to ask them

A&AN: Sure!

PC: Here is a question which would help answer her question about #1... Which is... How long does it generally take y'all to translate a volume? Of Fruits, or anything, if it's not any different... I'm thinking y'all must be quite fast, like Barb and adaptation...

A&AN: Oh good, someone else is fast! We keep hearing all these other rewriters talking about how much time it takes and we wonder if we're going _too_ fast. We usually try to budget our time so it doesn't take us longer than five days. It does differ depending on how much text there is. Fruits Basket is one of the more time-consuming ones, but not as much as Nosatsu Junkie.

PC: No, it's them, not you.

Barb Lien-Cooper: No, I love that you're fast, because I wanna find out what happens next in Atelier Marie soon!

A&AN: Heehee! Unfortunately they'll probably have us doing a bunch more stuff before we get back to it.

PC: I had a theory that y'all were as fast as Barb and that you just only are GIVEN volumes of a given thing so often, like her.

A&AN: Yup, that's right. Six days to do something is about our slowest. Unless we're doing fanbooks. Those are scary.

PC: My wife is... highly focused…

A&AN: >nodnod< We're slacker-y. We tend to only work four hours a day so we can go on to watch all our anime and play video games. Unless we're working on fanbooks. Then we get obsessed.

PC: Um... let me ask this... do y'all know anything about how Fruits Basket ends? And of course I won't say a word if the answer is no…

A&AN: Nope.

PC: Barb wondered. Wow. I would have guessed yes.

A&AN: We've only been through volume 20. It's a long story as to why we don't go ahead of what we turn in for TokyoPop. Though I guess the main reason would be that we didn't have the money to buy our own copies of the books, and then we didn't have the time.

PC: Okay second question… Do y'all ever go look into the actual books that come out... say, "Oh, so that's what the adapter did in that scene" …Sounds like you don't have the time…

A&AN: No, actually. We had a bad experience with DN Angel, and since then we decided it was best not to think too hard about it.

PC: Barb was wondering if you've followed Fruits in English publication… Eee. You're right.

A&AN: Actually, we do have a lot of the English version of Fruits Basket. We needed them for reference when we did the fanbook.

PC: mm. Forbes did a good job, Barb thinks. Er, and me, I think that too.

A&AN: He did indeed. There were a few places where we were like, "Jake..." but for the most part, yes. Of course by the time we went back to read it, we'd forgotten most of what we'd originally written. Athena points out the time when he had Ayame calling Mayuko "Madame," because obviously he'd know enough French to know it should be "Mademoiselle," so we're hoping that wasn't our mistake.

Barb: Eeeee! That would bug the heck out of me too... I adore Ayame.

PC: I think I may have said this before, but she loves y’all for Atelier Marie. We love ya'll's li'l notes.

Barb: They make it easy for me...

A&AN: Awww, thank you! And Ayame’s awesome. And really fun to translate. And according to our Juusanshi fortune, he's our perfect match.

Barb: >laughs< You do a terrific job on him.

A&AN: Oh, thank you! Not sure we can take _all_ the credit, but we'll take as much as we can get >grin<

PC: So uh. This is an odd question to ask. But um... how precisely did you get started doing this? >so vague!<

A&AN: Do you want professionally only, or manga translating in general?

PC: Uh. General. Both is good, though. Y'know. But yes general too. Provided you have the time.

A&AN: Well, it started when we wanted a friend of our to read Ayashi no Ceres (or Ceres: Celestial Legend), but it was long before Viz was publishing the manga, so we got her the books and we found text translations online. But there was no translation for volume 1, so we did that ourselves.

Barb: Park once did that with me-- he reverse-engineered an issue of Sandman into paragraph form. It didn't occur to him to just mail me his copy. (We started as a long-distance romance.)

A&AN: Cute!!

PC: EEEEE! Ceres! “Toyyyyyya!”

PC: Er. And.. .What about getting into manga in general?

A&AN: Then we wanted our friends to read Imadoki (Youji = <3), so we started it up again. Manga started with Sailor Moon. We got really obsessed with it back when it firsted started airing in the States, but since it ended in a really weird place, we pretty much tried to find everything we could. We lived in the Los Angeles area at the time, and were fortunate enough to find Kinokuniya, which had a pretty big manga section. Though come to think of it, there were random volumes of Sailor Moon manga floating around malls all over the area.

PC: Right... and... so... at that time... when you tracked down the rest of Sailor Moon... did y'all already know both languages?

A&AN: Nope. That's when we started teaching ourselves. We learned a lot of stuff from the Sailor Moon manga, but we didn't get really good at Japanese until we discovered the Fushigi Yuugi novels. In order to read them, we'd each pick a novel depending on who liked the character it was about better, and then we'd copy it out sentence by sentence and attempt to translate it based on out limited knowledge of Japanese that we were able to get from two dictionaries that we had and a kanji guide. And we had one grammar book that helped us with verbs and stuff. That was about a year before we got into college, where we majored in Japanese.

We got into translating manga because we wanted all our friends to be able to read it. Doing this got us even more obsessed with two series in particular, DN Angel and Saiyuki. One day at college, one of our roommates came into the living room and was pleased to announce that TokyoPop was having a survey, asking fans to name three titles they most wanted to see brought to the US, and that all her friends were asking for Saiyuki, DN Angel, or both. Being the possessive fangirls we are, our first thought was, "No! They can't bring those to the US! Our DN Angel!! Our Saiyuki!!"

The selfishness passed in a matter of seconds when we realized that if those titles were so popular, they were going to come to the States regardless of what we thought, so we might as well be involved in the process. Put our stamp on them, I guess. So the question was then, "Is TokyoPop hiring translators?"

We raced upstairs to our room and went to the TokyoPop website to see if they were hiring, and lo and behold, they were looking for interns in the fields of something, something, something, translating, and something. Not actual translators, but at least it was a way to get a foot in the door. We sent an e-mail immediately. We don't usually act that quickly, come to think of it. Anyway, there was a day or two of correspondence to make sure everything would work out. It was a little extra scary in that we couldn't go in for a real interview until we went back to the Los Angeles area for the summer. It would have sucked if we hadn't gotten the job, because we probably would have stayed in Utah, where we had a better social life, if not for the internship.

Fortunately, we passed the interview. It was kind of neat, because to prove we knew Japanese, they had someone from the office come in to ask us a question in Japanese. The question was how do we manage stress, and the answer was by watching anime, reading manga, and playing video games, so that probably helped a lot.

And so we began our lives as production interns at TokyoPop. One day, we found out that they did in fact have the rights to Saiyuki and DN Angel. So we made it a point to say to them, "We've already translated a bunch of that, if you're interested." And one of the senior editors was like, "So you make illegal translations?" And we're like, "No, we just do text translations for our friends. We don't even post it on the internet." "So if we asked you to, you could just reformat your script to match our format and let us use it?" "Yup!"

We didn't hear anything else about it for a few days. We kept doing our intern stuff, which included reading manga and summarizing it (talk about a dream job). One day, we were making copies when Jake Forbes came to us and said, "I'm going to make you an offer I think you'll find it difficult to refuse." We looked at him questioningly. We might have said, "Yes?" "How would you like to be the full-on, paid translators for Fruits Basket?" And we said, "Yeah, we think we'd like that very much." And then he left, and we started bouncing off the walls.

After that, we were assigned four more titles, including Saiyuki and DN Angel (the other two were Ai Yori Aoshi and The Candidate for Goddess [another one we had already translated], for the curious), and the rest is history.

The most interesting thing about the whole process is that we never doubted we'd get into translating. It's just one of those things that we decided we were going to do it, and we did it.

PC: Golly. So are you... sisters? Twins? Cousins? Other? If you don't mind my asking.

A&AN: We don't mind at all. We're twins. When we're trying to be cute I'll refer to us in the third person as the Twins.

PC: indeed. So Barb was like "so what have you done?" but I feel like we'd be here until 4 am if you wrote it out... is there a list somewhere already maybe?

A&AN: What have we translated? There is a list, but it's slightly out of date:

Fruits Basket
Ai Yori Aoshi
Saiyuki
Saiyuki Reload
DN Angel
Lagoon Engine
The Candidate for Goddess
Rizelmine
Scrapped Princess
Shaolin Sisters: Reborn
Sengoku Nights
+ANIMA (our current favorite)
Bus Gamer 1999 – 2001, The Pilot Edition
Elemental Gelade
Nosatsu Junkie
St. Lunatic High School
Atelier Marie & Elie
Hiyokoya Shoten

So let’s see… There’s also Million Tears, Aqua, and Hiyokoya Shoten's title was changed to Pick of the Litter. We also translate My Heavenly Hockey Club for Del Rey and I Hate You More Than Anyone for CMX. And CLAMP no Kiseki (we started on volume eight) and stuff that hasn't been announced. Oh, and how can we forget the most important one? We were assistant editors on volume 1 of the Kingdom Hearts II manga!

PC: You said earlier you love talkin about yerselves but it's hard to find anything personal about you by googling because all those credits clutter up the searches...

A&AN: Heheh. Well that link should take you to our Live Journal.

PC: Clamp, eh? what's that about Clamp? I read xxxholic... Barb is willing to watch the anime of xxxholic when we can get it on dvd but she's not into clamp otherwise. but she's very happy about seeing a connection between y'all and Saiyuki

A&AN: We're not into them that much ourselves, but the translator for Clamp no Kiseki vanished and they needed the next one in a weekend. Saiyuki's like our favorite thing ever.

PC: We bought some Saiyukis but she loved the anime. well, until they sort of hit some bumps... we finally stopped

A&AN: Yeah, there's a lot of bad filler in Saiyuki.

PC: When that god of war guy showed up we were like "ANOTHER distraction? Just ignore him and drive!!!" I don't think Barb knows when Saiyuki is set though from the anime I think she thinks it's a fantasy that happens to have a jeepdragon. Whereas I think it's more futury like I think Naruto is. She's like "Those who hunt elves has a tank, Saiyuki has a jeepdragon, end of story."

A&AN: Incidentally, the first Saiyuki anime and Naruto are directed by the same guy

PC: Oooh.

A&AN: It is fantasy. The legend it's "based" on takes place in the T'ang Dynasty in China. It was published in G-Fantasy, but then, so is Zombie Loan.

PC: Yes but there's a jeep. So surely it's not earth's past... if Barb was looking over my shoulder right now she'd tell me to stop thinking about it. So it's a good thing she's not.

A&AN: Heheh.

PC: Naruto’s world has movie theaters and video games…

PC: >...imagining Barb looking over shoulder<

PC: >shifty eyes<

PC: Okay, I'm gonna stop thinking about it now, I'm too well-trained to go against her will.

A&AN: Heheh.

PC: So… do y'all pretty much translate, watch anime, and play games all day? Like manga-ka in Japan seem to do, except with translating instead of drawing?

A&AN: Pretty much, yeah.

PC: Wowee. what games?

A&AN: Mostly RPGs, so a lot of Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts.

PC: And when you're in our line of work, playing imported games counts as research, right?!?!? Right!!!

A&AN: It's true. Come to think of it, we should remember that some of the games we buy are tax deductible...

PC: You should!

PC: But eeeee KH. We listen to the music sometimes, when I play the music. I was trying to research when KH3 would come last week. It's best not to think/dream about it.

A&AN: We cosplay Donald and Goofy at AX [a con]. We're so obsessed.

PC: Golly.

A&AN: Our dream is to help make KH3. Or at least help translate.

PC: Cool. Well then we should spread awareness of y'all around

PC: I hadn't found your livejournal before now. All the Fruits accreditations confuse google, like a school of fish…

A&AN: Heheh. It probably doesn't help that we don't use our real names as our username.

PC: Yah. If you're ready to be less-hidden, there are things that can be done. Hm. if you like filling out memes, you can go get on facebook. I just did. And comicspace. I have many places. www.comicspace.com/wickermanstudios

A&AN: We may need to do that.

PC: There's lots of wacky stuff to do on facebook. Barb is naming lots of female-friendly websites and contacts we know who would love spreading awareness. But I got dibs. All that comes AFTER my exclusive...

A&AN: Heheh. Of course.

Barb: (on y'all and KH3): God, I know what it's like to have a dream…

A&AN: Life is better with dreams.

PC: Comicspace is rather easy to use. Facebook is pretty okay too.

A&AN: We've heard good things about Facebook.

PC: New Barb question: What do you like better in Atelier Marie, the plot stories (reviving the evil overlord) or the silly stories (giant frogfish escapes!)?

Alethea: It really depends on which characters are in it. I think we like them both equally as long as they have our favorite characters being awesome.

PC: Which are your faves, then...?

Alethea: Strafe!!! And Ruven, but he hasn't been in the manga yet. He's our favorite in the games, but only Atelier Marie, because in Atelier Elie his voice is different and it sounds wrong. All the characters are really fun, though, so there's never any part where we're like, "Man, this is boring. Where's Strafe!?" Okay, so there are times where we're like, "Where's Strafe, dang it!?" but usually not because we're bored. Just because we like Strafe a lot.

PC: Wish we could play it...

Alethea: It's kind of addictive. If you have a Japanese PS2 or 3, you can play it, but it might be hard if you don't know Japanese.

PC: Barb likes Strafe. We think he looks slightly like me (as human). With my old hair.

PC: Second work-related question: Which of you do what? Do you alternate doing chapters, or…? y'know… the workload. Etc.

Alethea: Here's our process: I sit at the computer and do all the typing. Athena sits next to me and holds the book open (it doesn't seem important, but it really helps). She also writes numbers on the pages when we're using formats that require that. Athena will read a line. If it's something we both know right away, I'll just type up the English version. If it's something that takes a little more thought, we'll work it out together. If it's something where we don't know all the vocabulary, I'll pull up all our computer dictionaries, and she's in charge of the idiom book and the Classical Japanese book.

PC: Well that's all the extra questions I had lying around so far... I should get back to work trying to break into comics

Alethea: Good luck!

PC: but we'll talk more one of these days... maybe soon I can edit up everything we've said so far

Alethea: >nodnod<




Note: The following exchange is purely for big anime fans. Everyone else, you can leave the theater now if you want.




PC: Hate to stop talking but I should…

PC: …Anything new with you? >procrastinating<

Alethea: We finished watching Kaleido Star last week. That was awesome.

PC: I haven't watched that. …I recall it seems to involve a seal…

Alethea: It does involve a seal, but only as a side character.

PC: Mm.

Alethea: It's by the same director as a lot of our favorite shows.

PC: And what else has this person done?

Alethea: Sailor Moon (first season), Gate Keepers, Pretear, Sgt. Frog, Princess Tutu, Aria...

PC: GATEKEEPERS!

Alethea: He's also done storyboards and animation on things like Evangelion, and he's currently the sound director on Romeo x Juliet.

PC: I know all about GK and GK21.

Alethea: Oh wait, that just ended. Not currently. We haven't seen the OVA yet. Of GK.

PC: you mean 21? Or what? Or is there an OVA I don't know about...?

Alethea: Most likely GK21.

PC: Okay. So do you watch in Japanese I suppose?

Alethea: Yup. We did cheat and use subtitles for Gate Keepers, but when stuff comes out on DVD, the music tends to be louder than the dialogue. So that's how we justify turning the subtitles on.

PC: Mm. Sigh. “Gate Open.” “So Intense.” Good times, good times...

Alethea: Yup, yup. Awesome show.

PC: We said "GATE OPEN" for a long time afterward. We don't so much anymore. Strangely, I've noticed us saying "So Intense!!" a lot still.

Alethea: Heheh. What kind of things would you say it for?

PC: Just as a sort of emphasis of something mind-blowing D'ja ever see DaiGuard? Some of the background music was sometimes similar DaiGuard was pretty good

Alethea: No, we haven't. There's a lot of stuff out there we haven't seen, especially if it came out before 2005.

PC: Wow, really?

Alethea: I wonder if it was the same composer. He does a lot of stuff.

PC: Princess Nine had great music... I think it was the Warsaw Philharmonic

Alethea: Yeah. 2005 is the year we decided we needed to watch everything distributed by a certain group. Unfortunately, they have an unusual selection. Although the selection might not be as unusual as we think. Most of our LJ friends seem to only watch Naruto, so it's difficult to judge.

PC: We do like Naruto... a lot. Daydreamed about a Naruto/KH crossover just earlier today...

Alethea: KH lends itself to crossovers so well.

PC: Although we got more fun out of imagining a SuperGALS/Death Note crossover… Yeah, Barb and I agreed that KH is in fact the ultimate crossover in its way.

Alethea: We haven't seen Death Note (our preferred group didn't distribute it), but we want to. So true about KH…

PC: We really disliked the live-action movie of DN, but the anime is coming this month on Cartoon Network they say... I just hope they don't gut it like they did One Piece. Probably a bit, I'll guess... I got tired of One Piece anyway, though. Too silly.

Alethea: Actually, the director of One Piece came to AX this year to promote the un-gutted version coming out in the States. The problem with One Piece is that we'd miss it for a few weeks, and come back and it would seem like they were right where we left off.

PC: Yes, but will the un-gutted one be on Cartoon Network...? I'm guessing no...

Alethea: Actually, I seem to remember reading that it will soon.

PC: Yes, but... un-gutted? Not over-censored?

Alethea: It wasn't Cartoon Network that gutted it--it was Fox.

PC: Oh yeah.

Alethea: I think it was a Viz newsletter (we signed up for it in the hopes that it would tell us how to access the online Death Note episodes, which it didn't, ugh) that said something about unedited One Piece on Cartoon Network. It might have been a web site somewhere, though.

PC: Hm. I just know I saw some guns that were super-soakers and cigarettes that turned into lollipops, that's all I know. Any details were simply the first kindling that helped to fuel the ensuing rage.

Alethea: We didn't hear about the super-soakers. I guess we weren't paying attention when we watched, either.

PC: Heh. Barb enjoys saying "I'm sorry, but you're wrong! I'm going to be the King of the Pirates!" and so do I, but other than that we've pretty much washed our hands of One Piece. Oh, and when pirates come up in conversation she likes to say "He left it all in One Piece, Park."

Alethea: Yeah, that tends to be the way of most Shounen Jump titles. We even know a lot of Naruto fans who seem to be getting tired of it.

PC: That's a long story. They'll get back into it real soon... it's about to kick into overdrive again within the next 2 or three weeks I still like WHISTLE. Er, WHISTLE! I frankly suspect that what's running on Cartoon Network for Naruto right now is SURELY not really part of the Naruto storyline but a filler storyline that they made up because the show had started to catch up to the manga... (?) (I haven't wanted to spoil anything for myself so I haven't confirmed that theory)

Alethea: We know Naruto has a lot of that. In fact, we've heard something to the effect that the last... lots of episodes are all filler until Shippuuden starts up. We've actually only seen the first fourteen episodes of Naruto ourselves.

PC: Hmm. We'll see, I guess... they're knocking themselves out flooding the world with freshly translated Naruto manga volumes, because they realize they were at risk of losing Naruto momentum otherwise, between the show and the American Shonen Jump... It's working-- the 3 most recent Narutos were at the top 3 spots for all graphic novel sales last month.

Alethea: Wow.




















Messages from Park and Barb:


What’s Good?
With Park and Barb

Barb says: What’s good? Write us and tell us what you’re reading that you like, in comics, manga, or whatever… especially if what you’re reading has a website where we can find out more about it and stuff! Use the link at the top of this column where Park’s name (or mine) goes… If enough people write to us, we'll print it here on the Show...




Atelier Marie and Elie -Zarlburg Alchemist- Volume 1

This new manga that's out now was the first adapted by Barb for Tokyopop... You know, someone does a literal translation of the Japanese-to-English, and then someone comes and rewrites it so you don't end up with 'All your base are belong to us.' Well, with Atelier Marie, that second someone was Barb, so please pick it up and enjoy it.

"Welcome to the Zarlburg Royal Magic Academy-- producers of the best alchemists in the world! When Marie, Zalburg's prodigal daughter and premier alchemist, returns to her alma mater after thrilling journeys in many foreign lands, she suddenly realizes things are not too exciting at home. But all that changes after running into fellow alchemist Elie, who has plans to open an alchemy workshop and become famous."

Barb enjoyed it, I enjoyed it, there's adventure, comedy, fantasy, all that stuff you like.

So please go to your local store or however you purchase things and get it. Enjoy!



http://www.panel2panel.com/gsg-archives.html
http://www.wickermanstudios.com
http://www.halfdeadcomic.com
http://www.comicspace.com/wickermanstudios

http://www.amazon.com/Atelier-Marie-Elie-Zarlburg-Alchemist/dp/1598165259





And you can now get Septagon Studios stuff online too, like this thing: SCORN

SCORN is now available for pre-order in a number of ways:
--Scorn 1 and 2 can be ordered directly from the Septagon Studios Web site
--e-mailing store@septagonstudios.com, especially if one is a retailer, because there are special benefits
--Scorn is also available through Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Scorn-1-Obsessed-Kevin-Moyers/dp/097396670X

http://www.amazon.com/Scorn-2-Rage-Kevin-Moyers/dp/0973966718