Manga is unflipped. Always begin reading in upper-right corner, and proceed left and down. ^^

Notes:

1. Manga is almost always first published in magazines with many other different manga stories, all running concurrently. Each month/week/whatever the rate of publication, a new magazine is printed with new chapters for each separate manga. These magazines have content that is aimed at a specific audience, such as little girls, teenaged guys, or working moms. Zetsuai 1989 was published in "Margaret", which I believe is a magazine for women, aged teen and up.

Sometimes the first few pages of a story are orignially printed in color. The magaka (artist) will paint their final work, ususally in watercolor, and it will be published in full color on glossy paper. When the manga is reprinted in its individual tankoubons, all the pages are printed in black and white. This renders the formerly colored pages into gray tones, which is what you see here.

Occasionally, the entire first chapter of a story will be in color. This was the case with the very first Ranma 1/2 manga story. Thus far, that one is the only manga I have heard of to be done this way.

So far, I have not seen any manga's color pages reprinted in an art book or special edition. They've always just been done in black and white, along with the rest of the original art. A shame, ne? <:P

2. "Zetsuai" is not a word in common use in Japanese. It is made from a combination of "Zetsu", desperation, and "Ai", love. It could easily be romanized (written in English letters) as two words, "Zetsu Ai". I have chosen to leave it together as one word here, since that's the way I first saw it written, and is my own preference.

3. This is the first page of actual manga. Page one in the tankoubon is blank, and page two is the table of contents. You know, in case you were wondering why I began with page three. :)

last tweaked 5-11-05, created on 8-30-02 by slr2moons@hotmail.com