The commentary is the real punchline.

aceofspudz said:

The commentary is the real punchline.

Which always makes me sad when nobody translates the commentary...

The commentary on every single strip in this pool is just a description of what happens in the strip itself.

Paracite said:

The commentary on every single strip in this pool is just a description of what happens in the strip itself.

That is what makes it funny.

79248cm/s said:

That is what makes it funny.

It's also why I don't usually take the time to translate it...

I don't mind untranslated commentaries, personally. The art should stand on its own. (If I really, truly cared I could wade through it with rikaichan...)

In this case it was the fact that the artist wrote such a silly commentary and then Para went to the trouble of translating it that makes the joke.

They're also all giant run-on sentences in the Japanese, too.

aceofspudz said:

I don't mind untranslated commentaries, personally. The art should stand on its own. (If I really, truly cared I could wade through it with rikaichan...)

In this case it was the fact that the artist wrote such a silly commentary and then Para went to the trouble of translating it that makes the joke.

The thing is, in a good many cases, they are continuations of the gags, or add a new gag onto the comic. In other cases, the commentary is the text of the artwork because the art doesn't have speech bubbles at all. In cases like Hang In There, Kogasa-san, they include polls and the like that add onto the experience.

Basically, it's like the tooltip comments from XKCD, the experience would be incomplete without them.

At the very least, even if the commentary is stupid, it just leads to speculation, so it's better to have it translated, and a stupid commentary has the benefit of being fast to do.

NWSiaCB said:

The thing is, in a good many cases, they are continuations of the gags...

Yes and my point is that in my platonic ideal of a cartoon, they aren't.

So circling back around to my original comment: this commentary is funny upon multiple levels. Rather than needing the commentary to illuminate the strip, the commentary only describes the strip exactly. A delightful inversion of expectations.

Then you have Paracite who, understanding this, understanding that Danbooru won't care if he translates it, won't get the meta if he does--does so anyway.

That's comedy.

aceofspudz said:

Yes and my point is that in my platonic ideal of a cartoon, they aren't.

That presumes everything is "supposed to be" a 4koma. Some are rather deliberately novellas with illustrations. Even outside so dramatic an example, there are plenty of examples where the context or dialogue or other relevant information that isn't necessary to a 'comic', like references are contained in the commentary.

And in such cases, I would usually translate. On the most part for the things that I do it's nothing particularly important - Kouji is just the story name and links to previous and next; a lot is just 'New story for Event XYZ, will be on sale at Tora/Melon/ZIN/wherever + link'; quite often it's just [Story Name] [Page number].

Doesn't help that people don't copy over the commentary from the source fairly often...