This has been in the works for a while now, but I might as well make an announcement for it. I have a project underway that I have coined as "Project Flip." The reason being that as InuYasha is a manga, it should actually be read in Japanese, which reads from right to left, as opposed to left to right in English. To accommodate an English-reading audience, Viz Media, the group who prints InuYasha, flipped all the images so that the manga reads from left to right. As manga popularity grew in America and other English countries, printers stopped flipping the images, however, InuYasha is still published in the US with the flipped images. While most of the more current volumes of InuYasha are available from one source or another online in English, but in the correct right to left format, many volumes early in the manga are only found in English in the "flipped" format.
While the change may seem negligible to the novice manga reader, veteran readers find the flip more than irritating; the English flip actually alters the way in which the manga artist intended the work to be displayed. While translating the text is not usually a problem, many artists protest the idea of flipping their images. Looking at Sesshoumaru for example, one can easily see the effect of flipping.
Sesshoumaru flipped :(
Sesshoumaru as Rumiko Takahashi created him :D
"Flipping" Sesshoumaru not only distorts his crescent moon, but also his story line. With the image flipped, Sesshoumaru eventually loses his right arm, not his left as Ms. Takahashi had written. The intention here is to display the manga images the way they are supposed to be displayed.
I have scoured the Internet to see if others had undertaken this issue, but it seems that there are no sources for the primordial chapters in InuYasha in the right to left format; "Project Flip" aims to change that. I will begin with the manga storylines that pertain to Sesshoumaru, but once those are completed, I will extend "Project Flip" to include all of InuYasha that still remains in a left to right format in English. Cheers!