Denoting foreign language

[Verdad]

You're going to make me dig into the back of the closet in the overstuffed back bedroom for my old boxes of comics, aren't you SR? *laugh*

If anybody else is trying to remember something specific that used this, one I can remember off the top of my head is the Wolverine mini-series ( 1982 ) A Spider-Man/Wolverine crossover that I can't remember the title of also used this quite a bit.

At least I believe it was a Wolverine crossover. I'm fairly certain that it was the issue with the death of the original Hobgoblin, Ned Leeds.

While it's true that comics ( at least Marvel ) have been using angle brackets to denote foreign language written in English for years, it's also preceded by a caption somewhere on the page where it's first used. Something along the lines of *Translated from the Japanese

The second problem is that people who read/have read comics are an ever shrinking minority, so understanding of the convention is going to be limited among the general reading populace.

It does work well for the intended purpose, though. Once pointed out once, you can read without a bump, as far as my experience goes. Mainstream publishers outside the comic industry probably resist for the same reason they resist everything else -- printing costs.

I don't see where it would cause any confusion amongst readers on Lit ( if pointed out in an author's note at the beginning of the story ), but I can understand why your editor wants to change it for pay publishing.

Comics are a different medium. Lettering is an art form in itself and if it's employed to denote a character's language it usually involves more than just a change of grammatical conventions. The font might be styled to look Chinese, or Greek, or German Gothic, sometimes to an over-the-top comedic effect, and sometimes to blend seamlessly into the style and mood of the artwork that itself mimics the art of a particular place and time. In the latter case it kind of does what music would do in a film. It's in any case a part of an organic visual whole and it's not done as a matter of course, whenever a foreign language is implied, but only where it serves some further goal.