Open a Japanese comic in a bookstore — say, the latest edition of “Dragon Ball Super” — and you’re likely to find a note saying, “Stop! You’re reading the wrong way.”

That’s because manga begins where all Japanese books do: on what, to Western readers, would be the last page.

The text then moves right to left.

Try reading manga in the Western way and you’re likely to spoil a great ending.

When Epic Comics brought to American readers the wildly popular series “Akira,” a cyberpunk drama set in post-World War III Neo-Tokyo, they chose to print it as a standard U.S. comic.

In Japan, a page of “Akira” looks like this.

In the English version, it looks like this. The publisher not only flipped the page order, so that the book could be read in the Western style, but also flipped the pages themselves, creating mirror images of each page so that the panels would read from left to right.

Flipped, and in color as well.

A full-color Neo-Tokyo looked great. A flipped Neo-Tokyo — not so much.

Creating mirror images of all the pages meant that people were shown driving on the wrong side of cars (in Japan most cars have the steering wheel on the right side) …

… and everybody ended up left-handed, whether they were eating in a chow hall …

… shooting an enemy …

Or losing their “right” arm.

Japan has a longstanding bias against lefties, and many left-handed children were trained to use their right hand. So manga artists and their fans weren’t crazy about seeing left-handed warriors in the U.S. versions.

Another way publishers have addressed this issue over the years was to move the panels. This allowed the books to be read from left to right without making everyone left-handed.

Aesthetic concerns aside, all that flipping was costly and labor intensive. In 2002, Tokyopop, a Los Angeles-based company, started telling their readers that manga should be read the Japanese way: back to front and right to left.

The company marketed their books as “100% Authentic Manga.”

English-speaking readers were now asked to start from the “back” of the book.

The books were also smaller and thicker than traditional U.S. comics, closer in size to the original Japanese versions. Before then, manga in the U.S., like “Akira,” were usually printed the same size as other American comics.

Balloons are part of the artistry of a comic book, from their shape to the look of the letters inside them.

In Japanese, characters are read from top to bottom. That means fitting English sentences, which run horizontally, into vertical spaces.

What to do? In older editions of “Akira,” the balloons were completely redrawn to fit the horizontal lines of English.

In Akino Kondoh’s “Nothing Whatsoever All Out in the Open,” the text boxes and speech balloons were even taller and thinner than usual. The sensible — and perhaps only — fix? Rotate the English captions and dialogue 90 degrees.

But what about things like posters or restaurant signs, which are considered by publishers and manga creators to be part of the art?

In some cases, translators will leave signage intact, and simply add an explanation in English to the bottom of each panel.

In other cases, translators will render some of the signs in English, particularly when they are important to the story.

… from cicadas chirping …

… to toilets flushing.

From doors creaking …

… to monkeys shrieking.

Onomatopoeia can often be hard to translate, particularly when it refers to sounds that exist as words in Japanese but not English. Like the sound of cream going into coffee or the sound of a guy fanning coals as he cooks eels he fished out of a sewer.

There’s even a Japanese sound effect for, of all things, silence: shiin. The type of silence indicated in the story — the hush of a forest, say, or an uncomfortable lapse in conversation — often dictates how shiin is translated.

In this case, the translator is conveying the silence one encounters when entering a completely empty room.

Even sounds familiar to Western readers can spark debate. For the translator Ryan Holmberg, getting just the right tone for the sound of a rifle crack in Tsuge Yoshiharu’s “The Swamp” was crucial.

Holmberg didn’t want something that sounded cartoonish. He initially suggested something closer to the Japanese transliteration, “zdom.”

But few readers would have understood that. His publishers, he said, countered with “kpow.” In the final comic they ended with “kbooom” — a sound that may not fully capture the subtlety of the original but is familiar to readers of American comics.

“What we’re trying to do is mimic a Japanese reader’s experience,” said Sara Linsley, a letterer who has worked on adapting manga. Here, Linsley layered a tiger’s snarl — “grrah” — over her own hand-rendered “vham.”

In this case, Linsley matched the playful lettering of the original text.

Sometimes the Japanese sound effects are such an integral and indispensable part of the artwork — and so beautiful — that American publishers choose to keep them as is.

Take a look at the vibrant, frenetic work of Yuichi Yokoyama. Is it text, or art, or both?

And when adding the translations to the original Japanese sound effects, should the letterers make a clear visual distinction between the English and the Japanese original …

… or should their visual style match? In this other work by Yokoyama, a different publisher chose to add translations to the visual effects that were drawn in the artist’s style.

Sometimes, a translation might not be added to the page at all. In a recent deluxe edition of “Akira,” for example, presumably created for the manga superfan, the publisher chose to keep the original sound effects without translation or explanation.

Instead, translations were added at the back of the book — a clear choice in favor of authenticity.

The sound effect in parentheses is a direct representation of the sound in Japanese, but this doesn’t help the English-language reader. American motorcycles don’t go “doruru” — they go “vraooom.”

In the “Sailor Moon” series, for example, terms like nihonga, which means Japanese painting, go untranslated.

Same with honorifics like -san or -sama, which don’t have perfect English equivalents anyway.

Or senpai, which can mean anything from a role model to an upperclassman to someone you just want to get to know better.

“American readers of manga, they know all this stuff,” Schodt said. “And they love the fact that they know this stuff and other people don’t.”

This fall, Drawn & Quarterly will release “Nejishiki,” their latest collection of works by the celebrated artist Yoshiharu Tsuge.

The publisher will follow the traditional Japanese name order for the artist.

So now, when Japanese and English readers talk to each other about how much they love Tsuge Yoshiharu, they can all use the same name — no flipping required.