I love reading manga, but I hate reading right-to-left comics on Tapas; the UI makes it very unintuitive. When I read a manga book, I flip the pages in the correct direction for the direction the pages read, and when I read manga on the Shounen Jump App, I swipe or tap on the left-hand side to continue reading towards the left... but on Tapas, it's like going back to my university days reading scanslations, I have to tap the right side or right arrow to continue reading from right to left and it's like "uuuughhhh..."
In Britain, we had our OEL (Original English Language) manga rule set very early (like 15+ years ago) as "We draw left to right", and pretty much all British manga reads this way. Even the Manga Jiman competition, a contest run by the Japanese embassy in London, is on board with this. The Manga Shakespeare series all read that way, most OEL Tokyopop titles, like Shutterbox and Dramacon, read that way... It's just normal and expected, with the exception being people whose first language reads right to left.
Personally, I think that while flipping a lright-to-left book is bad because it takes away from the artist's original intent (and does weird crap like flipping signs and t-shirt slogans and having everything feel weird because everyone's left-handed and all the vending machines, games consoles and computers look wrong because the buttons are on the wrong side) and so manga made in right-to-left format in Japanese should be left.... I don't see the point in choosing to draw right-to-left, because it doesn't add anything.
Being formatted right-to-left isn't one of the ingredients that makes manga good; if anything, it's a thing that's tricky to get used to, but worth it to enjoy the great storytelling. The things that make manga good that I want to emulate, and to see other artists emulate is the use of stylisation and exaggeration; the focus on emotion-centred storytelling, the elegant approach to using detail and tone to create atmosphere, and the contrast of intensity and quiet.
If I want to read original Japanese manga, there are better platforms for it, and if I want to read the work of people like me, who love manga and want to use things they've learned from it to make great comics in English, mixing that manga influence with their own experiences and culture, I'd like to hope that the things they have learned from manga go deeper than "it reads right-to-left" and "it's in black and white with screentones", and are more about storytelling techniques, stylisation and stuff. Comics where somebody who's clearly never been to Japan, doesn't speak a word of Japanese and is making a comic that reads right to left (but where the characters all face and move to the right all the time because they can't overcome that instinct they've picked up without realising from western books and cinema) and where the characters are meant to be in Japan, but it's utterly unconvincing because it's all based on stuff they've seen in anime, often old anime, so all the names are a bit odd or wrong, the fashion feels dated, the school schedule makes no sense, everything's a cliche... Or it's about samurai and ninja, but all the customs and outfits are off... They're just CRINGE. If I want to read a story about Japanese people who live in Japan doing Japanese stuff, I'll read a comic by a Japanese person! I'm not short on options for those! That's why my comic is about knights and Arthurian legends; because I wanted to make a manga that felt as uniquely British as Japanese manga feels Japanese.
