I’ve only watched the dub a couple of times, but even so, I still can’t help hearing Yupa speak in Patrick Stewart’s voice. 
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I also read “chapter 2” (up to page 44) now and am still thoroughly enjoying reading this again. I think I read it in summer last time as well and this is just a nice manga to sit outside and read (the daylight also helps with the readability 
).
Some random thoughts:
It sure has all the usual Miyazaki tropes (squirming insects, aeroplanes) immediately at the start
The little box for テト (p. 35) was cute . She sure arranged that for him quickly.
I’m not sure about the logic behind the 王蟲 eye shield on the plane, though. Does it serve a practical purpose apart from offering us a view of the innards of the cockpit? And what was in those holes before? Surely they weren’t open to the outside air 
And a language question:
I’m having some trouble interpreting the two panels at the bottom of p. 28
When ユパ says 「美しい姫になったな」, ジル replies:
ウム、しかし男であったら何もいうことはないのだが
I can’t really figure out what he is saying here and I don’t have the English edition with me at the moment to look it up. If she were a boy, then… they wouldn’t be having this conversation (about her looks)? or then she wouldn’t be worth talking about? (which seems too negative). Or then he could wish for nothing more? (which feels a bit too freely translated). Or something else?
And then in the next panel someone is thinking:
11人子どもをもうけて育ったのはあいつだけだった
Is this ユパ saying that ジル raised 11 children on his own? Or is this about something else entirely? (Like: ナウシカ being the only child of 11 left? But I don’t see how that fits grammatically.)
I don’t know why I’m having so much trouble with these two sentences… maybe I’m missing something obvious 
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p.28
I believe he’s saying that if she were a boy, there’d be no additional trouble / nothing more to say,
with the background that she’s the only one of 11 children who lived to maturity (making her the only heir and presumably therefore being why her gender would be relevant).
(and the 11 children thing seems confirmed by the Nausicaa fan wiki which does say that is true about her)
I found a rendition of the second quote on a quotation site that makes it significantly clearer to breakdown:
「11人子どもをもうけて、育ったのはあいつだけだった」
Roughly literally:
(I/he/the king) had 11 kids, the one who was (fully) raised was her alone.
Without the comma it is easy to mistake the もうけて育った for one connected action, and I think that’s the main source of the confusion. Looking back at the original the line breaks in the columns do encourage the correct rhythm with a break after もうけて (at least in my edition).
Also note that (again at least in my edition), the ウマ is an ウム - it’s a murmur, a hmmm, that kind of thing.
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p. 28
Thanks! That makes it clearer!
Yes, I think that is it exactly.
O yes, sorry, that is an embarrassing typo on my end. I intended to type ウム, but iOS then suggests ウマ and I blindly clicked that without thinking.
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(Page 28 stuff)
It’s interesting that Miyazaki gives us a setting where Nausicaa is a viable successor to take over as the next leader of her country, represent them by going off to war to honour their agreements with other countries, etc, apparently with no pushback either internally or externally about this being a bad/unusual/weird choice – and he still gives ジル this “if only she was a boy” line.
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It lets the pilot see out. More importantly, almost straight downwards, which is otherwise blocked by the body of the gunship. The Torumekian corvette on page 45 has cockpit windows which serve the same purpose.
I suspect it’s mostly because said pushback has already happened offscreen and everyone’s now in a state of reluctant acceptance - when Yupa hears about it for the first time, he definitely thinks it’s a weird choice, though mostly because it’s Nausicaä specifically. Coupled with the “we had eleven kids and only one survived” comment, it’s almost certainly a case that women who can bear children are an extremely precious resource in this post-apocalyptic future. You want to make a prediction on exactly how many other women we see fighting in the war in the remainder of the manga?
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I forgot to ask yesterday, but as for the scene page 44 ends on, is Nausicaa telepathic with humans? The princess in the crash is thinking and not speaking isn’t she? I get that Nausicaa’s got some sort of psychic connection with the bugs.
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Nah, I think it’s just that Miyazaki uses thinking bubbles for when people are speaking softly too. Mito can clearly hear her.
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Oh that’s just obnoxious. Thank you for explaining!
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I recall reading recently this off-hand mention in Comics and the Origins of Manga, in a passage talking about differences in visual language that developed over time between Japanese manga and American comics:
cloud-like bubbly balloons signify thought in American comics, but whispering in Japanese ones
So at least to some extent, it’s a general rule of thumb. I’m not 100% sure if it’s true all the time nowadays though? I feel like now that I’ve been looking for it, I’ve seen both cases. But it’s hard to tell.
edit to add:
Per Wikipedia, sounds like it is indeed both:
(following a diagram where the thought bubble style is labeled #3)
（図3）と、小さな楕円の向かう先にいる人物が雲形の空間に入っているセリフを心の中で思っていることを表す（場面によっては小声で話していることを表す場合もある）。このふきだしをしばしば、モノローグということもある。
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I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a thought bubble (I don’t even know what else to call it since that’s what it is to me) used for whispering. I wonder if that usage has fallen out of style. Or maybe I’ve just been misreading my manga for the last 6 years. 
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Considering this volume was originally printed in Animage in instalments from February to September 1982, that’s entirely possible.
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I’ve seen it used at least once, though I don’t remember which manga
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Interesting! So likely just Miyazaki being old school? 
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I think this might explain the paneling choices too, if I remember right I read somewhere he was trying to capture the vibe of some of an older style of comics (there was one specific one that I am trying to remember and absolutely cannot place). absolutely cannot find where I read this though, so take that with a grain of salt. But this was also the 80s lol, anime and manga styles have come a long way in the intervening 40 years
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Ah, I don’t know how to feel about that. I wonder what his intention was besides maybe honoring that older comic? >-> I can’t imagine nostalgia beating out creativity as a design choice.
Even in just ~10 years the styles changes so much. Most of the JoJo I’ve read is from between 87-97 and even the part I’m reading now from 93 is so much different in terms of panel shapes and use of negative space.
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I suddenly remembered where else I’d seen bubble whispers recently: in the third volume of Fullmetal Alchemist, these are definitely audible whispers (they’re sneaking into a building)
So it’s not like it’s that completely out of date a practice. I guess 2002 does still count as old school now though
And for what it’s worth the book I was quoting from that was published in 2022 and was speaking in that passage (too generally it seems like, but still) about current practice.
I suspect maybe bubbles are relatively rare in manga anyway compared to captions or words outside of a balloon or things like that, and so it’s easier to not to notice?
I’d be sorta curious to look out for an example that’s 100% slam dunk non-audible thinking - like, people are around it happening and not registering it, etc. It seems like if there’s context clues implying someone hearing, it’s whispering… but if there’s not context clues (like people who could hear) I wonder if there’s much of a difference between thinking and whispering to yourself anyway?
Or perhaps that’s overthinking it and it just varies by author.
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That is really interesting. Of course it can vary mangaka to mangaka, but I wonder if they show similar style choices? Like does a mangaka’s tendency to use bubbles for whispers/blocky speech bubbles correlate with more blocky page/panel composition? Not that the small portion you’ve shared should be representative, but I think it’s interesting that it’s also very rectangular appearing too.
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Probably getting off track enough to start putting these under a jump
panel layout stuff
Amusingly, I was going to comment something rambling about layout style like
Personally I’m reluctant to too quickly cast the rectangle layout thing as mainly an old school stylistic thing per se. After all, I bet Tezuka for example did everything under the sun at some point or another layout-wise. I’d lean more towards genre and tone of the specific story - Nausicaä seems like it’s going for big and sweeping sure, but not like, ~ dynamic ~ ~in your face action~ (which a lot of manga are going for these days) and I think being light on the stylistic panel layout flourishes in some way enforces that like, feeling of order and homeiness conveyed in the world that’s being introduced so far. Like, so far at least, it might be a ‘post-apocalyptic’ world with a lot of problems, but Nausicaä herself seems totally at home and in control in it, so it makes sense I think that even as the giant bug turns up, it only barely affects the paneling, since Nausicaä sees even it as a natural part of the world and not an up-ending catastrophe. (that reading may very well not hold for future action scenes though)
Plus the first page layout is so good and that introduction shot of her flying being the lone borderless panel is great.
I guess to put it another way, while popular styles do change over time, it feels to me in this case more like along the lines of why Watchmen (also in the 80s) uses the very very rigid layout that it does, instead of being drawn like How to Draw the Marvel Way (i.e. it was a conscious choice for the story at hand). (although that’s an extreme example)
And anyway - the amusing part is I went to look for the oldest Tezuka I had access to off-hand, Metropolis, originally published in 1949, to see if it would back-up the line I had about Tezuka. And I didn’t find slam-dunk back-up evidence, it’s mainly rectangles (albeit ones he really does strange and wonderful things with), but what I did find was a bubble balloon where it sure looks like the character is thinking and clearly not audible to someone right in front of him:
Edit to add: it does seem like style and perceived age have an interesting interplay because I probably wouldn’t have guessed Nausicaä and Akira were nearly exact contemporaries… That’s one that would probably make a really good comparison on this subject (but I don’t have a copy myself)
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