Heeeey everybodyyy. Welp, ok here’s our group’s first release of 81diver! (Read as Hachi One Diver) For those of you who don’t know about it, it’s a comedic and sorta sports manga about shogi by the author Shibata Yokusaru-sensei, who wrote a fairly popular series called Air Master. This series ran in Weekly Young Jump from 2006 to 2014. It’s a really fun really compelling series that’s easy to read and weird as hell. I really enjoy it and if you haven’t read it yet, I hope you check it out.
Now that the introduction’s done, let me explain how this project came to be released here. And if you read the essay I wrote when we started releasing Innocent, then you’ve basically read the explanation I’m gonna give for 81diver. Also to a lesser extent, 3-Gatsu no Lion.
I’ve translated every chapter of this series that’s been scanlated so far. I started on chapter 1 in February of 2012. Aaand today we’re releasing the end of volume 4. So yeah, there’s been a fuckton of delays with this. Originally his project was being done by Utopia Scans/Mangatopia. I’d translated the first 24 chapters from late February to early September of 2012 and Utopia Scans was doing really well scanlating all I’d done, and then I had to take a break for a while to work on other projects. I had other projects among various groups we were trying to release the volumes/chapters as they came out, while this series I think we were 20+ volumes behind so it meant this project had to be put on the back burner because I just couldn’t do everything at the same time, which I sometimes have to do (In this case, that was Toriko, Gintama, Hito Hitori Futari, Billy Bat, Jojolion, Doubutsu no Kuni, REAL, Kingdom, 3-Gatsu no Lion, Spica, the Toriko anime and the Kingdom anime).
So I did a few more in early 2013, but Utopia Scans didn’t work on them. There were instances when I was told they were gonna be worked on, bu they never were. At a certain number of months with no progress being made I had to assume they weren’t actually going to do it and I had to find another group. But I couldn’t find another group to work on it and I think from that long list of projects I just typed out I think it should be clear I didn’t have time/resources to do it with my own group. So I had to stop again and try to get some other stuff finished. So I think after I finished… Innocent Volume 4, and Spica (That’s still not scanlated either), I decided I’d go back to working on this. I translated it on a regular basis trying to get as much of it done as I could. It’s a pretty easy series with not a lot of text so it was generally a good break from more intense series. But again, I didn’t have anybody to scanlate it. Shinjo volunteered to work on it but I think he only ever released 2 chapters and then quit. Then a group I had been communicating with for a while called Aka to Kuro volunteered to work on it, and got 7 chapters and an omake chapter done in 6 months. Which is uh, really really REALLLLLYYYY slow. To the point where you’d finish the whole series in around 20 years. And that was with someone in our group, Yakusho, doing the typesetting for them. So that clearly wasn’t working, just like the 2 groups before them they weren’t willing to put in the time to actually get anything released, so I had to try something else.
At this point the series had ended in Japan with a total of 35 volumes. And 3 and a half of those volumes had been scanlated. But at that point I’d translated 18 volumes in an effort to sorta develop a buffer in case I was busy later (which I was) so there would be translations to use while the groups I was working with caught up (which they didn’t). The last chapter Aka to Kuro released was in September of 2015 (And from their website it doesn’t look like they released anything of any other series since then, either) before voluntarily dropping it. I got to the end of V18, finishing the middle-volume out of 35 which was the milestone I had been going for, in October of 2015. After which I had to rush to translate Innocent because that project had fallen apart as previously mentioned after which I translated 3-Gatsu no Lion every day to catch up with that and then after that I redrew/cleaned/typeset 3-Gatsu no Lion over a couple months and now I think we’re at yesterday, so there ya go that’s the whole timeline of my scanlation life for the last few years, hope you enjoyed that rant.
TL;DR: I translated tons of this series but it got delayed for years because groups that said they would work on it didn’t work on it and I had no staff to do it or any time myself, so it didn’t get done. Hopefully it goes a bit smoother now.
So anyhow high8sky typeset these 2.5 volumes in the last 2 weeks (more progress done by the other groups in 3 years) so please send her all your thanks, because without her this sure as fuck wasn’t going all that well. Right after getting the redrawing done on a bunch of Innocent volumes. And then I quality-checked it and now I’m releasing it. So everyone please send high8sky all your warm kind feelings. She’s gonna need them to typeset the remaining 29 volumes. K I’m gonna… go to sleep I guess.
81diver Volume 4 ch35
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81diver Volume 4 ch36
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81diver Volume 4 ch37
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81diver Volume 4 ch38
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81diver Volume 5 ch39-49
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81diver Volume 6 ch50-60
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