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Whew. And now, right after the last chapter, we’ve got this done too. Volume 35. That closes the last gap, and now we’ve done everything from volume 33 to the end of the series.

This volume completes the Four Devas arc and also closes the gap to the first volume we did, Volume 36. I’m pretty proud of this, and I’ve been using most of my free time the last month or so to get it done. Much thanks to Kago for the cleaning and Huldra for QCing.

I talked about this project of doing these 3 old volumes before if you wanna check, right here and here. But this is the last time I’m gonna go through it so I’m gonna go into a bit more depth. I’m really glad we got this done, and I think it feels like a good closure point for me and this group for this series. Like I said this is the last old volume we’re planning to do. So, just for posterity I’m gonna explain why we’re stopping here.

In an ideal world, I’d like to get the whole manga from beginning to end out in high quality in some form. Viz only officially released up to volume 23 which are all great quality, and the scanlations for 24-32 are all pretty bad quality. Pretty much all of those old scanlations used Rufi’s unedited scripts which he admits himself weren’t very good because he was pretty inexperienced at that point (FYI, originally I was editing his scripts when we started doing Gintama, but I switched to doing them purely on my own around chapter 417, with the exception of a few others I did on my own before then, because trying to catch/fix his mistakes (which there were a lot of, no offense to him, this was 8-10 years ago) and incorporating his stylistic choices was taking more effort than just doing it purely on my own and I was getting burnt out from all that. He’s been doing his own translations for the series that he’s just releasing in text form you can read here.). Then also most of the old scanlations use scanned Jump magazine scans and are cleaned and typeset by people who were pretty inexperienced so they’re not very good quality in those respects either (A handful of them are pretty good cleaning/typesetting wise, but the vast majority of them are really bad and done by groups who I think admittedly didn’t really know what they were doing at the time). Which is frustrating to me, because it’s a great manga, and I’d really like there to be SOME good quality version available for everyone to read through the whole massive thing if they so choose. Even though I know most people will watch the anime for those earlier parts, the manga is still the source material and it has all the composition and flow that Sorachi-sensei put into it. Plus the anime sometimes goes REALLY fast, making characters talk super fast and cutting out lines to finish 2 chapters in 22 minutes. So it’s really a different experience to read the source material over the adaptation, even if most people prefer the adaptation.

But the thing is doing even one of those old volumes is a massive effort. I put off doing V35 for a bit because V34 took so much out of me. But even then from start to finish it took about a month after working on it with almost all my free time nearly every day. And that was for a volume that has a lot of battles and so has less text than the typical volume. 33 and 34 took more like a month and a half I think. Then there’s the fact that we only did volume scans for V33-45 and V73-76 (We’re gonna do 77 when it comes out in August). Just redoing those old volumes we already translated and typeset would take less time each volume, but it still takes a good amount of effort, and with 27 of them getting all those done would be a massive task that would take like, a year or more of constantly working on it.

So basically what I’m saying is, although it’d be great to have everything in great quality, the amount of time and effort it would take just isn’t worth it for me. Just pushing myself to get the last few volumes ending off the series and these few old volumes done was probably more effort than it was worth really, given how many people are probably gonna read them 8+ years after they came out (and been animated, too). Getting the ones we already did with the Jump magazine raws to better scans using volume raws would basically only make them like 10% better and still take a massive amount of time. Doing the volumes from 32 and earlier would take WAY more time per volume but the jump in quality would be a lot bigger for the vast majority of them (Some of them were done with volume scans and good magazine cleans but all the translations have a lot of errors, even the ones that say they were checked by me in the Stray Cat arc, because I was way less experienced then). The bottom line is I would rather use my free time to do a new series that’s not scanlated at all than to use years of my free time re-doing stuff that most people probably won’t read anyhow because they already read the chapters back when they were new, or just watched the anime instead (It should go without saying, but most series can be done WAAAAY faster than Gintama. Gintama’s one of the wordiest manga per page out there). Which, I think is well… basically fine. An OK end result. They’re at least readable, you can understand what’s going on, and you can always watch the anime at this point anyhow to fill in the gaps from the errors. Maybe for something like Gintama, a series all about looking into the future despite imperfections in the past, it’s even appropriate? No? Ok maybe not but you get what I’m saying right?

So that’s basically my mindset here. I hope most people are understanding about this, and I think most people will be, given that I think most people understand how much effort goes into translating a series like this. (Sidenote: With Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, fans put in a massive amount of effort to get the whole series scanlated in good quality including redoing all the Veggie’s Jojo Project (Duwang) scans which weren’t very good. Which is a lot longer a series, but still much less wordy and takes less time per volume, plus the work was distributed across several different groups/people and still took quite a few years to complete). I’m mostly just writing this to sort of give everyone a sense of why, and to leave a record for anyone checking what happened with the scans of this series years down the road. I don’t think there’s a huge fan-demand to do those old volumes, but I felt I owed it to everyone and myself to thoroughly explain why I’m stopping here.

Ok. With all that said, if someone WANTS to scan, clean, redraw, and transfer the typesetting over of any of volumes 46 to 72, you can email me at kewl0210@gmail.com and we can try to work it out. I’m ok with putting in the effort of at least translating the volume-only extras if someone is willing to do the rest. I’ll even pay you back for the volumes if you want, they’re only like 4-8 bucks each depending on shipping and if they’re pre-owned. But you have to follow through with it on your own, I’m moving on to other stuff (And I’m not using the digital raws, which are blurry and bad and wouldn’t really be an improvement in quality at all over the cleaned magazines. That wouldn’t even save much time, scanning a volume only takes like an hour or so). If you want to do volumes 32 and earlier, then you’ll need to translate and typeset them yourself too. I can give you our style guides and check the stuff over at the end but that’s about it (I realize I wouldn’t really be contributing much in that case so if you wanna do those 32 and earlier volumes as a completely separate group and just not involve us at all, I’m ok with that too). I dunno if anyone out there is willing or interested in doing all that, but if you are, I’m ok with giving you the resources we have and to release it as this group.

Ok, I think I covered everything. I know not a lot of people are gonna read this whole post or even this scanlation, but thanks a ton to those who do. I put a lot of effort into all of it. And a ton of effort and years of my life into this series. And it means the world to me that so many people have enjoyed it. See ya at volume 77.

Edit: I decided to zip all the magazine chapters that made up volumes into single zips for the downloads page. I probably should’ve done this before, honestly. But I was originally planning to do volume scans for everything so it felt wrong to zip magazine chapters into a zip and call it a volume. But since we’re not doing anymore, I figure it’s fine. I’m doing it with Toriko as well since we’re not doing anymore Toriko scanlations.

Gintama Volume 35 (Ch301-309)
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