Ok I hope ya’ll appreciate this because this took way longer than I expected.
Uh so as I’m sure a lot of you know, with the release of the final Gintama volume (77) they also released a “fanbook” which is a kind of series encyclopedia, called Koujien. It’s named after the popular Japanese dictionary of the same name. It’s super long, 432 pages long, so we’re not translating the whole thing, but I translated the relevant new information that was put at the end. So the last 30 pages basically.
This contains the cover and inside cover of the book, a sorta tabloid-style expose on the delays of the final chapter, a realllly long round table discussion between Sorachi-sensei and all of the editors that worked on Gintama over the course of the series, a couple pages of cut panels from the final chapter, a 4-page manga by Sorachi, and a final note by Sorachi. Basically we did the end of the book. And it’s really the only part that I was all that interested in doing, as it’s not a collection of old information or fan works.
Most of the book is a long encyclopedia of every character that ever showed up in the series, and it’s way too long for us to work on. It’d be like translating an entire wiki, it doesn’t really give you any new information. Mostly just stuff that you could already tell by reading the series. It also contains a long art gallery of color pages or just the character sorta cropped out of the color page and stuck on a white background, the original scrapped storyboard from before Gintama was first serialized, some comments Sorachi wrote for the tables of contents of all the issues of Jump… uhh… some letters he wrote to various anime events, and some ‘job well done’ fanart and stuff from his assistants. All of which, if you’re interested in that and want to check it out, you can buy your own here. But it’s very ancillary, so it’s not something this group is going to be working on. If someone else wants to translate all that stuff, you have my blessing.
So yeah, check this out if you’re a big fan of Gintama. I thought it would be a cool final thing to work on. And I hope everyone enjoys. The round table discussion is all text, but I thought it was a very interesting insight into Sorachi-sensei’s mindset during the course of the series and it gives us a tiny look into what it was like to work on Gintama, and all the suffering he put his editors through being late on every single manuscript.
Also we’re going to be doing a volume version of volume 77 still, which Kago is in the process of cleaning right now. So look forward to that, sometime in the near future. Though it is 360 pages long so it could take some time. (If you wanna just read the extras before we finish scanlating the whole thing, I posted it here.)
Edit: I added the author flap which I didn’t notice was even in the book the fist time around.
Gintama Koujien Fanbook Ending
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Online Reader (MangaDex)
