Ooook, well, finally this is all done. I really hope you all enjoy this because I put a ton of effort into it. This was one of the most difficult single volumes I’ve worked on, when it’s all said and done.

So, for those that don’t know, this is volume 1 of Sakamoto Shinichi’s new series, DRCL midnight children. We did the original pilot one-shot, episode 0, back when it came out in Grand Jump (this volume contains this original one shot now called “episode 0” as well). This is an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, though quite a bit is changed and is Sakamoto-sensei’s personal version of it. This is his first new series since Innocent ended back in early 2020 which we scanlated over the course of 8-ish years. As always his artwork is REALLY REALLY detailed and beautiful and the only way to see it properly is from the physical version, since Shueisha’s only digital raws are really low resolution relative to the paper version. Because of that this volume took a REALLY long time and a lot of effort to finish properly. So I really hope you all enjoy it.

I ended up having to do quite a lot of the tasks myself. And the difficulty in this series and in Sakamoto Shinichi’s other series is that there’s a LOT of detail in the artwork which could easily be messed up if it’s not cleaned properly and there’s also a LOT of redraws to do. So this took a lot of time researching the original novel for the translations to make sure it’s authentic to how Dracula by Bram Stoker sounds, any direct lines or references to the original novel need to match it. Then on top of that is scanning the raw in high resolution, cropping all 247 pages, leveling it and manually burning the dark colors so detail isn’t lost, doing tons of redraws and joining double-page spreads, and then typesetting and checking everything. All while keeping the files at high resolution which makes everything a lot slower so we can release it without having to compress it much. It’s a process which requires multiple passes of the whole 247 page volume.

Anyhow, because of that I’m really burnt out on working on this and I’m not sure if I can continue working on this series. It really took up about half of my free time for about two months now. It’s just mentally exhausting to have this much work to do on your own and no one else volunteered. So I’ll see how I feel about it when volume 2 comes out. As usual we’re only doing volume versions of this series because I don’t have time to work on the magazine version which looks way, way worse because of how badly Shueisha compresses their digital manga making them look blurry and awful. So I just wanna get that out of the way upfront, though I am really proud of how this turned out. If someone wants to volunteer to help, specifically we’d need help related to cleaning and redrawing, you can email me to discuss it at kewl0210@gmail.com. Volume 2 is slated to come out in “Autumn 2022” so that could be any time from September to November, it usually comes out on the 19th of the month.

So all that said, I hope everyone checks it out! It’s a great series and I’m excited to see where it goes from here regardless of anything else. We’re working on a bunch more stuff which hopefully gets done soon.

Also, if you want it, I made a super-high-res uncompressed version where we don’t scale it down at the end for file-size reasons. Keep in mind the “regular” version is already huge, it’s 2560px tall. This version would be the totally uncompressed version from the 1200dpi scan which results in pages 8580px tall. They don’t allow filesizes this big on Mangadex but I figured I’d put it here if someone would prefer that.
Uncompressed Volume 1

Also, we have a new Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF

#DRCL midnight children Volume 1 (Ch. 1-7 + episode 0)
Mega
Online Reader (Mangadex)