Hey so everyone, here it is, finally, DRCL volume 4! I talked about this a bit in my previous posts but this is gonna be the last volume of this series we’re doing as it’s been licensed by Viz and the first couple volumes are out now. I think they’re doing a fine job and I hope you support the official release going forward. They just released volume 2 and it seems like they’re coming out with new volumes every 6 months or so. Largely I wanted to get volume 4 done so we at least end on a high note, getting past the group that was sniping us a while back. This volume goes up to chapter 35 and also starting in this volume the series switched from being every-other-issue to every issue (in the bi-weekly magazine, Grand Jump), but with each chapter being about half the length. So as a result you get 14 chapters in this volume, whereas the previous volumes had around 7. That continues past this point but like I said we’re not gonna be doing any more. And as usual we’re releasing an uncompressed version at 1200dpi if you want that which is a way bigger filesize so it won’t fit on Mangadex.
This series was a LOT of work largely because of all the effort to do redraws at high resolution. Way moreso than translating which isn’t too hard. Though some of the translating is a headache because it’s quoting the Bram Stoker novel (in Japanese) but in different contexts than what was happening in the Bram Stoker novel. So you need to sometimes leave it so it worked exactly as the original worked and sometimes you needed to alter it slightly. I think we got it all reading quite well this volume. I did about half the redrawing in addition to all the translating and scanning so I’m quite happy to be done with this volume, it was a ton of work. This volume is mainly about Jonathan Harker and is more or less the equivalent to the chapters that the novel Dracula starts on (finally). I really appreciate the help from suibian who did half or maybe more like 60% of the cleaning and redrawing which is the only reason we were able to get this done.
Anyhow, even though we’re not gonna be working on this series anymore, I really enjoyed the work we did on the first four volumes. I think it’s a good series and I’m interested to see where Sakamoto-sensei goes with it. It’s starting to get kind of weird in the chapters in the current issues of Grand Jump.
I’ve got a couple ideas for smaller projects I might wanna do since I’m not longer working on this one, but for now I’m gonna focus on doing more Shima. I might do some short 1-2 volume manga or try to make improved versions of projects I worked on years ago or something along those lines (I think about doing that a lot but then when you start doing it you realize how boring it is to redo stuff, so who knows if I’ll actually do that this time). Anyhow, until then, enjoy!
Also, we have a Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF
#DRCL midnight children Volume 4 (Ch. 22-35)
Mega
Online Reader (Mangadex)