Oh hey. So yeah it’s been a while since we last released anything Gintama. 4 and a half years in fact. So, since we’ve dropped DRCL midnight children and everything else is caught up now, I thought I would take one more crack at this.
I discussed this back when we were doing our last few releases of Gintama back in 2019, but volumes 46-72 are still only released using the Shounen Jump magazine scans as raws. We were never able to do high quality volume versions of them because of just how many there were and how it was simply too time-consuming a task to try to do on my own when I’d rather do other projects, so I put out a post asking for folks to volunteer and maybe we could do them if we could divide the work between a few people. The physical-scans of Shounen Jump really don’t look that good and aren’t really meant to be the archival version of the series (They’re done on cheap paper with cheap ink and need a lot of processing to look semi-decent). Also Gintama still hasn’t had a licensed release past volume 23 and probably never will, let’s be honest. So there’s no way to read it in better quality in English and probably won’t be if we don’t do it. (Course you can always also buy the physical books in Japanese and support the author and just read along with the magazine scanlations, too)
Well, not one person volunteered in the about 5 years since I made that post. BUT luigi and some other folks created some really good tools for doing some steps of the physical volume scanlating process automatic and faster. It’s a modified version of what we’re using to do The JOJOLands. Essentially what we’re doing for Gintama here is we’re taking the digital raws (Which are low-res, blurry, and covered with awful jpeg artifacts so we can’t use them on their own), scaling them up to the desired height/with (2650px x 1630px), then running an auto-align automation to put the scans of the physical pages from the physical volumes onto the same place, then running cleaning automations on that, then we’re using a smart-sharpened version of the edge-most few pixels from the four sides of each page to make them the same dimensions as the digital raw and fix any issues with the physical papers not aligning to the edge of the image canvas (The digital raws also have a few more pixels of image data than the physical versions for some reason), and then we’re transferring over the Shounen Jump scanlations onto those and reusing the redraws somewhat and reusing the text.
BUUUT we still need to white out the bubbles, the text also needs manual repositioning and scaling, the smart-sharpened edges need manual fixes/redraws because the digital raws are awful even if it’s only the very edge of the page, we need to manually decide which bits of the old redraws to use or redo them if need-be, and that’s all on top of also needing to do the volume-only extras from scratch. Also we’re trying to change the sound effects to be typeset in-line rather than writing (SFX: DON) in the margins, because we think that looks better. Doing all that, even with the automations, takes a few full days of work. Maybe like 20-30 hours of work for this one. So while I was hoping to maybe make each of these super quick, I still really need a volunteer or two to help if we’d really like to do all 26 of the remaining volumes. And if I did them all on my own that’d be quite a bit of time and effort. This volume is near the end of the series so it’s part of the very action-heavy post-Shougun-Assassination-arcs. So this one took still took all that time with it being one of the easier ones. Having to manually reposition text in the gag-heavy chapters is gonna take longer. Oh, also on top of that sometimes there are changes between the magazine versions and the volume versions. Like in this one a number of lines in Takasugi’s speech about heroes changed.
So, to sum it up, I need help if we’d like to do more of these. I think it would be really nice to have all the volumes we did of Gintama to be done in high quality (We did volumes 33-77 overall, and volumes 33-45 and 72-77 now have been released with high quality volume raws). I’d like to do that if we can. If you want to help out, you can hop on the Discord and DM me at kewl0210 or email me at kewl0210@gmail.com. If nobody volunteers I’ll probably do one of these once in a while but I’m not gonna start using all my free time on this.
I have some other projects I’d also like to do now that I have some free time with the other projects done/caught up. Plus there’s a million Shima volumes to do. Possibly for some volumes I could simplify the process and leave the sound effects in the margins or something along those lines to save time with the trade-off being it doesn’t look as good but at least the artwork is better.
Regardless of all that, I hope folks enjoy this! I really like how it turned out. I do still really love this series after all these years and it was fun to go back and read these chapters again. I hope folks still check it out even though it’s a few years old and has an anime adaptation at this point and all that. As usual, I’m still working on a bunch of other stuff besides this and I have no idea when any of that’ll end up getting done. See you later!
Also, we have a Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF
Gintama Volume 72 (Ch647-655)
Mega
Online Reader (Mangadex)