Hey everybody, we’re back to this. I talked about this in multiple other posts at this point, but I’ve wanted to at some point do volume versions of all the Gintama chapters we did with physical Shounen Jump scans over the course of like a decade. The main issue is it takes a lot of hours of “busy work” to do and all you have to show for 20-30 hours of work is one volume out of 25 (now 24 after this one). So I was trying to find a way to speed it up by automating some of it. Luigi has helped out with that so I think ENOUGH of this is automated now that we can maybe eventually do all of them, but it’ll take a while.
Over the last few months I scanned all of the remaining volumes. That’s Gintama volume 46 to 70. Which took a LONG time because I had to find time to do it among everything else (job, all these other projects, various social and other life obligations) and I’ve basically had to do every step of this volume on my own. A couple people volunteered but haven’t had time to do all that much, which is what it is. It’s a lot of boring work just to make an existing thing we already released higher quality, so I don’t really expect many people to jump at the chance to do that. But now that we got them all scanned and we’re in the process of running all the automations on them, all that’s left now is to manually clean and redraw… about 4600 pages. Which is gonna take a long time, and it’s pretty mind-numbing after you do it for a few hours so you can’t just marathon through all of that. If I did it all in a row every day I could probably finish it all in a 3 months or something.
And while that would be nice to get it all done quickly, it’s probably not good for my physical or mental health so my plan now is to just do these every once in a while. Like maybe once a month or something. But I figure now that we’ve got everything at this stage I can eventually finish it, or maybe occasionally get people to volunteer to work on it because the first stages of everything (physically buying, scanning, and running a bunch of processes one pages one chapter at a time) are now all done. Like we could just white out all the bubbles and then it would be at least kinda-sorta in a releasable state. Just it wouldn’t have the redraws done, the edges of the pages fixed to look normal, the extras added just for the volumes, the inline sound effects, and any mistakes fixed or changes made from the magazine to the volumes added. So maybe later down the line I just skip some of those parts and release it just so it gets released in some form, I dunno. This series is huge, man. If we just did all that we’d have done volumes 33 to 77, that’s 45 volumes of one series.
Anyway, we’ll see how that goes. I’ll let you all know as we get it done. Just don’t expect these to all come out in a row (unless somebody wants to volunteer, and if you do you can email me at kewl0210@gmail.com or DM me or contact me in some other way. Send me a letter? Whatever you wanna do.) This volume contains another chunk of the Liberation Army battle/Silver Soul Arc. As usual we included all the color pages, I’m trying to include the clean color art from the Koujien Fanbook as well. It has all the sound effects drawn inline rather than notes in the margins. And it has all the Q&As and such from Sorachi-sensei which I translated just for these. And some fonts are updated to look nicer. The text is largely the same otherwise though a handful of lines were revised or improved or fixed. And I think visually it looks really good (Certainly way better than the official digital version which are very blurry). I hope you all enjoy it!
Also, we have a Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF
Gintama Volume 70 (Ch628-635)
Mega
Online Reader (Cubari)
Online Reader (MangaDex)
Online Reader (MangaTaro)