Okay, volume 54! We’ve got 8 volume versions left. I wrote a recap of what’s going on with this project here. God I remember what I was going through when I was working on these back in like 2013-2014, I was doing way too many projects every week back then. I would have like 3-4 weekly projects and monthly JoJolion and a bunch of other long-term do-whenever projects I was doing in all my spare time besides then. I went through this whole thing multiple times now so I was hopefully able to catch every little mistake we made the first time around. This volume contains the Sakamoto-Mutsu meeting/flashback arc, that weird art style essay manga chapter, the Etekichi Kozou monkey dude story involving Kondou’s childhood arc, the time-stop arc, and that gag chapter about Street Fighter-style special techniques. As usual it’s also in higher resolution and has all the extras translated and all that. Holy shit a lot of work went into each of these. Probably way more than it’s worth to just have a fixed up version of something we already released, but well it’s already done and now I just gotta check and finalize 8 more.
I was thinking about what we wanna do after this, given we’re nearly done with this project of redoing the Jump Raw chapters which was for volumes 46-71. After that, Volumes 33-35 and 72-77 could be like *slightly* redone with higher resolution and fixed fonts and we can add in any SFX we didn’t do. Those were all ones we did around 2019 so that would basically be it, it wouldn’t take too long, maybe a couple days of work on each. We’d use the same automations for cleaning and stuff and transfer everything over but some stuff would need to be redone manually. Beyond that, Volumes 36-45 would then require more work where I’d have to check through all the old translations because I did them so long ago. The first ones were done only a year or so after we made this group (Some of V36-ish was done with Shounen Jump scans and then fixed up for volume versions already but they resolution isn’t at the 2560px height we’re using now and doesn’t have the fonts updated). All that would take a little longer each volume but would be another thing we COULD do if I felt like it. But we’re getting into really low-return, being a super perfectionist stuff here. And then if we did all that we could then work on going further back to completely new volumes from scratch for volumes 24-32, and we’d just work backwards like we’ve been doing. The official Viz releases end at V23 so I wouldn’t go earlier than V24, there’s really no point, I think those versions are good enough even if they’re not amazing. Of course doing any volumes from scratch would take WAY longer than fixing up any of these ones, each one would take like 3 weeks of work or something around that. Which I’m not so sure is worth doing for 9 volumes tbh.
My thinking right now is I don’t really wanna spend all my free time forever trying to make this series perfect, I started working on the series I September of 2009 to give you all some perspective here. So basically I’m focusing on just finishing up the other 8 volumes we got left for now. But then I’ll probably slowly work on some of those other things every once in a while. Even if I only did one or two pre-V33 chapters a month we’d still get a volume done every once in a while. And sometimes it’s fun to revisit stuff like that I haven’t read since I was like, a senior in high school. But also I could use that time to just work on a *totally new* series. I could probably translate quite a few entire series faster than I could translate Gintama Volumes 24 to 32. But I dunno, we’ll see where life goes. So yeah that’s it for now. I guess I’ll start working on Volume 53? Nothing much else happening until the next Jojo chapter/volume come out.
Also, we have a Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF
Gintama Volume 54 (Ch477-486)
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