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

Uncompressed Volume 4

#DRCL midnight children Volume 4 (Ch. 22-35)
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Here we are, we made it to DRCL volume 3! As usual we’re really focusing on making these the highest quality possible with the physical volume scans and we’re including an uncompressed version of this which is from the scan at 1200dpi.

So this one, much like the last one was a huge hassle to do. I did pretty much every job this time besides typesetting one chapter and doing final checks at the end. This volume contains chapters 15 to 21 and sort of the end of the first “arc” you could maybe call it, though this series doesn’t REALLY have traditional arcs, this volume has some pretty climactic moments. Part of what makes this series difficult is that it at some point started having a sort of “painterly” look where there’s a sort of texture with little white dots in the art. So you need to clean off all the noise from the texture of the page but if you go too far, you lose those dots which are part of the artwork. That’s in addition to tons of double page spreads which need to be joined and lots of redrawing and such.

I was debating whether or not to continue this series because DRCL midnight children has been licensed by Viz, so it may not be worth continuing at this point. Though they’re likely going to do what they do with most series which is release it 2+ years after it comes out in Japan. Volume 1 is set to come out September 19th of this year and I encourage you all to buy it regardless to support the author. I ultimately decided to do this volume at least to finish out the “arc”, but given how much work and how much of my time doing this took up I’m not sure if it’s worth continuing to work on. Let me know what you all think regarding continuing with this series or not. Otherwise I’ll probably just be focusing my time more on translating Shima Kōsaku.

Either way, next volume is scheduled for simply “2024”. So likely it’ll come out in January-March next year. As of now the newest chapter released in the magazine, Grand Jump, is chapter 34. Though keep in mind that from chapters 1 to 21 the chapters were only appearing in every other issue of the magazine, which meant chapters were coming out once per month since Grand Jump is a bi-weekly magazine. But from chapter 22 onward the series started running once every issue but at half length. So the chapters went from being around 28 pages per chapter down to around 13 to 15 pages per chapter. Which means volume 3 is likely to have up to around chapter 33-35-ish. I figure that’s worth mentioning if we choose to keep going.

Meanwhile I’m still working on Division Chief Shima Kōsaku volume 2 which is really hard because it’s full of stuff about the wine industry which takes time to research and understand properly. Though that’s most of the way done now. Next month the last volume of Ikoku Nikki comes out and there’s also going to be a new volume of The JOJOlands and 3-Gatsu no Lion which we’re going to be working on so we’ve got our work cut out for us. Anyhow, enjoy the new volume, everyone!

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

Uncompressed Volume 3

Edit: Apparently a big percentage of the uncompressed pages exported… brokenly. I re-exported it with different color settings and it should be all correct now. Apologies.

#DRCL midnight children Volume 3 (Ch. 15-21)
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Ok, so here is DRCL volume 2! This one was also a huge slog! I spent several hours a day on this almost every day for 3 weeks to get this finished! I had some help which I really appreciate but I ended up needing to do the majority of it myself and this was a huge, massively time consuming task. Thanks to PronouncedSmith for doing a bunch of redrawing of the last two chapters, Luigi for doing most of the typesetting, and them plus Su Shi and Ai for helping check and edit (Which was itself a huge task). I’m really hoping I can get more help by the time the next volume comes out or I may not be able to continue this project. Even after speeding up a lot after figuring out a good workflow from doing volume 1, this still took forever mainly due to all the redrawing, double-page spread joining, and getting the whites white and blacks black and all that to make it look good.

As last time, this is scanned at 1200dpi of the physical raw and manually has all the redraws and page joins and everything done. That’s on top of translating and typesetting and all that. So we have an uncompressed version that’s really huge (5.2GB) and the more compressed version which is still pretty big which is what goes on Mangadex due to filesize limitations there which is more like 500MB.

Uncompressed Volume 2

The next volume comes out in Spring 2023! I’ll see what the heck is going on in my life at that point. I just really can’t dedicate nearly a month of my time doing every job on each of these.

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

#DRCL midnight children Volume 2 (Ch. 8-14)
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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)
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