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)
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Ok, well finally, this is done.
Sorry this kinda took a while but it’s like 360 pages long, took a while to clean, redrawn, get the typesetting moved over, all that stuff.

Uh so I’ve pretty much said everything I had to say back when we released the final chapter originally.

The short version who don’t want to read all that is: We’ve done the series from V33 to the end. It would be nice to do volume versions for volumes 46-72, but it’s just not worth it to me given the time it would take. Same for doing volumes 25-32, which were done by other groups but for the most part aren’t done at very good quality (And Viz’s official versions exist for the rest, which are all good quality). For those earlier ones, while there are fewer of them, each one would take a lot longer because I’d need to translate them too. I kinda wanna move on to other projects, so these last V33-35 and V73-77 have been my send off for the series.

Though if someone wants to volunteer to do any of that, feel free to email me at kewl0210@gmail.com and we could try to work it out, but I’d only be a minimal participant.

The volume is pretty much the same as the magazine, but the quality is better. A handful of panels in the last chapter changed I think to clarify what was going on with the fake reality created by Tamako. I also put all the extras, color pages, and apologies in from the magazines and that one note for the final delay they posted on Twitter. Plus the extras Sorachi added just for the volume about his horrible experience ending the series.

Also here’s a fun tweet of a mosaic-ed Sorachi being lifted up by all his editors from the run of the series. I can’t really put that in the release since it’s a video but it’s pretty cool so I thought I’d stick it here if anyone didn’t see it at the time it was posted.

And if you haven’t seen it yet, check out the end of the fanbook we translated, which contains some post-series-end interviews and stuff.

Uh, so this series is great. But now it’s all done. I hope everyone enjoyed it. Spread it out there to all those that haven’t read it yet. And check out some of the other series we’re doing! I try to find good stuff. This series changed my life for the better, and I hope it affected all yours for the better, too.

Gintama Volume 77 (Chapters 696-704)
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Ok I hope ya’ll appreciate this because this took way longer than I expected.
Uh so as I’m sure a lot of you know, with the release of the final Gintama volume (77) they also released a “fanbook” which is a kind of series encyclopedia, called Koujien. It’s named after the popular Japanese dictionary of the same name. It’s super long, 432 pages long, so we’re not translating the whole thing, but I translated the relevant new information that was put at the end. So the last 30 pages basically.

This contains the cover and inside cover of the book, a sorta tabloid-style expose on the delays of the final chapter, a realllly long round table discussion between Sorachi-sensei and all of the editors that worked on Gintama over the course of the series, a couple pages of cut panels from the final chapter, a 4-page manga by Sorachi, and a final note by Sorachi. Basically we did the end of the book. And it’s really the only part that I was all that interested in doing, as it’s not a collection of old information or fan works.

Most of the book is a long encyclopedia of every character that ever showed up in the series, and it’s way too long for us to work on. It’d be like translating an entire wiki, it doesn’t really give you any new information. Mostly just stuff that you could already tell by reading the series. It also contains a long art gallery of color pages or just the character sorta cropped out of the color page and stuck on a white background, the original scrapped storyboard from before Gintama was first serialized, some comments Sorachi wrote for the tables of contents of all the issues of Jump… uhh… some letters he wrote to various anime events, and some ‘job well done’ fanart and stuff from his assistants. All of which, if you’re interested in that and want to check it out, you can buy your own here. But it’s very ancillary, so it’s not something this group is going to be working on. If someone else wants to translate all that stuff, you have my blessing.

So yeah, check this out if you’re a big fan of Gintama. I thought it would be a cool final thing to work on. And I hope everyone enjoys. The round table discussion is all text, but I thought it was a very interesting insight into Sorachi-sensei’s mindset during the course of the series and it gives us a tiny look into what it was like to work on Gintama, and all the suffering he put his editors through being late on every single manuscript.
Also we’re going to be doing a volume version of volume 77 still, which Kago is in the process of cleaning right now. So look forward to that, sometime in the near future. Though it is 360 pages long so it could take some time. (If you wanna just read the extras before we finish scanlating the whole thing, I posted it here.)

Edit: I added the author flap which I didn’t notice was even in the book the fist time around.

Gintama Koujien Fanbook Ending
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Whew. And now, right after the last chapter, we’ve got this done too. Volume 35. That closes the last gap, and now we’ve done everything from volume 33 to the end of the series.

This volume completes the Four Devas arc and also closes the gap to the first volume we did, Volume 36. I’m pretty proud of this, and I’ve been using most of my free time the last month or so to get it done. Much thanks to Kago for the cleaning and Huldra for QCing.

I talked about this project of doing these 3 old volumes before if you wanna check, right here and here. But this is the last time I’m gonna go through it so I’m gonna go into a bit more depth. I’m really glad we got this done, and I think it feels like a good closure point for me and this group for this series. Like I said this is the last old volume we’re planning to do. So, just for posterity I’m gonna explain why we’re stopping here.

In an ideal world, I’d like to get the whole manga from beginning to end out in high quality in some form. Viz only officially released up to volume 23 which are all great quality, and the scanlations for 24-32 are all pretty bad quality. Pretty much all of those old scanlations used Rufi’s unedited scripts which he admits himself weren’t very good because he was pretty inexperienced at that point (FYI, originally I was editing his scripts when we started doing Gintama, but I switched to doing them purely on my own around chapter 417, with the exception of a few others I did on my own before then, because trying to catch/fix his mistakes (which there were a lot of, no offense to him, this was 8-10 years ago) and incorporating his stylistic choices was taking more effort than just doing it purely on my own and I was getting burnt out from all that. He’s been doing his own translations for the series that he’s just releasing in text form you can read here.). Then also most of the old scanlations use scanned Jump magazine scans and are cleaned and typeset by people who were pretty inexperienced so they’re not very good quality in those respects either (A handful of them are pretty good cleaning/typesetting wise, but the vast majority of them are really bad and done by groups who I think admittedly didn’t really know what they were doing at the time). Which is frustrating to me, because it’s a great manga, and I’d really like there to be SOME good quality version available for everyone to read through the whole massive thing if they so choose. Even though I know most people will watch the anime for those earlier parts, the manga is still the source material and it has all the composition and flow that Sorachi-sensei put into it. Plus the anime sometimes goes REALLY fast, making characters talk super fast and cutting out lines to finish 2 chapters in 22 minutes. So it’s really a different experience to read the source material over the adaptation, even if most people prefer the adaptation.

But the thing is doing even one of those old volumes is a massive effort. I put off doing V35 for a bit because V34 took so much out of me. But even then from start to finish it took about a month after working on it with almost all my free time nearly every day. And that was for a volume that has a lot of battles and so has less text than the typical volume. 33 and 34 took more like a month and a half I think. Then there’s the fact that we only did volume scans for V33-45 and V73-76 (We’re gonna do 77 when it comes out in August). Just redoing those old volumes we already translated and typeset would take less time each volume, but it still takes a good amount of effort, and with 27 of them getting all those done would be a massive task that would take like, a year or more of constantly working on it.

So basically what I’m saying is, although it’d be great to have everything in great quality, the amount of time and effort it would take just isn’t worth it for me. Just pushing myself to get the last few volumes ending off the series and these few old volumes done was probably more effort than it was worth really, given how many people are probably gonna read them 8+ years after they came out (and been animated, too). Getting the ones we already did with the Jump magazine raws to better scans using volume raws would basically only make them like 10% better and still take a massive amount of time. Doing the volumes from 32 and earlier would take WAY more time per volume but the jump in quality would be a lot bigger for the vast majority of them (Some of them were done with volume scans and good magazine cleans but all the translations have a lot of errors, even the ones that say they were checked by me in the Stray Cat arc, because I was way less experienced then). The bottom line is I would rather use my free time to do a new series that’s not scanlated at all than to use years of my free time re-doing stuff that most people probably won’t read anyhow because they already read the chapters back when they were new, or just watched the anime instead (It should go without saying, but most series can be done WAAAAY faster than Gintama. Gintama’s one of the wordiest manga per page out there). Which, I think is well… basically fine. An OK end result. They’re at least readable, you can understand what’s going on, and you can always watch the anime at this point anyhow to fill in the gaps from the errors. Maybe for something like Gintama, a series all about looking into the future despite imperfections in the past, it’s even appropriate? No? Ok maybe not but you get what I’m saying right?

So that’s basically my mindset here. I hope most people are understanding about this, and I think most people will be, given that I think most people understand how much effort goes into translating a series like this. (Sidenote: With Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, fans put in a massive amount of effort to get the whole series scanlated in good quality including redoing all the Veggie’s Jojo Project (Duwang) scans which weren’t very good. Which is a lot longer a series, but still much less wordy and takes less time per volume, plus the work was distributed across several different groups/people and still took quite a few years to complete). I’m mostly just writing this to sort of give everyone a sense of why, and to leave a record for anyone checking what happened with the scans of this series years down the road. I don’t think there’s a huge fan-demand to do those old volumes, but I felt I owed it to everyone and myself to thoroughly explain why I’m stopping here.

Ok. With all that said, if someone WANTS to scan, clean, redraw, and transfer the typesetting over of any of volumes 46 to 72, you can email me at kewl0210@gmail.com and we can try to work it out. I’m ok with putting in the effort of at least translating the volume-only extras if someone is willing to do the rest. I’ll even pay you back for the volumes if you want, they’re only like 4-8 bucks each depending on shipping and if they’re pre-owned. But you have to follow through with it on your own, I’m moving on to other stuff (And I’m not using the digital raws, which are blurry and bad and wouldn’t really be an improvement in quality at all over the cleaned magazines. That wouldn’t even save much time, scanning a volume only takes like an hour or so). If you want to do volumes 32 and earlier, then you’ll need to translate and typeset them yourself too. I can give you our style guides and check the stuff over at the end but that’s about it (I realize I wouldn’t really be contributing much in that case so if you wanna do those 32 and earlier volumes as a completely separate group and just not involve us at all, I’m ok with that too). I dunno if anyone out there is willing or interested in doing all that, but if you are, I’m ok with giving you the resources we have and to release it as this group.

Ok, I think I covered everything. I know not a lot of people are gonna read this whole post or even this scanlation, but thanks a ton to those who do. I put a lot of effort into all of it. And a ton of effort and years of my life into this series. And it means the world to me that so many people have enjoyed it. See ya at volume 77.

Edit: I decided to zip all the magazine chapters that made up volumes into single zips for the downloads page. I probably should’ve done this before, honestly. But I was originally planning to do volume scans for everything so it felt wrong to zip magazine chapters into a zip and call it a volume. But since we’re not doing anymore, I figure it’s fine. I’m doing it with Toriko as well since we’re not doing anymore Toriko scanlations.

Gintama Volume 35 (Ch301-309)
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Well everyone, here it is.
We made it. This chapter was hard as fuck because it’s 59 pages long. I’ve been spending every spare minute I have working on this.
I really hope everyone enjoys the end. This series is really special to me. It conveys emotion and talks about dealing with facing your past and facing the difficulties and unfairness of life in a way no other series does. On top of being really funny. There’s plenty of people out there that can describe why this series is great better than me. But it’s meant a ton to me and it’s been a monumentally great story the whole way through. Translating this series has been one of the great joys of my life, even if it’s tons of work to get through every time. I really love these characters and this world, and I’ll never forget them. I hope people keep reading it for years to come.

Volume 35’s scanlation is almost done, we should have that out in a few days probably.
Volume 77 should be the last “thing” we do with this series, as I’m not planning to do any more old volumes after that. Probably. That comes out August 2nd, and it’s sure to have some words of goodbye from Sorachi in it. It’s also gonna be 360 pages long so that’ll be fun. Anyhow, until then, keep your souls silver. And remember that you can always start again, as long as you’re still alive.

Gintama 704 (End)
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Ok. So. This chapter is 44 pages long. The last chapter is coming out June 17th in Japan (3 weeks from now).
That chapter is supposed to be the last chapter, and I think it really will be this time. The last volume, volume 77, should come out in the summer sometime and we’ll do HQ versions of all these last chapters once that comes out. We’ll be working on doing our HQ version of V35 and getting that out sometime in the near future too.

This chapter’s a really great one, and I think it shows why this kind of ending was needed and was more appropriate than ending on the big war arc. I hope you all enjoy it.

Edit: Fixed a couple typos.

Gintama 703
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Okay, SO. This chapter is 29 pages long. The news thingies in the app said that there will be “over 100 pages distributed in the app” so that makes me think there’s gonna be around 4-5 chapters total. Probably. I do really like this denouement arc and the closure it’s giving this part of the story. It feels much more personal than a big war.

Next chapter comes out 2 weeks after this one, on the 27th in Japan. So we’ll see you around then.

Gintama 702
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Ok… Ok I finally finished this.
For more on this project of translating old Gintama volumes, check here.
So, as you might guess, doing these old Gintama volumes takes a REALLLY long time and A LOOOOT of effort. So I’m really glad I finally got this done. This took nearly 2 months from start to finish. And that’s with me scanning, translating, and typesetting it all myself alongside the other projects we’re doing.
Now, we no longer have any “incomplete” Gintama volumes, as we had done a couple of these chapters in volume 34 back when they were new in Shounen Jump. But now we’ve done the whole thing. And I re-translated all the chapters we had originally done, fixing up all the errors and improving the phrasing and characterization and such as much as I could (Plus obviously the scans are way better). So I’m pretty proud of the fact that we finally got this done.

I know we probably won’t get many people reading these since they’re so old, but it’s something that gives me some closure with this series as these were something I’d planned on doing for years and kept postponing or opting against doing them, given how much time and effort were involved (It’s because all this takes so long that I’m cutting myself off after V35 and not doing anything before V33, I could be at this forever).

This volume covers a bunch of one-off chapters, including the Yamazaki Anpan Stakeout one. And then the beginning of the Jirochou/Four Devas arc.

I’m gonna take a break from these old chapters for a bit and try to get more Ikoku Nikki and Takeshi done before I get seriously into volume 35, which is made up entirely by the rest of the Four Devas arc. But that’s the very last one, and we’ll have filled in the gap between the early chapters we did and when we started doing volumes at volume 36. This group will have every Gintama chapter from volume 33 to 76 done.

As for newer stuff, Volume 77 is slated to come out… some time in the future (Shueisha’s site lists planned release dates up to June and Gintama isn’t on there). Uh and the next chapter that’ll be appearing in the app, I don’t know when that’ll be either. Also we don’t know how many of them there’ll be, if they’ll all be compiled in volume 77 or if there’ll be a volume 78, we have no idea about any of that so far. The app chapter(s) will probably start coming out… sometime this year I’d guess??? Sorachi-sensei doesn’t have any due dates now so who knows how long he could take or how he’s gonna release them… The only thing listed on the app is that the app chapter(s) will be released in paper volume form at some point and there will be “over 100 pages” released on the app. God I hope it’s not all at once. Anyhow, that’ll probably be on anime/manga news sites once it’s announced. See ya later!

Gintama Volume 34 (Ch292-300)
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Welp… see you next chapter.

We’re gonna have to figure out how to rip the raws from the Gintama App now.

Gintama 701
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Ok, and here we have volume 76, the high-quality version of chapters 686-695. That covers NEARLY all the chapters released so far, all except the ones only in the final volume.
So here’s where Gintama is at as a project. The last chapter should PROBABLY be in the next issue of Jump GIGA which comes out on February 22nd.
Volume 77 should be the last volume and will come out in spring of this year. We’ll try to do that soon after it comes out.
And I’m going to try and do volume 34 and 35 at some point, but as a side project I work on when I have time (Those chapters take a loooong time to do and there’s a lot).

Gintama Volume 76 (Ch686-695)
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