The beauty that overturned a nation.

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Ok, so, I discussed most of the situation regarding volume scanlations of Toriko and Gintama here:

Gintama Volume 44

and here:

Toriko Volume 2

But to reiterate a bit, this is the last volume scanlation we’ll be doing for either series for now. I’m not gonna say I’ll NEVER do more, but at the moment I’d rather use my time on other series and I’m not planning to go back to these as of now. Even if we’re just doing a HQ version of what we did in the magazine, it requires debinding and scanning the book, getting it all cleaned and redrawn, then the typesetting from the original chapters has to be copied over and shifted so it’s in the right places, then I need to go through the whole thing and update/improve the translations as well as any translate any extras that are only in the volumes. All that is very time-consuming and can be really stressful, largely because it never goes smoothly. Especially when you need several people who are working on a non-regular basis to do those jobs. In volunteer groups, people tend to fall off the map part-way through when you do that sort of project. In that way it’s no less difficult than any project done from scratch. So because of that I’d rather use my free time and resources to work on series that hasn’t already been scanlated. And honestly, I think there’s way less fan-demand for doing HQ versions of things we already did than there is for doing new stuff.

Pretty soon, we’re going to be moving the projects of Innocent and 81diver to this group. I was previously working on them with other groups but they kept falling apart. Hopefully they do better in my group with the group of people we managed to get together who all want to work on them.

As per this volume, let me talk about it a bit. It’s a really great volume. This contains the conclusion of the Courtesan of a Nation Arc. A large reason I wanted to get this one done in volume form is because a lot of the art was re-done in the first couple chapters. You may have noticed that the Shinsengumi’s uniforms weren’t inked-in, so it looked like everybody was in the Mimawarigumi in the magazine version.

Here’s an example:

The other thing is the last chapter has an extra 4 pages. It didn’t change the story before like it did in V43, (With making Kintoki seem like he has a change of heart at the end.) it basically just makes the last scene longer and more pretty. There are probably more art-related changes but they’re all very minor. Though I am really glad we got this volume in HQ because the art in it it looks so good.

Anyhow, I think that covers everything I have to say on that subject. Thanks for everyone that’s supported our volume releases of Gintama up to this point, and I hope our future projects go well. I hope you all enjoy.

Gintama V45 (Chapters 390-399)
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The moon will rise again.

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Ok, well, it’s been quite some time since we finished the last Gintama volume, hasn’t it? This one is all made up of chapters we already released all fixed up with a better translation and using the volume raws, which are much higher quality. We all worked really hard on it, and I hope you guys enjoy it. Especially for those who haven’t read these chapters so far.

Originally I was hoping that we would be able to get HQ volume versions of the Gintama chapters we scanlated fairly quickly. But when you consider how reality always gets in the way, that really didn’t happen. Since they’re already translated I was hoping they could get done with minimal effort on my part so we would have a nice side project going while I focused on other things (Specifically, the 2 weekly series here plus 6 or so other projects I do with this group or others). I scanned this volume in early January of this year. We were only able to get one cleaner to work on it for the most part and that took from January to mid-June to finish Manhai did that. Then I transferred over all of the old typesetting from the issues to the new version. Then then had to be scaled/shifted into the bubbles because the dimensions of the pages weren’t identical. Tochiru did most of that but I did some, too. Meanwhile I had to translate all the extra stuff in between the chapters (The FAQs and Sorachi’s handwritten essays and all that), which took a while. And since then I’ve been meticulously going through the chapters and fixing up the translations and the typesetting. And that took few weeks, too. Often working on nothing but this every day. All this whole thing also involves me managing things, making sure everything is moving and helping out when someone couldn’t do it. And honestly it’s waaaaaaaay more stressful than I’d hoped. So really I don’t know how much more of these we can do. It’s simply more work than I have time to do and managing it is more stress than I can handle at this point in my life for something like this. I’d really rather spend my energy working on series that haven’t been translated at all rather than working on high quality versions of stuff we did 3+ years ago (We released the first chapter of this volume, chapter 381, in December of 2011 by the way. To give some perceptive on that, which also means I was that much less experienced when I translated it so it was that much more work to spruce up. Especially for a series as wordy as Gintama).

We’re part-way through Volume 45 already, so I do plan to see that through to the end. After that I dunno. It’ll depend on if there’s fan interest, if there’s staff willing to do it (Feel free to volunteer if you’d like to help by the way. Shoot me an email at kewl0210@gmail.com but please only do so if you’re experienced. As I said, it’s really more than I can handle right now). So yeah, that’s that. We’ll keep doing the weekly chapters until the series ends, of course. Whenever that is. Ok, go read it now.

Gintama V44 (Chapters 381-389)
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