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Aaand moving right along, here’s our next project! It’s a series called Innocent by Sakamoto Shinichi. It’s about executioners and intrigue and weird crazy-ass shit in the run-up to the French Revolutionary Era. And probably eventually the French Revolutionary Era itself, too.
The scanlating of this series ALSO has a huge story to it. So everybody get tucked in and Kewl0210-sensei will tell you yet another tale of scanlation hell.

Ok, so I’ve translated this entire series. I also translated all of the author’s previous series Kokou no Hito which I highly suggest you all check out, because that’s my favorite manga of all time. I was scanlating this series with the group that is currently scanlating Prison School, Utopia Scanlations. They’ve also done a whole ton of other series in the past. I worked with them on a few chapters of Hunter X Hunter I translated years ago and the beginning of 81diver (Which is a whole other story I’ll share with you guys when we get to that). Anyhow, they were scanlating the series really well, they were all high quality and ended up being released around when the next one was coming out in Japan. That was until this volume, Volume 6. I finished translating this December 24th 2014, and it’s took until today, November 4th 2015 before it finally got done. And thaaaaat is because of about every problem I could imagine.

First the head of their group M-Hario was basically working on Innocent on his own. I think it may have been him and one other person for a while. After a while he didn’t have time for that outside various personal life stuff. But it took until February to get in contact with him and get all the files he worked on. After that I had to search for another group to work on it because, as you might know if you read the rest of this blog-ish thing, I totally overwork myself and spent way too much time on this shit. So the group that was gonna work on it was Habanero-Scans. Or at least one of the leaders of Habanero-Scans, Iruyily, was going to work on it and maybe they were going to release it as Utopia Scans? I’m not sure at this point. But he was working on it for a good couple months. And then he had his own problems. He realized he didn’t have time to do all the redrawing and everything and he wasn’t able to find the help to do it so I spent a bunch of time getting other people to help him and was making very slow progress on his own. So at that point I had finished scanlating Ring, and I decided we were gonna have to try to scanlate it ourselves if we wanted to get it done. It’s really hard to do that, because that means I need to manage the staff and usually do 2 or more jobs myself, but it just wasn’t really getting done. Luckily high8sky and Yakusho were pretty enthusiastic about working on it and tochiru said she would help out when she could. It was around this point when Iruyily’s computer got messed up for something like two months and we couldn’t get in contact with him. Now, after waiting months to try to get just one volume of this done about 3 more had come out. At this point we were just trying to get Iruyily to send us his files he had spent months to do so we wouldn’t spend a huge amount of time re-doing parts of the volume he already did. And although we got some contact or another with him a few times it took months before we actually got all the files he did. I think one of his hard drives got messed up and that’s why he couldn’t send them, it wasn’t totally clear. So he sent us the files he did and then high8sky, Yakusho, Tochiru and me have been spending the last month or so doing all the rest of the cleaning, redrawing, and typesetting. Which was actually quite a lot, despite all the people that had worked on it. Probably around 65% of it.

So there ya go, that’s the fun-filled story of how this project got tossed between groups for the last year or so. Finally resulting in today, when it’s finally totally done. So it has a happy ending, yay. Everyone party like it’s 1753. We were able to make some progress on V7 in the time we were waiting and I’m working on translating volume 8 now. The first series ends at volume 9, then starts the sequel series “Innocent Rouge” which just came out a couple weeks ago for the 10th volume (Though the volume numbering starts back at 1). Also the series moved from Young Jump, a weekly magazine, to Grand Jump, a bi-weekly magazine. So chapters are longer, but come out less frequently. As do volumes. So we’ve got time to catch up. Which is what we’re trying to do right now. Not sure how long it will take, but we’re all working really hard on it.

So, I really hope you enjoy this series everybody. A lot of people worked really hard on it, and I honestly think it’s really great. Check it out.

Volumes 1-5 scanlated by Utopia Scanlations can be found here

Innocent V6 (Chapters 54-64)
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