BWAM here’s volume 12. A lot of big events happen in this volume and it starts setting up for the final arc which we get into next volume. As usual this volume has lots of great art and a lot of memorable scenes as Mori/Katō Buntarō starts to really change as a person and overcome some of the biggest personal obstacles he’s had up to this point.

So, I talked about this in the last couple posts, but at this point we’re down to the point in the manga where there’s VERY little text compared to early on. It sort of gets less and less as the series goes on and just occasionally has a wordy chapter or two then goes back to chapters where half the pages have no text. Because of that, there’s way less to do in these later volumes, so I’m trying to get this series finished up soon. I finished cleaning and redrawing the whole rest of the series to the end of volume 17. Volume 13 is typeset and being checked and I’ve typeset the beginning of volume 14. Besides the occasional wordy chapters where I need to double check every sentence, most chapters don’t take very long. Some of these take literally 10 minutes, though some take like an hour or two. At this point we have 48 chapters left to release. So I’m trying to get through a lot while I have some free time right now. As usual I’m trying to balance “I want to get this done” with “I don’t want to burn myself out and use all my free time working.” But I don’t think there’s all that many total man-hours of work left so I’m really trying to get it all done.

Meanwhile, we have Jojo this week. Volume 5 is also coming out so we’ll be working on that. And also there’s a new 3-Gatsu no Lion chapter coming out later this month, and I’m working on Shima a little while I have some spare time (I’m mostly trying to finish Kokou no Hito before I get back and finish Division Chief Volume 12). So look forward to all that! Enjoy, folks!

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

Kokou no Hito Volume 12 (Ch. 113-122)
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Hey everybody! So here’s volume 11. At this point the manga is becoming more and more minimalist. This volume has one chapter that has no text at all. And we’re now at the point where there’s no more sound effects, and it switches to only using visual metaphors. There’s a FEW in this volume but I’m pretty sure this is where the last ones in the series are.

So, given that there’s not a lot left, I’m trying to see if I can sort of push to get through the rest of the series fairly soon. Right now I’m in the middle of cleaning and redrawing volume 16 out of 17. Then theoretically typesetting shouldn’t take too long since there isn’t a lot of text and at this point it shouldn’t need so many corrections because I had a little more experience at this point. Not that there’s many mistakes in these, for the most part they’re the sort of little misses you’d just notice after going over it an extra time. The other textual changes are mainly making it sound more natural or flow better. But anyhow, given there’s not a lot left I figured it might be a good idea to try to just really focus on this a bit and see if I can get to the end soon rather than draw it out doing one every 2-3 weeks. So for now I’m cleaning ahead till I get to the end and typesetting enough so the QCers have something to check while I’m working ahead. Though we’ll see what happens. Sometimes when I do this sorta thing, like I did with Takeshi a couple years ago, I got kinda burnt out. But at this point there’s 6 volumes left and I only need to clean about 3 and a half so it shouldn’t be too bad.

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

Kokou no Hito Volume 11 (Ch. 103-112)
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Aand we’re done with volume 10! Now after about five and a half months since the first release, we’re into the double digits. There’s 7 volumes to go now. We’re definitely getting there! So at this point we’re a good ways into the small story arc between the Northern Alps Traversal arc and the final big arc which is the K2 arc. Generally speaking there’s less text from here on out besides a few wordy chapters. So because of that it SHOULD *IN THEORY* take less time to do. I’m really trying to prevent this side project where we redo old stuff to take that long. Then I can move onto some other project maybe. The last chapter with any sound effects is the beginning of volume 11. But there’s still plenty of double page spreads to join and lots of redraws to do so it’s not MUCH easier. Still gonna take a lot of work, but I’m working on it.

Besides this, we’ve got Jojo coming up and I started on Shima volume 11 but haven’t gotten too far yet. Enjoy, everyone!

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

Kokou no Hito Volume 10 (Ch. 93-102)
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Ooookay, and now with this we are past the half way point of the series. 9 volumes done and 8 to go. This volume also finishes off the end of the K2 Simulation Training Northern Alps All-Mountain Ridge Traversal arc. So quite a lot is concluded here. And then it gets well into the next arc about Mori Buntarō working on Mount Fuji and introduces Takemura and all sorts of stuff. So this is another good one! I’m really glad we’ve made it this far. It’s taken about 5 months from the first release to this point (And we were working on volume 1 for a couple weeks at that point). So we’re making pretty good time, given the hardest stuff is in the beginning. We’re nearly at the point where Sakamoto-sensei stops using sound-effects. There’s fewer and fewer until volume 11 which has the last one (Unless I missed one somewhere). Once we’re at that point, getting these done should be a little faster. I’m pretty happy about the pace this is given it’s a “fix-up project” and not doing a series from scratch. Once this project’s all done I can probably pick up another project we’d be doing from scratch.

Anyhow, check it out!

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

Kokou no Hito Volume 9 (Ch. 83-92)
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K so this one is all done too! This one gets to the climax of the K2 Simulation Training Ridge Traversal arc. Though there’s still a few more chapters of it in the first half of volume 9. This is 8 our of 17 so we’re now ALMOST half way through the series. I’ve had a bunch of time to do this this month since there’s no Jojo or 3-Gatsu to do. But like I said, it’s still gonna take a while cause I can’t just marathon through these. It becomes sorta mind-numbing at a point when you’ve been doing it for hours a day. And all the redrawing still takes a while every volume.

Shima volume 11 is coming along nicely, I’ve got about 3 chapters in that left to translate now. So that’s what I’m working on at the moment. Hope ya’ll enjoy!

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

Kokou no Hito Volume 8 (Ch. 73-82)
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Whew! So here’s volume 7. This one we got done pretty quickly. We’ve got 10 volumes to go now. As always I’m trying to work on this enough to get it done without taking too long because it’s already translated, but I’ve gotta balance it with other stuff. I’m trying to avoid any issues and do all the redraws and get all the fonts looking good and all that. I kind of don’t like the styles OMFGG chose for the most part. A lot of font choices weren’t great and the text was often not sized right (Usually it was too big and text had a lot of words with hyphens going onto two lines when that wasn’t needed). A lot of the I’m mainly trying to keep this project from being TOO long so I can move onto some other project I haven’t already translated sometime soon. I have a couple ideas for those. Anyhow we’ve already started on volume 8 at this point, too. There’s way fewer sound effects and less overall text at this point in the manga so it SHOULD take less time per volume from here. So I’m aiming for around one every 2-3 weeks, if all goes well.

Meanwhile I’m also doing Shima, and volume 11 is about half way translated now. I kinda feel better doing just these two things rather than juggling four or so projects at once so I feel a bit better. I’ve had a lot of stuff going on outside scanlating this year so it’s good not to do everything at once.

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

Kokou no Hito Volume 7 (Ch. 63-72)
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Okay, here we are, volume 6. Man this is a really good one. I love this series. It’s just got such powerful expression of emotion. You really feel Buntarō here as he’s dealing with the rejection and hazing and competition from his other teammates. We’re now in the middle of the Northern Alps All-Mountain Traversal arc which goes until the beginning of volume 9. It definitely has gotten easier to do these because there’s less text and less redrawing. But there’s still a considerable amount of work in each of these so I don’t think I’m ever going to get to the point where I can bang out like one a week (until maybe the last couple, maybe?). So now we’re a little more than a third of the way through the series and I’m glad we’re making good progress on this but it’ll probably take a few more months at least to finish.

So in the meantime, I’ve done a bunch of cleaning on volume 7. I’ve translated the first like 3 chapters of Shima volume 11. And I’m also trying to get some of the other Gintama volumes scanned. That Gintama project of redoing all the volumes from magazine versions to volume scans is basically on hold until Kokou no Hito is done, but I do want to at least get them all scanned so that initial step is out of the way. And there’s so many of them I need to do it a little at a time. If we have folks volunteering to work on that we can get those out faster but I’m not really counting on it. There’s 26 more volumes to redo so even if one doesn’t take too long the whole project would end up taking six months at a minimum if I focused SOLELY on that, and the end result would be just a somewhat nicer more complete release. In that same amount of time I could probably do a decent sized manga from scratch so I’m mainly just trying to keep it as a side project and I dunno if we’ll ever finish all of it. But yeah I want to at least keep moving on all these things. As usual I’m constantly trying to balance work on this stuff with other things I want to spend my time on.

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

Kokou no Hito Volume 6 (Ch. 53-62)
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WHEW, here’s volume 5! Now we’re well into the real meat of the manga. The speech at the start of chapter 52 here is one of the highlights of the series. It feels like it’s where Buntarō really feels like he’s got firm opinions about his life and how he’s living it that he lets the reader in on. And now we’ve finally got underway with the Northern Alps All-Mountain Ridge Traversal.

This volume was a bunch easier because the amount of text is letting up and the amount of sound effects and fonts is going down. So hopefully these don’t take too long. There’s still 12 more volumes to go now. These don’t take a lot of focused concentration but they do take a lot of hours regardless to get the whole volume done. And we’ve got a few people quality checking now which helps. I’d really prefer this “spruce up” of this series didn’t end up taking many months, because it’s taking up my time for everything else I wanna do. But the hardest volumes are behind us now.

In the meantime, we just released a bunch of stuff and I’m still working on Shima volume 10. Gonna try to really focus on that now that this is done.

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

Kokou no Hito Volume 5 (Ch. 43-52)
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Ook, here’s volume 4! We have finally finished the beginning arc of the manga and we’re into “Part 2” or the first timeskip or the start of the “K2 Simulation Training Arc” whatever you wanna call it. This is also the last volume where Takano Hiroshi is the writer. After this point it’s all Sakamoto-sensei.

A lot of folks feel like this is where the manga “really starts”, and I agree it’s way different from the beginning to the point of feeling like a totally different manga, I do think the beginning is good in its own right even though it lacks the sort of atmosphere we get when he’s out of school. It also really establishes Mori Buntarō’s mindset and how he’s shaped from being younger to getting to the state he’s in. So I hope you all enjoyed that! Past this point there’s way fewer sound effects which makes it easier to typeset and there’s less text in general, though still way more than there is in the 2nd half of the series. So hopefully these volumes take a bit less time to do. We’ve been doing this project for around 2 months now and it’s probably gonna take a longer than I was hoping but it’s still going pretty well. I’m still going though every single line and a couple people are checking it and helping me improve it. That’s in addition to re-scanning, re-cleaning, re-redrawing, and re-typesetting everything.

Besides that, we’re working on Shima volume 10 and there are new The JOJOLands and 3-Gatsu no Lion chapters coming out later this month. So look forward to all that.

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

Kokou no Hito Volume 4 (Ch. 32-42)
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And here’s volume 3! This pretty much finishes off the first arc/part of the story. There’s sort of a denouement in the first chapter of volume 4 but after that, the story changes quite a bit. And that arc continues until the middle of volume 9. And starting in volume 4 there’s a lot less text and way fewer sound effects so it should take less time to typeset. Though I still have to go through the entire translation and make corrections/improvements which takes some time. Though there’s still plenty of text compared to the last few volumes, at which point the amount goes WAY down. Also this volume does not have Nabeta Yoshio as the story writer and it’s only Takano Hiroshi. Hiroshi leaves as well at some point in volume 4 at which point Sakamoto Shinichi is the artist and only writer. So yeah, as it goes on these should take less time to do. There’s still 14 more. I’m gonna try to keep them coming out somewhat steadily but it’ll probably take a few months to do them all. I hope you enjoy! This volume I think is where the series really starts hitting its stride and feels special.

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

Kokou no Hito Volume 3 (Ch. 21-31)
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