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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Hey everybody, so here’s volume 2 of this! If you want to hear more about the background of this project I explained it all in detail in the post about volume 1. I spent the last couple weeks scanning the ENTIRE rest of this series, which took quite a bit. Then I cleaned/redrew/typeset volume 2. I mentioned this in earlier posts, but volumes 1-4 of this series feel basically like a different series than the entire rest of the series because the writer changed. Though it still continues the general themes regarding Mori/Katō Buntarō as a character starting from this first arc where he’s in high school. Mainly the redrawing and typesetting is MUCH more intensive here because there’s just way more text.

Scanning the other volumes was a strong reminder because half the pages in volumes 15-17 don’t have any text at all and the other half have 1-3 lines per page in all but a few. Also the number of sound effects go down from tons of them in volumes 1-3, to very few in 4-7, to none around volume 9. All that, plus having less text and having translated them when I had more experience, will make the later volumes take way less time to do. So I’m trying to get the first few volumes done fairly quickly. The drop-off in labor needed per volume is pretty steep. That said I’m also doing Shima Kōsaku so I’m going to also be dividing my time with that.

Kokou no Hito Volume 2 (Ch. 10-20)
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Hey folks, so here’s something new. Sort of. Ya see I actually scanlated this series a long time ago back in 2010-2012. I’ve wanted to sort of do a spruced-up version for a long time now but I didn’t feel like I had time. Especially when I’ve had all these other projects going. But I have some free time now, and that Gintama volume didn’t take too long and I can use the same techniques I used for that, so I thought I’d take a shot at this. I did the original scanlation of this with other groups since I did it before I started HWMN. The first 15 chapters were done by a group called Bakana-Haven, then it was done by a group called OMFGG until volume 13, and then volumes 14 to 17 (which is the end) were by Easy Going Scans. I translated every single chapter and I also scanned every volume and joined the double-page spreads (Except Easy Going Scans which scanned and did the joins themselves). So I’m essentially “redoing” my own project here, trying to improve it. I was really early on as a translator when I did them, I’d only been translating for a couple years, so I was hoping to someday redo some of this if not all of it. So that’s what I’m gonna do now. I dunno if I’ll be able to do ALL of it but we’ll see. This has higher resolution like all our newer releases and I also fixed up my translation and improved all the typesetting/lettering, which is done from scratch along with redrawing (I actually bought new copies of the series and started re-scanning at higher dpi).

This is one of my favorite series of all time. It’s about social anxiety and dealing with the conflict of wanting to be with people VS the freedom of being alone. The title “Kokou no Hito” Means “isolated or aloof person”. It also has a sort of official English title that’s just “The Climber” which I think is kind of a dull title so I prefer to call it Kokou no Hito. And also all about mountain climbing. It’s near and dear to my heart. I first fell in love with this series the first time I went to Japan in 2010 and found volume 1 in a bookstore and I knew I had to work on it. I’ve really never seen anything like it before or since. It’s written and drawn by Sakamoto Shinichi, the author of Innocent and #DRCL midnight children. This is the series he did before those two. (It’s based on a novel by Nitta Jirō about the real-life person, Katō Buntarō, and the story was written by Nabeta Yoshio in volumes 1 and 2 and then Nabeta left and the story was taken over by Takano Hiroshi until volume 4, after which he left and Sakamoto wrote the rest himself from volumes 5 on.)

Uh… so then on Friday, Viz announced they’re licensing this series, which I really didn’t expect because it ended over a decade ago. I guess sales of Sakamoto-sensei’s other series were good enough that they decided to also do this. But I think unlike doing DRCL from scratch when that’s already licensed, this is a bit different because I already scanlated it once. What I’m doing here is really simply “sprucing up” my old translations. I wouldn’t really think of it as directly competing with them since the scanlation already out there is one I did and it’s basically fine, just has some occasional minor mistakes (mainly in the beginning) because my grasp of Japanese wasn’t as good and my ability to translate into readable English wasn’t as good. I’d like to hear feedback on what ya’ll think makes sense. These don’t take THAT long to do because the translation is already done, I just have to scan, run cleaning automations, and then redraw/join, and typeset. And I edit the text as I typeset. This one took around a week and that included picking the fonts and such. It was super weird timing that that announcement came out when I was like 80% done with this. But anyhow at least I got volume 1 done here. I could probably do a quick version of all the other 16 volumes before the licensed version starts coming out in a year. There’s way less text as it goes on, so each volume will probably take less time than the last. But if anybody wants to help typeset it could go way faster, you can always email me at kewl0210@gmail.com. Otherwise I’m doing most of the jobs by myself besides checking at the moment (Ironic, I know. Or maybe apropos.) I still encourage everyone to buy the official version if you can. I know it’s also out in some other non-English languages.

Kokou no Hito Volume 1 (Ch. 1-9)
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