Kokou no Hito (The Climber) Volume 4

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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The JOJOLands Ch. 17

Hey everybody, here’s chapter 17! Please go check it out. Uhhh more things happen in this one. I can’t think of much to say here. This one has a ton of text but so did the last one. Just kinda continues the current arc. Volume 4 comes out next month at the same time as the new chapter, which is August 19th Japan time. Besides that, we just finished a new Shima Kōsaku volume and a new Kokou no Hito volume so I’m starting work on the next ones.

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

The JOJOLands Ch. 17
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Kokou no Hito (The Climber) Volume 3

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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Division Chief Shima Kōsaku Volume 9

Division Chief Shima Kо̄saku Volume 9

Whew, here we are, volume 9. It’s been a bit since the last one. I’ve been doing a lot of stuff since then both IRL and in other projects so I hope you all understand. This volume is sort of a more transitionary one, I guess you’d say? Mainly the status quo stays the same a lot here and it’s made up of a lot of vignettes. The plot starts progressing a lot next volume. We’ve now got just 4 volumes of Division Chief left, so we’re making great progress, but man this series is a lot of work. It can be kind of exhausting and I need to balance it with everything else in my life.

Uh so besides that, 3-Gatsu no Lion hasn’t had any new chapters. There was another occurrence of it being listed as appearing “next issue” in the previous issue’s next-issue-preview page, but then it didn’t, seemingly due to Umino-sensei’s health. It’s not next issue either so we’re just waiting and seeing. I’m most of the way through Kokou no Hito volume 3, but these early volumes have a lot of text and they take a while. And the next Jojo chapter comes out next week. I have a bunch of personal things going on right now that’s taking up a lot of my time and energy so I don’t know for sure if that will be late or not but we’ll be trying to get the chapter out as soon as it comes out in Japan as usual.

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

Division Chief Shima Kо̄saku Volume 9 (Ch99-111)
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Kokou no Hito (The Climber) Volume 2

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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The JOJOLands Ch. 16

Hey everybody, here’s chapter 16! I hope you all enjoy, this one has a loot of text. When I work on these I’m basically doing it all day nonstop from when I wake up to when I go to sleep and then I do some finishing work in the morning the next day if anyone doing final checks made any comments when I was asleep. Honesly I dunno how long I can keep doing these because it takes so much out of me but I’ll keep going for now.

Meanwhile I’m still working on the next Shima Kousaku volume and Kokou no Hito V2 is almost done. Kokou no Hito is an easy series that I’ve already translated so I’m trying to prioritize that to get it all done, but the first like 4 volumes have a ton of text relative to the rest of the series. Then the last bunch of it has like almost none, half the pages have no text, so I can probably typeset a whole volume in like a day, whereas the first ones take like several days. So as it happens the BEGINNING is where all the effort is going to go to. I’m hoping to have that done pretty soon.

Also we finished our HQ scanlation of volume 3 the other day. So please check that out. It took a long freaking time to do all those pages and I really love how it turned out.

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

The JOJOLands Ch. 16
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Kokou no Hito (The Climber) Volume 1

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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Gintama Volume 72

Gintama Volume 72

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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3-Gatsu no Lion (March Comes in Like a Lion) 208

If you haven’t seen it, check out our release of volume 17! It goes up to the magazine of equivalent of 201 and it took a ton of work to finish.

Ok here’s this! There doesn’t SEEM like there’s a new chapter next issue. But Umino-sensei was seemingly hard at work on it and posted some drawings of names (storyboards) on Twitter. Meanwhile I’m overdoing it working all the time as usual. Anyhow, see you next time!

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

3-Gatsu no Lion 208
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The JOJOLands Ch. 15

Okay everyone, here we are at chapter 15! This chapter is lots of fun and full of weird body horror. It’s more fun hanging out with a bunch of weirdos. The magazine comes out a bit early this month for some reason, not really sure why. Next time it comes out at the usual time on the 19th Japan time.

Also we finished our HQ scanlation of volume 3 the other day. So please check that out. It took a long freaking time to do all those pages and I really love how it turned out.

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

The JOJOLands Ch. 15
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