Gintama Volume 69

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Gintama Volume 69

Ok here we are again, but with volume 69 (nice, etc. etc.) We’ve got 23 volume versions left to do now. I wrote a recap of what’s going on with this project here. This is the next one. We’ll be going backwards with the later volumes first so in case we don’t finish at least the finale of the series has a high quality version. Also the older volumes have a lot more text because there’s fewer action scenes, so those would also take longer. As usual, this is a better resolution version of these 10 chapters. All scanned with the physical volumes. It includes various changes Sorachi-sensei made after the magazine version, more image on the top and bottom of the pages, the extras between the chapters, we upgraded some fonts and some text, and we included good quality versions of all the color pages and such.

These really are a lot of work, they involve redoing all the cleaning and redraws, checking all the text, writing all the sound effects inline, all that. I hope you all like these, I think they look really good once they’re all done. We’ve finished scanning and running all the automations on all the volumes from V46 to the end, and a couple quick things like the volume covers are all cleaned. Now we just need to clean and redraw about 4,350 pages, which take a few minutes each, but there’s a lot, so it’s a huge effort we’ll do over months/years. I’m probably gonna go back to focusing on translating more Shima Kousaku volumes now. Teppy is helping clean these too, so say thanks to him folks. And we’ve got Jojo next week, so have a good week everyone.

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

Gintama Volume 69 (Ch618-627)
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Gintama Volume 70

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Gintama Volume 70

Hey everybody, we’re back to this. I talked about this in multiple other posts at this point, but I’ve wanted to at some point do volume versions of all the Gintama chapters we did with physical Shounen Jump scans over the course of like a decade. The main issue is it takes a lot of hours of “busy work” to do and all you have to show for 20-30 hours of work is one volume out of 25 (now 24 after this one). So I was trying to find a way to speed it up by automating some of it. Luigi has helped out with that so I think ENOUGH of this is automated now that we can maybe eventually do all of them, but it’ll take a while.

Over the last few months I scanned all of the remaining volumes. That’s Gintama volume 46 to 70. Which took a LONG time because I had to find time to do it among everything else (job, all these other projects, various social and other life obligations) and I’ve basically had to do every step of this volume on my own. A couple people volunteered but haven’t had time to do all that much, which is what it is. It’s a lot of boring work just to make an existing thing we already released higher quality, so I don’t really expect many people to jump at the chance to do that. But now that we got them all scanned and we’re in the process of running all the automations on them, all that’s left now is to manually clean and redraw… about 4600 pages. Which is gonna take a long time, and it’s pretty mind-numbing after you do it for a few hours so you can’t just marathon through all of that. If I did it all in a row every day I could probably finish it all in a 3 months or something.

And while that would be nice to get it all done quickly, it’s probably not good for my physical or mental health so my plan now is to just do these every once in a while. Like maybe once a month or something. But I figure now that we’ve got everything at this stage I can eventually finish it, or maybe occasionally get people to volunteer to work on it because the first stages of everything (physically buying, scanning, and running a bunch of processes one pages one chapter at a time) are now all done. Like we could just white out all the bubbles and then it would be at least kinda-sorta in a releasable state. Just it wouldn’t have the redraws done, the edges of the pages fixed to look normal, the extras added just for the volumes, the inline sound effects, and any mistakes fixed or changes made from the magazine to the volumes added. So maybe later down the line I just skip some of those parts and release it just so it gets released in some form, I dunno. This series is huge, man. If we just did all that we’d have done volumes 33 to 77, that’s 45 volumes of one series.

Anyway, we’ll see how that goes. I’ll let you all know as we get it done. Just don’t expect these to all come out in a row (unless somebody wants to volunteer, and if you do you can email me at kewl0210@gmail.com or DM me or contact me in some other way. Send me a letter? Whatever you wanna do.) This volume contains another chunk of the Liberation Army battle/Silver Soul Arc. As usual we included all the color pages, I’m trying to include the clean color art from the Koujien Fanbook as well. It has all the sound effects drawn inline rather than notes in the margins. And it has all the Q&As and such from Sorachi-sensei which I translated just for these. And some fonts are updated to look nicer. The text is largely the same otherwise though a handful of lines were revised or improved or fixed. And I think visually it looks really good (Certainly way better than the official digital version which are very blurry). I hope you all enjoy it!

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

Gintama Volume 70 (Ch628-635)
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The JOJOLands Ch. 30

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The JOJOLands 30

Hey everyone welcome back after that one break of one month last month. Here’s more Jojo’s Kooky Quest Part IX, Lands of Jooj. This chapter romanizes Howler’s first name as “Hacca” so we’re going to spell it like that now I guess (I suppose the H is silent). Also a bunch of other stuff happens with the various Stands and their respective users attacking each other.

Also I’m trying out using a new reader site MangaTaro and see how that goes. I’m trying to move our stuff over there too as another backup reader. But it takes a while cause we have to do every single chapter and there’s like 2000+ of those. I might do a little at a time or something. It took forever to get our whole library of manga onto Cubari and I’m not eager to spend hours and hours and hours doing it again on Bato.to or MangaTaro or anywhere else. But I think it’s a pretty good site so I’m trying to at least put the current ongoing stuff on there.

So, next issue of Ultra Jump (with Jojo) comes out December 18th Japan time. Volume 7 also comes out then. And for now I’m going back to working on Shima and Gintama. I’m gonna try to get a bunch more Shima done before the end of the year, I think. I’m enjoying this arc and translating through it. See you later!

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

Edit: This is now updated with the higher-resolution Chinese raws from Bilibili. All the links should have the latest version.

The JOJOLands Ch. 30
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Managing Director Shima Kōsaku Volume 4

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Managing Director Shima Kōsaku Volume 4

And here we are at volume 4. Believe it or not we’re half way done with Managing Director now. This volume is mainly about the changing landscape of Japan’s business in China and how China is/was changing as a country as it develops over the course of the 2000’s. We’re into mid-2003 at this point in the story. Also there’s some sword fights and kissing. And it’s also the first appearance of Kōtarō! So lots of stuff going on in this one.

I really like how this series sort of gives you a snapshot of a specific era and what folks were thinking about the future at that point. You feel like you’re seeing what actual people thought at the time and their worries about the future and looking back on it 20 years after the fact now you can see how it played out. Various cultural dynamics changing too.

I finished like 4 chapters in a day in this volume for some of the easier ones in the middle and it makes me wonder sometimes if I should just try to marathon through this series rather than doing one volume every month or two. But given how long the series is, we still wouldn’t be caught up even if I did a chapter a day for two years. Outside Director volume 7 came out a couple weeks ago and that’s the equivalent of volume 90 of the series as a whole (not counting the prequels or the sorta-canon spinoffs) and this one we’re releasing now is the equivalent of volume 34. And there’s enough magazine chapters for 2 more volumes already and it’s still going. But I dunno I’m gonna play it by ear and just try to do this when I feel like it and maybe I’ll get a lot done. It’s a fun series to translate once you know what all the subject matter is and you’re not spending a whole bunch of time looking up business terms and such to make sure you’re interpreting it right. If I finished 4 chapters a day every day I’d get all the way caught up in about 4 months. Anyhow I’m probably not gonna do that, but it’s just something I’ve been thinking about since we’ve been working on this series for 4 years now. Also I finished the first few chapters of volume 5 while I was waiting for folks to cleand then check this volume, so hope fully that one won’t take too long from now.

Anyhow, Jojo comes out soon and I’m still scanning the rest of those Gintama volumes. There haven’t been any other 3-Gatsu no Lion chapters announced so far either. So anyhow see ya later!

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

Managing Director Shima Kōsaku Volume 4 (Ch40-52)
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3-Gatsu no Lion (March Comes in Like a Lion) Volume 18

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Hey all, we’ve finally made it to volume 18. It sure has been a while, hasn’t it? The last 3-Gatsu no Lion volume we released back in September of 2023. This includes all the chapters released over those two years. This series has really come out pretty slowly, but it’s really been great. There’s so much emotion packed into these pages even though it’s only like 170 pages released over 2 years. This is a huge effort to do these, cause we need to re-redraw and clean all the pages, transfer the text over, find all the differences, update everything, etc. I hope you all enjoy, we’re doing our best to make the final version of all of this as high quality as possible. As usual this volume contains a bunch of little changes. Umino occasionally slightly alters lines or removes things or adds some visual changes. Though unlike the last few volumes this does NOT combine any chapters so the volume chapter numbers are still 7 chapters behind the magazine chapter numbers.

Magazine 202 is volume 195
Magazine 203 is volume 196
Magazine 204 is volume 197
Magazine 205 is volume 198
Magazine 206 is volume 199
Magazine 207 is volume 200
Magazine 208 is volume 201
Magazine 209 is volume 202
Magazine 210 is volume 203
Magazine 211 is volume 204
Magazine 212 is volume 205
Magazine 213 is volume 206
Magazine 214 is volume 207
Magazine 215 is volume 208

Besides this being higher resolution and containing all the changes, this volume as usual contains little new drawings and a couple pages of an afterward at the end where Umino-sensei updates us all on how she’s doing (though I guess she also has a twitter she does that at sometimes too). She says her plan is to make the next volume, volume 19, the last volume. So far we just have one chapter that’s been in that so far which is the one that came out last month. So far we don’t know when the next chapter comes out, as they only get announced one issue in advance (And sometimes those announcements end up being wrong). So we’ll see what the future holds! We’ll keep translating it, and hopefully Umino-sensei is able to draw the ending to the series she’s happy with.

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

3-Gatsu no Lion Volume 18 (Ch195-208)
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Managing Director Shima Kōsaku Volume 3

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Managing Director Shima Kōsaku Volume 3

Hey folks, we’re finally done with Managing Director Shima volume 3! Lots of stuff going on in this one as the China arc continues. A fun thing about this one is there’s a lot of discussion about how China was a growing economy and developing fast when this came out in 2002 and 2003 and they were at the time speculating about where the country would be in 10-20 years. And that’s where we’re at now! So you can see how accurate their predictions were. Anyhow I sure hope you all like manga about economics because there’s plenty more where that came from in this series.

In the meantime, we’re working on 3-Gatsu no Lion volume 18 now. We’re in the process of re-cleaning and re-redrawing the whole volume’s worth of chapters. Plus making all the changes that were made for the volume and all that like we did for the previous ones. I’m hoping that doesn’t take too long. And there’s no The JOJOLands this month so the next thing I’ll probably do is start on Shima volume 4. And I’m still scanning Gintama volumes when I have time among everything else (I spent a ton of free time getting all our stuff uploaded to Cubari recently so I need to take some time to do other stuff). Anyhow, go tell all your friends Shima Kōsaku is the best manga ever and tell them to read it.

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

Managing Director Shima Kōsaku Volume 3 (Ch27-39)
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3-Gatsu no Lion (March Comes in Like a Lion) 216

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Hey everybody, we FINALLY have another 3-Gatsu no Lion chapter after… shit 3 months? It’s been a while. Volume 18 finally goes on sale on the 29th, so once it does we’re gonna get that and do a volume version of it. That’s going to compile together magazine chapters 202 to 215. So the whole Shimada match. It’ll likely combine some chapters again and cause the magazine’s numbering to be even further off from the volume versions. It’ll start at volume chapter 195 and go to what will be called 210 or so. With 3-Gatsu no Lion a lot tends to change between the magazine versions and the volume versions, so that’ll take some time. There’s no 3-Gatsu next issue. Who knows when the next one is, but probably soon.

Otherwise, everything else is basically in the same place as a few days ago. We’re working on finishing up Director Shima volume 3. And still working on getting more Gintama stuff done when I can. That’s all I have time for at the moment. After ComicK went down, we’ve gotten our whole release library backed up on Image Chest/Cubari now, and I’ve added links to the Reader page and the tops of all the Downloads pages so I’m hoping those are easy to find. For now I’ll keep uploading new chapters to MangaDex even though a bunch of series were taken down from there and more could be taken down at any time. We’ll see if folks choose a new site to move everything over to at some point, for now I’ll be using those 2 and also I might use bato.to as a reader site to upload new releases to. See ya’ll later

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

3-Gatsu no Lion 216
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The JOJOLands Ch. 29

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The JOJOLands 28

Hey ya’ll so here’s what’s going on. Here’s chapter 29 of The Jojo series part 9 – The JOJOLands. There’s more fun fighting over a magical rock action in this one. There’s no new chapter next month (October) and the next chapter comes out November 19th Japan time.

So ComicK has closed down. And we were using that as our “main” place to upload to as an online reader new releases (You can still download them from this site same as always). So we need to move that somewhere else. This just happened a couple days ago so I’ll see where people ultimately move. For now I started a process of making a reader-mirror on Cubari.moe. There’s one URL for each series and I’m listing them all on the reader page you get to by clicking “Reader” in the site nav bar.

If you’re not aware how that works, Cubari is just a reader not an actual host, it’s taking images hosted somewhere else and sticking them in a manga reader. We’re hosting images on a hosting site called Image Chest which uses a single file stored on a Github repo to create a JSON document to hold all the metadata which lets you make one big page for reading one series. Also you can then edit/manage those things with facaccimo and batch upload/update them with a python command line tool called Kaguya. So it’s using a bunch of different independently-made tools and I have to do this for like 1500-some-odd chapters of manga which require having the correct volume number, chapter number, and title, so it’ll take some time. (Though you can sort of quickly and easily change image hosts if there’s a problem with one once it’s all done, just by re-running all the batches with a different image host’s API). I put up all the manga we’ve done recently on there and I’ll be going through some older stuff slowly.

I’m also going to upload to MangaDex where we still can (We can’t for chapters that were taken down specifically and they may take more down in the future) and I may look into uploading our whole library to bato.to as well but I haven’t had time to start on that yet. I hope you all can be patient with that, and hopefully another good safe place shows up. Most of the big aggregator sites don’t have tools for scanlators they’re just ripping from some other place and putting them up on their site and we can’t do things like upload when we want or edit them so we can put up the fixed/better raws versions of everything. So please support the sites that let us do that sort of thing. So that’s how I’ve spent my last couple days, sounds fun right?

In other news Managing Director Shima Kousaku volume 3 is almost done, I have like a chapter and a half left to translate and then we need to typeset it and check everything. I have 7 Gintama volumes left to scan which I do whenever I have some time to do that, once those are all done I’m gonna get back to trying to do more volume versions of that once they’re all digitized. Though I don’t know how frequently I’m gonna do them, how much work I’m going to do in every single one, etc. So all that’s happening. How are you all doing?

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

Edit: This is now updated with the higher-resolution Chinese raws from Bilibili. All the links should have the latest version.

The JOJOLands Ch. 29
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The JOJOLands Ch. 28

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The JOJOLands 28

Here’s more of this! Ok see you next month! Please go check out our scanlation of volume 6 from a week or so ago. Next month’s chapter comes out on the 19th as usual. In the meantime I’m working on Director Shima volume 3, that’s about it right now. I’m constantly trying to just balance everything going on in my life so that’s it right now.

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

Edit: This is now updated with the higher-resolution Chinese raws from Bilibili. All the links should have the latest version.

The JOJOLands Ch. 28
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The JOJOLands Volume 6

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The JOJOLands Volume 6

Okay, here we are, volume 6! As usual, this is mainly just a more-final version of these chapters. They’re using the physical volume scans which have the highest resolution, more image data on the top and bottom of the pages, and have all the little additions and changes Araki-sensei makes after the magazine versions. We made a few tiny adjustments to the text but it’s nothing much. And it has those couple extra pages in between chapters with descriptions of Stands and all that. I spent like the last two weeks of my time working on this every day so I hope you all enjoy it.

Meanwhile, there haven’t been any new 3-Gatsu no Lion chapters. Volume 18 is still scheduled for September 28th. And I’m working on Managing Director Shima Kōsaku volume 3. The next regular The JOJOLands chapter comes out the 19th Japan time. And I’m very exhausted from too much happening in my life so I’m trying not to overwork myself with this stuff. Anyhow, enjoy this.

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

The JOJOLands Volume 6 (Ch. 21-20)
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