Hey there everybody. So I’ve finally had time to do another one of these. I talked about this a bit back last May when we finished volume 72. But since we finished Kokou no Hito I have some more time to work on doing some volume versions of this series. I explained this all basically in the previous post last year and not much is different so I’ll just refer you to that post for details. But basically we’d like to do volume versions of Gintama volume 46 to 71 which we’ve only been able to do with the lower-quality versions from the Shounen Jump magazine scans.
But it takes a good 20-30-ish hours of work to do one of these, even considering the translation is already done, so it’s hard to justify doing that much time and effort for 26 volumes. But here’s one. And there’s 25 to go now. Hopefully we get more done in not as long. We can automate a few steps but every chapter needs to be re-cleaned and all the redraws redone in addition to translating all the extras that are only in the volume. The automation process aligns them to the digital volume raws which are super low res and look even worse than the scanned Jump magazine raws tbh. And for some reason there’s a handful of pixels on a couple of the edges that are in the digital volumes but not the physical volumes so we then need to copy over those edges from the digital volumes to make a “final” “complete” version. Plus we’re trying to fix any mistakes and we’re changing the sound effects to be typeset in-line with the images rather than in the margins. All that takes a long time to do for 200 pages. So there’s no way to do this super fast.
I’m trying to get the rest of them scanned. I think I need to scan 20 more. I figure if we can at least digitize them then maybe we can eventually do at least do some sort of really quick version of these and just skip some parts like doing the extras and fixing up the sound effects and the translation, just so some kind of high-res version exists. Teppy, who’s mainly the head mod on the discord, has volunteered to help with this so we’ll see how that goes. If he’s able to work on them consistently and get them fully cleaned and such regularly, then my workload is just to translate the extras and fix up the translations. In which case I can justify spending the time to do it. So hopefully that goes well, otherwise this will probably continue to be just a thing we work on every “once in a while” with no fixed schedule. I just don’t wanna spend 6 months of my free time redoing all of these, it’s probably not worth it (I’d probably do that if there were like 10 of these but there’s 26). I’m not even sure how many people are gonna read this at this point as the series ended in 2019 and it’s largely just a visual upgrade. Course if anyone else would like to volunteer, you can join the discord and DM me or email me at kewl0210@gmail.com or contact me in some other way. Just understand that it’s a lot of hours of tedious work to do these, so you need to be willing to stick with it.
As for the volume itself, this is mainly just exactly the magazine version in higher resolution with more detail plus the extras are included. A few panels have added or changed highlights and backgrounds. It no longer has the insert texts and series logo on the first page? Not much else. The results of the 5th character popularity poll are in this and for some reason they’re slightly different from the magazine version (They seemingly lost track of a handful of votes and then included them in the volume version). This volume has Bansai’s big final moments which I really love.
So besides this I’m working on Managing Director Shima volume 2 and the next 3-Gatsu no Lion chapter comes out in the next issue of Young Animal. See yall later.
Edit: Apparently how this will work with ComicK is I have to upload the new chapters then at some point they will be “combined” with the old Jump versions thus overriding them with the new versions. But someone in their staff has to o it manually. I opened a ticket about it so they should do that any time now. But until then there’s two versions of these chapters by Hi Wa Mata Noboru on the site.
Edit 2: The chapters are now in the correct place on ComicK now. Apparently in this case it will use the OLD chapter’s URL so the URL has been updated.
Also, we have a Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF
Gintama Volume 71 (Ch636-646)
Mega
Online Reader (ComicK)
