Oooookay, and here we are, volume 9! This volume contains the grand finale of the president-change drama arc. And then a whole bunch of other stuff after that. And with 9 volumes done that means we are past the half way point of the 17 volumes of Section Chief Shima Kōsaku! Man we’ve really made a lot of progress. It’s been almost exactly a year since we released volume 1 now, I think it’s gone pretty well. I started it while I was still doing Takeshi which was kind of a lot to be doing at once so the first few had a bit gap between releases. But the last few have been 3 weeks to a month apart which is kind of blazing fast when you consider how much text is in each of these.
This volume’s got a lot. Including the end of the aforementioned story arc, it’s got a bunch more characterization of recurring characters and continues building the overarching story. Also the manga turns into a boxing manga for a little while for some reason.
I dunno if anyone’s all that interested in this but I’ve been trying to track down the color pages for this series if I can. We’ve been including the extra color pages from the bunkobans and any magazine covers or color pages I can locate at the end of the volumes as extras. If you’re not aware, the color pages are in the original magazine but then they’re often not included when the series is compiled into books of just that series, but sometimes there’s some kind of “collector’s edition” that has all the color pages. This series has a LOT of editions, most of which are out of print. This series has been popular for a long time and as a result it has a lot of editions and reprints and repackaged versions. The earlier the part of the series it is, the more editions it has. So with Section Chief being the first, it has the most. But even then none of them just… have all the color pages. They’re all basically the same product every time despite having tons of editions.
It has tankoubons (the original volumes), bunkobans (pocket paperback size editions), shinsouhens (special editions, like bunkobans but more pages per book and fewer total books), gold soushuuhens (compilation editions, these weird larger editions on cheap paper they only did for volumes 1-14 with sometimes different art on the covers), wide aizoubans (wide collector’s editions which are pretty much the same as the shinsouhens but with different jackets), chronicles (A sort of selection of specific chapters. Labeled by a range of years they came out rather than being numbered), zenshuus (completed works editions, which are expensive deluxe things in boxes), encore editions (big 350+ page books labeled by what age Shima is in them), platinum comics editions (This is some other sort of big cheap version), selections (These just have names about what are in them, like ones specifically about Shima’s love life), and Kaigen Shima Kōsaku edtions (This is a digital-only version that is just the digital versions repackaged with a different cover and more pages per digital book).
And among these they have different versions of some of the color pages. Like the color pages in the bunkobans I’ve been putting in the releases sometimes put the original drawing on an abstract background and sometimes they do stuff like stretch one panel across a double page spread or make one panel be tinted blue or yellow or something so it looks kinda artsy instead of like the original page. They also don’t include all of them. Recently I found out that the Gold Soushuuhens contain some of the regular color pages that are part of the actual comic so I bought those and we’ll be including them from now on, though they only go up to volume 14 and they only contain the color pages from the first chapter of each volume, not the ones in the middle. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of online resource that says what color pages are in each of the other editions and I don’t think it’s worth it to me to buy them to try to find out because that would end up being really expensive just to find out the likely answer of “this has the same ones as the bunkobans”. So as a result we’ll have a few more color pages I found in the Gold Soushuuhens and if I ever find proof that one of the other editions is worth buying I might get one of those but probably I think we’ll be sticking with just these. I added the color pages from them to volumes 1-8 in all the usual locations you can get them.
I should also mention that previously I had a couple names romanized wrong, it should’ve been “Tomabechi” not “Tomapechi” and “Usami” not “Usabi”. I went back and changed all these a couple weeks ago but I feel I should mention that.
There’s no Ikoku Nikki this month, and although it was announced a 3-Gatsu no Lion chapter was coming out it was delayed due to Umino-sensei being ill, and supposedly 3-Gatsu will be resuming in October. So because we haven’t had either of those series or Jojo to do these have been coming out pretty fast. It’s probably not gonna keep up at this pace though. October has Ikoku Nikki and 3-Gatsu plus the new DRCL volume is coming out so that’s going to occupy a lot of my time, and I’m translating and typesetting these Shima volumes on my own. I’ve also been trying to get Shino Ura’s other one-volume manga of short stories done but it’s been quite a slog and is taking way longer than I expected it do. Those stories are full of a lot of abstract language and lore. Essentially that’s what I’ll be focusing on for the next month or so in addition to working on Shima volume 10. So a lot going on there.
Check out my summary here of what this series is about if you haven’t seen it yet.
Also, we have a new Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF
Section Chief Shima Kо̄saku Volume 9 (Ch76-86)
Mega
Online Reader (Mangadex)
