Friday, October 11, 2013

Bloody Mary Chapter 16 + Epilogue (END)

Here it is, the conclusion of the Bloody Mary saga. And what a saga it was.

It all started when we completed the beautiful beautiful Tsubame (give it a read, it's only one thin volume of pure art), and started searching for some other color manga to do. I mean, our group name says it all, right? Well, unfortunately, color mangas with publicly available raws are few and far between, but we found the first two volumes of Bloody Mary without too many problems. The art and the story seemed nice, and although the proofreader objected, in the end the project was picked up.

The sailing was smooth for the first two volumes, but then we realized that the manga has four volumes, and no raws for v3 and v4 were too be found on the internet. Then we also realized what we paid no attention to in the beginning: this manga was long out of print, thus we could not realistically expect that someone would decide to scan it for the public all of a sudden. So that meant a) we needed someone to order and scan the raws; b) we needed someone to buy the raws (incidentally, color manga is quite a bit more expensive than regular black and white one, even though color volumes have about half the page count). The first problem resolved itself quite nicely through various connections in other groups, and we decided to solve the second one through a donation drive among the fans (some of you might remember it). To our surprise, the response was very positive and we secured the funds, at which point the scanner went to order the used volumes and... oops, no used Japanese bookseller would ship to a foreign address. Wherever we tried, the story was the same: the booksellers that had the manga in stock wouldn't ship outside the country, and the ones that would didn't have it in stock. And no, I don't know any scanners residing in Japan. What a bummer. The donations were returned and the idea was given up on.

Months passed... But the little completeness freak in the back of my head wouldn't let me mark this project as dropped. I kept complaining about this to anyone who would listen. And one day another scanner tells me that he sees used volume 4 in stock at a bookseller site he usually buys from. Of course, he can buy and scan it, but then there's the question of payment... That brought up two problems at once: 1) What the hell do I need volume 4 without volume 3 for? But if I don't get it and it disappears, and then volume 3 turns up in stock, we'll be right where we started, with no raws. The longer we wait, the less of a chance that we'll ever be able to buy volume 3 even used. 2) How do I pay? Paying in order to scanlate is a bit absurd, and PayPal wasn't an option to begin with... I can't ask fans for donations anymore, because there's no way to reach them without releases, and besides, it would look stupid to ask for donations after we already did so in the past volume. But the little completeness freak wouldn't quit, and the following deal was reached: the scanner would order volume 4 and with no money, I would have to pay for it with my body. Yes, the world of scanlation is cruel like that. Alright, I'm being a little facetious: in compensation I would translate a volume of a manga the scanner picked (which I am still doing to this day, I may add, since the release rate is somewhat slow).

After volume 4 was secured, it made the lack of volume 3 raws even more glaring. That's where I pulled out the final trump card: there is a certain site in Japan that buys whatever you need there and ships it to you for the cost + exorbitant markup and commission. And that's what we used in the end with yet another scanner to acquire volume 3. I don't even want to think about how much that one book ended up costing. Needless to say, I paid with my body yet again. So in order to bring the second half of Bloody Mary to you, my dear readers, a lot of other random manga got scanlated.

So there I was, with volumes 3 and 4, covered in scanlation debts. But I was optimistically looking forward to finally getting this project released. At that exact moment, the editor of this project (and also, the only editor in the whole group), decided to retire from scanlation. And there I was again, with volumes 3 and 4 I went through so much trouble to secure, indebted to scanners, and no editor, facing the grim prospect of looking for a new one. Why was the prospect grim? Remember, we had no editors left in the group. So we couldn't recruit a noob since there was no one to train him. The project isn't popular or well known, so it's not like experienced editors would be applying in droves. Even if someone applies, this is a color manga that requires different skills, so it's not clear they'd be able to handle it. But more importantly, as anyone in scanlation knows, the odds of an applicant staying to finish the job are quite low. Probably only one in five applicants ever do any significant amount of work. The rest quietly disappear after wasting a lot of your time. If that happened to me, then I'd be back to square one. Running around offering this project to other groups is also an iffy proposition, and it would be nice to finish it in the group it was started in. That's when I had a flash of inspiration: I remembered that there was a certain Russian group retranslating our releases. Their translator had actually left comments on our releases and that's how I tracked them down. We struck a deal: I would provide raws and translations to English, they would provide everything else including English typeset and, of course, they keep all that for their own releases. That's how our very successful partnership with Shinra Tensei Manga Team was born, which now extends beyond just Bloody Mary. This is the way a translator-only group makes releases happen. :)

Finally, I got the release archive from our partners, and was about to make the exciting announcement of the project's relaunch when I found out that there was no place where to make that announcement left: while all this was going on, the group's founder got bored with scanlation and also forgot to pay for our site and domain. The entire site was wiped out, the domain was lost, but the worst thing of all, all our old releases that were hosted on it were gone as well. Oh the annoyance... It was all the more annoying because I didn't know if it was a momentary or a permanent lapse, since the guy was off in some god-forsaken land and not responding. That's when I decided to start this blog as a replacement. Since I'm still posting on this blog, you can deduce that the lapse turned out to be quite permanent. Although I'm still too lazy to do anything in terms of design; function over form, right?

So yes, it was a long road filled with obstacles, but we're here nevertheless. The final chapter. Only the second project this group ever completed. Despite everything, this was a fun ride. I repackaged all our releases into volume bundles, so you can more conveniently download the whole manga. Or if you just want the latest chapter, it is here as well:

Monday, October 7, 2013

Yuru Yuru Chapter 20

Let's take a break from Bloody Mary for a moment and read a manga about three silly joshi kousei* who:
1. Don't kill people through sex
2. Don't fight over turf
3. Are not protagonists of a borderline hentai manga

Instead, they go for a swim and have some ice cream.

Get your chapter here:

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Bloody Mary Chapter 15

Now that the number of comments for Bloody Mary corresponds to its popularity relative to our other projects, everything is right in the world and we can release the penultimate chapter of this manga without much delay. Yes, the end is nigh.

EDIT: No one even told me I had the manga name misspelled in the post title...

Get Shibuya Wars: Episode XV - Attack of the Clones here: