Azumanga Recycle - Kiyohiko Azuma (2001) - featuring Tenchi Muyo!, Battle Athletes, & Magical Girl Pretty Sammy

 

Recycling is important, you know.

Here it is! After a year and two months, I have finalized my scanlation of Azumanga Recycle!

If you are not already familiar, click here to read up a detailed account of what this book is, and what this project even entailed.

Honestly, in this moment, I mostly just feel relief—157 pages is a lot to translate by myself, and I've never done a full book before! But in the spirit of pushing to work on it a little bit as a somewhat consistent pace, I have somehow found myself at the end of this book. And honestly, the relief isn't coming from me not wanting to work any more—rather, it's because I can finally put this out for people to read, and I can finally start working on other stuff! Yaaay!!!!

With that being said, here are the download links for the complete package:

MEGA (Direct Download)

Nyaa (Torrent)

If you're a fan of my work, please consider following me on Twitter, or checking out my Ko.fi! You can find those by clicking here!

Special thanks to the Tenchi Muyo wiki for info that helped me translate! Double special thanks to whoever made sure each character’s page contained the obscure kanji their name uses!!!

My thoughts exactly.

See you next time!

Azumanga Recycle Part 4: Books

Swag Pixy Misa

 

This is the fourth and final section of my scan and translation of Azumanga Recycle, which you can read the details about here. 

EDIT: You can now download the translation of the complete book here!

Can you believe it? This is the final section of Azumanga Recycle, scanned and translated by me! This section contains the final 43 pages of the book, in English for the first time! This section is a little bit of a grab bag, and its theme this time is "Books".  What's nice about this section is that the comics here were originally drawn in a book format, meaning that they actually take up the entire page. This means that they're easier to read, the artwork is more detailed, and each page is less dense with words, making it easier for me to get through!!!

The first comic presented here is one that was created for a Tenchi Muyo mook, which is a type of low-frequency magazine that's stuffed with content, similar to a quarterly. This mook seemed to feature information on part of Tenchi Muyo's 2nd OVA series and features a story with the mother of Sasami and Ayeka, Misaki.

😭😭😭

After this is a brief comic that was made as a magazine advertisement for the mook, followed by another full-page special: Sammy 4999, a cross over between Battle Athletes and Magical Girl Pretty Sammy!

Now this is the crossover the world's been waiting for!

This crossover comic was actually made specifically for Azumanga—that is, the original, large-size book that Recycle is a budget reprinting of! It might get a little confusing since that large book has never been scanned or translated into English yet, but that may change soon...!

After this comic, there is another collection of illustrations Azuma did for more Tenchi Muyo! CDs, followed by two afterwords, one by the editor, Hideki Satomi, and another by Kiyohiko Azuma himself. This is followed by an original illustration of a very stylish Pixy Misa, as you've seen at the top, but even though the copyright page comes immediately after this, it isn't quite the end!

Following the copyright information is a final group of color pages! The first page has a collection of Battle Athletes 4-panel comics, used in magazine advertisements for the OVA series. This is followed by a color illustration of a poster made to promote the original Azumanga. And last, but certainly not least, for any fans (?) of Old Man Ryo-Ohki, we have a pair of comics starring him!

It's been so long, old friend...

These two comics were originally digital files that came on the original Azumanga's appendix CD-ROM. However, since this budget release did not come with a CD, they saw it fit to print these two comics in a physical form. And now you too can enjoy the adventures (?) of Old Man Ryo-Ohki as he meets Akari and Sasami!

As you can see, this final section is stuffed with a good variety. Here's a list of where everything comes from:

• Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki Part 2 (Mook)
• Anime V (Magazine Advertisement)
  
• Azumanga (The Original, Larger Version of this very Book!)
• Tenchi Muyo! CD-Box
• Battle Athletes Magazine Advertisements
• Azumanga Appendix CD-ROM

And that's it! That's the rest of this book! These are the last pages, and with me sending out this blog post, I have officially put the entirety of an English version of Azumanga Recycle into the world!

...But my work isn't done yet! I'd like to consider these four separate downloads as something of a pre-release. It is true that now every single page, and every single bit of text on those pages is translated into English, but I would not consider this the final version. I still want to go back and scrutinize every single line of text I wrote to make corrections. I've made typos, typed out somewhat odd sentences, and even made a couple of minor translation mistakes that I've already gone ahead and fixed. But before I release my final, "official" version, I would like to go through all the pages again with a fine-tooth comb.

(And also, if you spot any typos, or read any lines that feel odd to you, please let me know! I'm only human, after all!!!)

Once I do all my checking, I will post my final version in a single download, and also remove all the downloads for the individual parts. I ask anyone that is itching to upload this stuff to one of those manga-sharing sites to hold their trigger fingers for a second—please only begin to spread my work around once I post this final, complete version!

As always, I'll post it on my webzone right here, while also letting everyone know on my Twitter account. You can check out my social media links right here!

As for future prospects, well, I'll let you guys know what I plan on doing in the future once I make some progress :)

That's enough text! Here is the download link for this section:

EDIT: You can now download the translation of the complete book here!

 

Me too, Sasami-chan. Me too...

Enjoy! Special thanks to the Tenchi Muyo wiki for all the information to help me translate.

Azumanga Recycle Part 3: 4 Panel Comics & Movies

Swag Kiyone

This is the third section of my scan and translation of Azumanga Recycle, which you can read the details about here. 

EDIT: You can now download the translation of the complete book here!

This download has the next 21 pages of Azumanga Recycle, scanned and translated by me. (Pages 91-112). This section (technically two little sections) is a bit shorter, however it's pretty special as the bulk of it contains some Tenchi Muyo-themed 4 panel comics (or 4-koma) that Kiyohiko Azuma drew for the magazine Anime V! (Along with some he did for budget VHS/LD rereleases of the OVAs)

Wow... that's a nice pair of comics right there!

This section was pretty exciting to get to as you get to see Azuma at arguably his best. Anyone familiar with Azumanga Daioh will recognize this format, and by reading it you'll see a bit of Azuma's earlier comedic chops that he would refine and use for this own original work later down the line! This may be exactly where "Azumanga" was truly born.

Also wanted to give thanks to CrashOveride on Twitter for sharing with me a photo of a comic from the back of one of these Laserdisc rereleases! He said he's planning on acquiring most if not all of the Japanese LDs of Tenchi Muyo to scan and capture!

Couldn't get a photo without a bigass shadow? (jk ily xoxo)

Also stuck onto the end of this section are a couple of comics that Azuma created for brochures given out to anybody that went to see either of the first two Tenchi Muyo movies in the theater!

Pre-rotated, for your viewing convenience. Don't forget to tip me!!!

What's funny about this movie section is that, as a matter of fact, someone else translated it before me! (Thanks to Chicago Ted on Twitter for sharing this with me!)

Remember the golden rule of humor: "It's funny because it's unexpected!"

 ...But thankfully the translation is pretty terrible and inaccurate, so my work didn't go to waste! (Not to mention the scan quality is pretty bad too!) My guess is that whoever tried their hand at translating this wasn't actually any good at Japanese and could only ready simple words and such, so a lot of assumptions and, um, "creative liberties" were made. And since this was from the early 2000's internet, these dead zones were filled in with what can best be described as "Something Awful-esque writing". Y'know, in case you went too long having forgotten what that dark period of the Internet was like... bleh.

Anyway, the comics are from the following sources, in order:

• Anime V (Magazine)
• Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki Reprise VHS
  
• Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki THX LD-BOX
• Battle Athletes Promotional Booklet/Magazine Advertisements
• Tenchi Muyo! in LOVE Theater Pamphlet
• Tenchi Muyo! A Midsummer's Eve Theater Pamphlet

(As stated in the first part, in the US these two movies were released as "Tenchi the Movie: Tenchi Muyo in Love" & Tenchi the Movie 2: The Daughter of Darkness".)

Also, at the very end of the section is another original illustration of a character, but this time it's Kiyone! (As seen at the top of this page)

We're finally nearing the end of this book, and given the word density of the earlier sections, it takes quite a bit for a single person to translate all of it. But I'm finally at the final section of the book, which is much less dense with words and even just pages compared to the first one. It's a little longer than this section, however it shouldn't be as painful of a slog as some of the earlier comics, which were quite wordy and dense. This last section focuses on a couple of comics that were actually published in book form, meaning that the art will finally take up the entire page! Can you believe it?

As always I sometimes post bits and pieces of pages I think are funny as I work on them to my Twitter account here. As always I'll both post updates to Twitter and to my personal webzone right here. Getting to the end of this book is exciting, I can't wait to put a bow on this book and claim the entire thing, both in its preservation and newly found accessibility in the English language. So that's pretty cool.

Anyway, enough yapping! Here is the download link for this section:

EDIT: You can now download the translation of the complete book here!

 

😓

 

Enjoy! Special thanks to the Tenchi Muyo wiki for all the information to help me translate.

Azumanga Recycle Part 2: Compact Discs/Video Games

 

Swag Ichino

 

This is the second section of my scan and translation of Azumanga Recycle, which you can read the details about here. 

EDIT: You can now download the translation of the complete book here!

This download has the next 43 pages of Azumanga Recycle, scanned and translated by me. (Pages 47-90). This section features comics created for the booklets included with several music & PlayStation CDs, mostly from the Tenchi Muyo! franchise. Also included are some comics for the Battle Athletes Victory CD soundtrack release, along with a comic found in the booklet for one of the Magical Girl Pretty Sammy video games.

Oh, Ryoko, you crazy girl!

 

The comics come from the following music CD & game releases, and are shown in this order:

• Tenchi Muyo! Radio Makunouchi Bento (CD)
  
• Tenchi Muyo! Radio-Television Box (CD)
  
• Tenchi Muyo! Radio Jukebox (CD)
  
• Tenchi Muyo! We Don't Need School! (PlayStation)
  
• Magical Girl Pretty Sammy: Part 2 (PlayStation)
• Battle Athletes Victory: Behind the Superstars (CD)
  

Similar to the last section, the final image is an illustration of Ichino from Battle Athletes made specifically for this book, as shown at the top.

These first two sections were the most bulky in terms of text, but the next couple are a little shorter... Still, I never, ever, ever promise a release date for anything I work on!!! But even with the dense amount of text, this section was quite fun to tackle - I think I really got into a nice groove with my Photoshop work, and everything looks pretty dang nice and professional, if I do say so myself. :) Not to mention, Azuma created some genuinely funny comics here - if you spent your childhood watching Toonami back in the day and have fond memories of Tenchi Muyo, then this is for you!

Here is the download link for this section:

EDIT: You can now download the translation of the complete book here!

 

oooh....

 

Enjoy! Special thanks to the Tenchi Muyo wiki for all the information to help me translate.

Azumanga Recycle Part 1: Laserdiscs

 

Swag Akari

This is the first section of my scan and translation of Azumanga Recycle, which you can read the details about here.

EDIT: You can now download the translation of the complete book here!

This download has the first 46 pages of Azumanga Recycle, scanned and translated by me. The bulk it is taken up by the first section of comics, called "Laserdiscs", and contains gag comics drawn by Kiyohiko Azuma that were published with the Laserdisc and VHS releases of episodes of Tenchi Muyo! and Battle Athletes. 

Man, Tenchi Muyo is such a weird franchise...

The comics come from the following releases, and are shown in this order:

• Tenchi In Tokyo
• Tenchi the Movie: Tenchi Muyo in Love
• Tenchi the Movie 2: The Daughter of Darkness
• Battle Athletes (OVA)
  
• Tenchi Universe

It caps off with the original illustration of Akari, shown above.

Note that for pages 2-3 & 34-45, the image files actually contains two pages. This is because the book was bound to be read from right-to-left, but these particular pages have comics that were made to be read from left-to-right. (So the book is bound like any manga, but when you get to these pages, you're expected to begin reading on, say, page 35 on the left, and continue to page 34 on the right. Confusing, huh?)

Here is the download link for this section:

EDIT: You can now download the translation of the complete book here!

 

how i will look in 30 years

Enjoy! Special thanks to the Tenchi Muyo wiki for all the information to help me translate.

Introducing my Next Project: Azumanga Recycle!

 

*Not to be confused with Azumanga Daioh

 

Finally! It's that time again! Time to finally get a look at what I've been working on for the past year or so: it's Azumanga Recycle!

...But what is this, exactly? Answering the question of what this book even is is more complicated than you think, especially given the lack of information about it on the English-speaking Internet. And no, despite its title, it has nothing to do with Azumanga Daioh, besides sharing the same author.

To begin, let's go over a bit of history. Before Kiyohiko Azuma became famous through the publication of Azumanga Daioh and Yotsuba&!, he was something of a prolific gag-artist, and began working on parody comics of Urusei Yatsura and the like ever since he joined a doujin circle in high school. Later he would begin his own self-published magazine under the name of A-ZONE, which later transformed into its own website where he published his own webcomics. It's around this time the silly gag comics he created caught the attention of several larger magazines, and even the production companies of some of the anime he was parodying.

From here he began a career in the second half of the 90's in which he produced a large variety of gag-comics, ranging from unofficial doujinshis to officially-sanctioned parody comics published in various magazines. This is where those Azuma-made Evangelion gag comics floating around the internet come from, he also produced gag comics for Donkey Kong Country, Battle Arean Toushinden, Darkstalkers, King of Figthers, Street Fighter, and many more.

I don't own it myself, but the mercari seller very helpfully included a close-up photo of one of the comics Azuma worked on. I am as surprised as you are.

One of his Evangelion Doujins (There are multiple!) You can read it here: Link!

After making nothing but parody comics for a while, around 1998 he tried to flex his own creative muscle with an original idea: Wallaby, which was published in GAME-JIN magazine. (You can read my translation of that here!) This didn't seem to make too great of an impact, but his next work Azumanga Daioh, later led into his smash success Yotsuba&!, both of which are published in Dengenki Daioh.

...But then what is this Azumanga Recycle thing, then? Well, you see, during his stint as a gag-comic artist, Azuma was hired by the animation production company Pioneer LDC to create comics of their many anime series, including Tenchi Muyo!, Battle Athletes, and Magical Girl Pretty Sammy. This was a pretty big deal for the young Azuma, as his gag comics would be included with official merchandise for these shows: Laserdisc and VHS tape releases of the episodes, CDs of the character songs and soundtracks, video games, and even movie brochures! With the stroke of a pen, Azuma brought his surreal sense of humor to these characters.

As an example, here's one of his comics printed on the back of the Laserdisc sleeve for the Japanese release of Tenchi the Movie 2: The Daughter of Darkness.

 

Thanks to crashoveride953 on twitter for sharing this yahoo auctions screengrab.

It seems that Pioneer was impressed with Azuma's work, as he ended up creating a lot of gag comics for them (espeically for Tenchi Muyo!), and in 1998, they decided to produce a collection of the work he created for them. Given that it was all Azuma's manga, they bestowed upon it the title of Azumanga: Digitally Remastered Edition.

Yes, this is actually where the name "Azumanga" comes from.

The book was huge—literally—as it was made to be the size of a Laserdisc sleeve as to accurately reproduce the size of the comics as they were originally published. The "Digitally Remastered Edition" is also there due to its inclusion of a mini CD-ROM. This CD-ROM is interesting as it includes some extra comics he worked on that weren't included in the book for whatever reason, along with some neat behind-the-scenes sketches and even some faxes.

As neat as this book was, its large size and the inclusion of the CD-ROM brought about some issues; some bookstores had issues stocking the book, it was difficult to handle, and I imagine it was quite expensive to produce. (Not to mention—it's too big for my scanner!!!)

After the publication of this book, Azuma borrowed the name for his original series Azumanga Daioh, serialized in Dengenki Daioh. (Get it? It's Azuma's manga in Dengenki Daioh.) Of course this would lead to nothing but confusion for anybody who saw this older book, thinking this and Azumanga Daioh were related in any way.

In direct response to Azuma's newfound success, Pioneer allowed him to republish Azumanga in a smaller, shinsho-sized tankōbon volume with Dengenki Comics, in a very similar format to their publications of standalone Azumanga Daioh volumes.

Size Comparison (Recycle has already been debound for scanning)

From here, Pioneer would also publish Azumanga 2, another anthology of even more comics he created for them. This is where Wallaby was first collected, and Try! Try! Try! was published, but I'll get into that book at a later date.

As implied by the name, this new book is mostly just recycled content from the first Azumanga. Other than the size, Recycle does not contain a CD-ROM, but instead actually publishes a few comics from the CD in its pages. This smaller size probably made it much easier to publish, and even makes it easier for me as the pages are small enough for me to scan!

The same comic, in two formats. You can really see on the right how it was meant for a Laserdisc booklet.

While the contents of the two books are very similar, they are not exactly the same: for example, the original Azumanga contains an extra gag comic for El-Hazard that is not included in Recycle. (For anybody worried about missing out, don't worry! I recently sent my debound copy of Azumanga to be scanned by Marty McFlies, who has a big enough scanner and has experience scanning vinyls and Laserdisc covers.)

But until I start working on that beast of a project, I have scanned Recycle and have been translating it for the past half-year or so. Let's take a brief look at the table of contents, shall we?

Akari is cute!!!

To summarize, the book is divided into five sections: Laserdiscs, which included comics that were printed with Laserdisc and VHS releases of anime episodes, either on the box or in the booklet; CDs & Games, which as you can guess are comics that were printed in the booklets included in the CD jewelcase of some music CDs or Playstation games, 4-Koma, which as the name suggests are 4-panel comics published in a variety of sources such as magazines, VHS booklets, and the like; Movies, which are comics that were published with the brochures included with the purchase of tickets for the first two Tenchi Muyo movies, and books, which includes a comic that was published in a standalone mook, along with a comic that was created especially for the original Azumanga: Digitally Remastered Edition. At the end of each section is an original character illustration by Kiyohiko Azuma himself, each one created specifically for Azumanga Recycle.

An example page. Very helpfully, the source of where the comic was originally published in printed, along with a comment from (presumably) Azuma himself. Neat!

Translators Note: As I worked on further sections, it's become clearer that the person most likely writing the comments are actually Azuma's partner and the graphic designer/layout artist of this book, Hideki Satomi. He seems to have founded the TRIATHLON studio that later morphed into YOTUBA SUTAZIO. Neat!

Phew, that's a lot. And I'm translating it all, baby!!!

I'm very excited to be working on this project. Compared to the two short one-shots I did, taking on a whole book practically by myself has been quite the challenge—but it's been a lot of fun! Unlike my last couple projects, I don't believe anybody has scanned this before me. It's possible somebody may have tried translating some of the comics off a VHS booklet or something, but to me knowledge, I am the first to preserve and translate this particular book, which is a huge honor!

The increase in the number of pages and the much higher density of words per page has been quite daunting, but after working on it for a while, I've finally finished the first section, and I hope to continue on a good pace going into the new year. I appreciate everybody's patience regarding the release schedule for this project.

If you're a fan of Kiyohiko Azuma, or Tenchi Muyo!, or Battle Athletes, I hope you enjoy this little treat!

EDIT: You can now download the translation of the complete book here!

Translation Comparison of Try! Try! Try! - The Difference of 20 years

 

I've always been interested by the process of translation, especially Japanese-to-English translation. The two languages are so grammatically different, even if there was a 1-1 match for each word in both languages (there isn't), just the differences in grammar alone would make a word-to-word translation incomprehensible. At best, you might get a somewhat-readable sentence that sounds like something Yoda would say, if you're lucky.

That's why there's always a degree of creativity that comes with every translation. Even something as banal as a legal or medical document demands at least the slightest bit of creative thought to accurately translate even a simple sentence. For example, in Japanese, the subject of a sentence is often dropped if it's considered obvious for the listener to know who or what is being referred to; in English, such a thing would be ungrammatical. You can't just say "Went to school." as a sentence by itself, but you more or less can in Japanese if it's considered already obvious who exactly is going to school. As such, even the most simple sentences can require a creative choice made on the part of the translation, such as if you write the name of who went to school, or if you instead decide to use a pronoun. These creative choices require both an understanding of the original speaker's intention with their sentence, but also a cultural and linguistical understanding of how an equivalent sentence may be said in the same context in the target language. Complicating things, as is in the case of a manga, the translator would (ideally) be aiming to produce writing that is of the same caliber of that seen in a comic written by a native English speaker, and would elicit a similar reading experience.