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| *Still not to be confused with Azumanga Daioh |
It's the time of the year again! And I'm not just announcing it this time, oh no, today I'm putting out a full new release! Introducing, a full English translation of Azumanga (1998)!
...So what is this, you may ask? If you are familar with my previous release of Azumanga Recycle (which you can read the introduction to here.), you'll know that, before he became famous with his own original series, Kiyohiko Azuma was a prolific gag manga artist. From here he was contracted by Pioneer LDC to produce manga for their various anime series, including Tenchi Muyo! and others. Eventually this manga was collected into a single book, and that book was reprinted in a smaller form called Azumanga Recycle.
But what about this original book, you may ask? Why was there a need to reprint it in a smaller size? And how come you translated the reprint first you crazy man!?
Well, the answer to your questions is simple - this original book, simply titled Azumanga (I've included the subtitle in the header to hopefully make it more distinct), is freaking huge dude. Like look at this thing. It measures about 11" x 10", which is about the size of an LP sleeve. (Or more accurately, a Laserdisc sleeve.)
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| Size comparison with Recycle |
It literally did not fit on my scanner! And on top of that, it comes with a CD-ROM with some bonus manga on there as well, which only makes things more complicated. In comparison, Recycle is a standard, manga-sized book which I could more or less scan myself and translate cover to cover without needing to do anything too complicated. So, I went with that one first and put out that release last year.
However, once that was finished, I still wanted to go back to the original Azumanga and get that translated as well. Not only is this book the true, original source of the name "Azumanga", before being essentially stolen for "Azumanga Daioh", this book contains more color pages with nice, glossy paper (in contrast to the cheap, yellowed manga paper that Recycle used), and also presents many of the manga at their original size. (Recycle had to shrink them down). Also the stuff on the CD is cool!
Luckily, I was not without options. I got in touch with MartyMcFlies of LonelyChaser Fansubs, as I heard he had a large scanner and scanned Laserdisc sleeves before. We agreed to scan certain things for each other (I had experience debinding books and he wanted me to do a couple) and from there I debound this book and sent it over to him to scan. So special shoutout to him for that!
From there, I was finally able to start work on a translation of this piece of Azuma history, and got started converting my translations from Recycle to the bigger Azumanga. After that was finished, I took on the manga that was included in Azumanga but did not make the cut for Recycle, which was more than I expected. And after all that was done, I took on the challenge of translating the contents of the CD-ROM, with its quiant, 1998 webpages. Since I didn't have to translate everything from scratch, this project took a little bit less time, only about 8 months on and off.
So, enough yapping about the production. What exactly do you get from this scanlation of Azumanga that you couldn't already get with Recycle? Well, there are a few things.
1. Full-sized, full-color pages!
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| Azumanga on top, Recycle on the bottom. Ryo-Ohki has never looked less splotchy. |
Many of the comics here were originally published in full-color Laserdisc booklets, or on the back cover of the sleeve. The first Azumanga was Laserdisc-sleeve-sized to accomdate these comics and display them exactly as they appeared before. But once it came to publish Azumanga Recycle, the paper got smaller and cheaper, rendering this scratchy, rough look to the comics. (Which is enjoyable in its own way!) What's more, after page 20, all the comics are in black-and-white, meaning some had to be converted to monochrome!
With the original Azumanga, all of these comics are presented in full size and color, as they were originally created.
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| At last, we get to experience Sasami bullying as God intended |
2. More content, including comics based off El-Hazard!
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| Working on these has made me the only person to think about El-Hazard in the past 20 years. |
That's right, the original version of Azumanga actually has some more content! For whatever reason, certain things were not carried over to Azumanga Recycle. This mostly consists of extra collections of illustrations and advertisements produced for the Battle Athletes OVA, but this also includes a couple of comics based off the El-Hazard series!
Since these were not printed in Azumanga Recycle, I did not translate them at the time. Now, for the first time, these extra little bits of Azuma's work have been unearthed.
3. A CD-ROM with a bunch of extra stuff!
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| The information era is upon us |
Included with this book is a bonus CD-ROM, and contained within are a collection of webpages, showing off a variety of manga and some behind-the-scenes illustrations. It's explained in the CD that some of the manga was meant to be included in the book, but they could not find the orignial manuscripts for them. As a compromise, they scanned the various places these comics were published after the fact and included them here instead.
...Unfortunately what this means is that the quality of these particular comics is pretty bad, given that they were limited to 1998 scanners and desktop publishing suites. Still, this collection provides an easy way for me to translate even more of Azuma's work without having to hunt down issues of Anime V. (And believe me, I checked for them!)
Besides manga, the CD-ROM also includes liner notes and other bits of information. And I translated all of it!!!
So, now that you've read my spiel, I bet you're wondering where to grab this fantastic scanlation. As always, I post it to the usual places, however due to the threat of DMCAs I will not link them directly. You can search the title or my tag, MrManager, on these sites, and find them pretty easily.
If you'd like to download a torrent, you can find it posted to Ny●a, and I may or may not post it to a certain private tracker as well :).
If you'd like to read it online, I also posted it to M●ngaD●x. My group name there is "MrManager".
And if you don't care about this stuff and just wanna download it directly, well, erm, here's the MEGA link:
Special thanks to MartyMcFlies for his scanning work.
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| 😮 |
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