Buster Keel Chapter 30 (English)

Third chapter! *Happy dance*

Took kind of embarassingly long to churn this out, given that I gave up on SFX cleaning, but there was a lot of Life to deal with.

I low-key might go back to SFX cleaning though, because it was so much fun. I was so so tempted to clean the SFX on each page.

This one was... surprisingly easy to typeset. I've found all the little cute shortcuts I need to clean bubbles quickly, and on top of my less-than-stringent typesetting quality standards, editing went real quick. Hence also why it feels weird that it took this long to complete.

Hopefully the translations are smoother as well! I found a site with the official translation of this manga in my second language, which is super rusty but I could stumble through the whole thing without typing every single line into a translator!! So I've been checking my translation against the official one to make sure I'm on the right track, or just generally clarify what the heck the Japanese is saying.

Makes me feel kinda odd now because there was a way to read this without going through the trouble of learning Japanese. No regrets though, I love languages, and Japanese is so much fun.

Anyway, Ch 30 continues the Eight Cup Tournament! Which I honestly can't wait for to be over... starting to feel a lot like filler stuff now with all the extraneous fighting with so many new side characters. I wanna say it gets better soon, but... there's a lot of stuff to get through before anything epic returns. Just my thoughts though.

In any case, here's my translation of Buster Keel! Chapter 30, please enjoy!

Also on the Translating Stuff page.

TFW

"TFW you discover a new manga and really love the art and characters and midway through the first chapter you realize you recognize the style and the feels it's already giving you so when you check the author you realize YOU WERE RIGHT IT'S THEM!! but that makes you really sad at the same time because not only do you have to start waiting in painful anticipation for the next chaps but their previous work that got you hooked on this style was dropped by the scanlator so you will never find out how it ends, yet author-sama has moved on to their next work already!!!!!!!!"

Not really a relateable TFW, but this is ALL about the feels. And also I take pride in writing a 100+ word sentence.

Anyways, I'm talking about Charlotte Has Five Disciples, a Korean webtoon by YongYong. They did Black Haze (which is the said previous work), and they are also the culprit behind me rolling in bed in agony requiring that I read the next chapter and then, having received it, continuing to roll in bed in agony over what happened in said chapter.

I loved Black Haze to bits - I'll admit up front that the story was pret-ty hard to follow and felt really unnecessarily drawn out, and also the art started out amateur. But then that art went to beautiful but chunky to just plain gorgeous, and the premise and the randomness of the gags really hooked me. The magic/OP-ness harpooned me right in all my geek spots, so I was drooling all over it. For a good week, I wondered if some future version of me had created this webtoon, because of how much it slathered me in everything I wanted in a comic (but lol I'm never going to draw anywhere as good as that).

So yeah, I found Charlotte last week, and I was both ecstatic and depressed to discover I had stumbled on YongYong's next work. There are 2 chapters out so far and I'm already crying over the return of YongYong's beautiful art (which seems to have improved enormously since) as well as their amazing sense of humour.

Just look at how beautiful this is.

The creativity in premise and concepts are still high-tier and the story looks like it's going to be much more cohesive and directional than Black Haze (cough cough it's a good thing). We have a new female lead (and she's OP yay), plus we are promised a cast of 5 more interesting folks (who are also definitely OP)! To top it all off, it looks like a thematic topic is going to be romance??

It'll take me a while to get over the fact that Black Haze is done and forgotten by the valiant Korean scanlation vanguard, so I will settle for Charlotte as my comfort food. 

Bless the scanlators & YongYong, may their USBs plug in the on first try and fat cheques arrive in their mail. Looking forward to enjoying Charlotte Has Five Disciples!

Buster Keel Chapter 29 (English)

H-Here we are! My second scanlating chapter!!!

Oh man. This seriously took so much effort. After getting seduced by the appearance of SFX-cleaned pages, I couldn't resist cleaning Every. Single. Page after that. All 44 of them.

(I'd like to say, except I chickened out on cleaning page 11 on grounds of "the sfx looks good, it's part of the art." 😂)

Anyway, it was like there was no end! I'd clean one page, redraw, typeset, and then there'd be the next, and the next, and the next, and the next... Forty-four pages. Yikes. Looking back on it, it's kind of amazing I did this all myself in one month. Some pages were really easy, some pages were absolute torture. But I just kept going, I had so much steam. Each page was a new adventure through wiping out SFX, crying over redraws, and debating over typesetting, and I wanted to see what the next page had in store for me.

I was even excited to work on this if I hadn't been doing it for a few hours. I'm literally passionate about cleaning manga, and I never knew. Where can I get a job doing this???

The quality isn't professional, but it's not trash either, if I may say so myself. I learned so much about how to use GIMP in the past month in order to accomplish this, and I'm 100% proud of the results.

The thing is, I also learned that this takes up way too much time, and unsustainably so. Being a shounen fight manga and all, there are just "speeds" (what I call those groups of lines in the background that indicate movement or are used for effect) literally everywhere and I have to redraw every single one of those lines that are covered by SFX.

I'll probably go insane trying to clean every chapter, so this' gonna be my golden moment (yes, it's early to be going downhill from here...) and future chapters are going to be simply typeset, with sidenotes for the SFX sounds. I'd really like to catch up to the amount I have translated (up to Ch. 33 as of!!)

Anyway, I hope you enjoy my golden moment - Buster Keel! Chapter 29! In which we get more badass/dumbass/heart-of-gold Keel, and some action from Blue & Ravi!! Also a very bad adult role model 😓

Also can be found on the Translating Stuff page in the nav bar.

Sometimes -

- I read so much manga that I start reading all other comics, and even just blocks of text on a sign, from right to left.

Giving SFX cleaning a shot...

...and crap, it's fun and rewarding (it looks so much better without the SFX!!). Scanlating this is gonna take twice as long now.


The workflow right now for cleaning is really tedious right now though.

First, I open the raw in GIMP and use the Clone tool to remove any SFX that are covering art with tone. I can't replicate tone otherwise, so the clone tool is a must. I'll also clone any other patterns over nearby SFX. Any SFX covering large areas of white or black are initially painted over (crudely) in GIMP.

I then save the GIMP file as a regular image, and open the image my go-to art applicaiton, Autodesk Sketchbook. Yeah, I gotta switch apps.

Sketchbook is a must though, because their pencil tools leave lines that look almost exactly like the existing lines. I'm redrawing any art that used to be covered, and having a similar tool makes the redraw look so much more seamless. I haven't figured out yet how to make GIMP tools match that level of quality. However, Sketchbook does not have that essential clone tool, so that has to get done first in GIMP.

Once redrawing is done in Sketchbook, cleaning is usually complete. I go back to GIMP (which happily will open .tiff files; Sketchbook has no idea what .xcf are) and finally go on to do the typesetting. GIMP's text tool is highly superior to that of Sketchbook's, so I use GIMP for this.

Long story short, I don't have any one tool that has all the features I want, so I use a combination to achieve the results I'm looking for. And in the process, complicate my process further :)

Buster Keel Chapter 28 (English)

I did it! It actually happened! I read a whole chapter in Japanese, and edited in the English to boot! *__*
Granted the quality is pretty rock-bottom but the digital format made the images nice and clear at least, so hopefully my lack of font diversity and awkward rephrasing doesn't detract too much.

And of course, I don't own this, so feel free to use this however. It's crappy enough that it probably should stay quarantined here, though.

Still new to Blogger so maybe this isn't the best way to upload 50 pictures, but... it's working so far?


Oh and, I just found out that Heavenly Uploads had also picked up this series...  (.__.);

I will continue with my own work because I need to translate to read what I have anyway. It does leave a strange feeling knowing that I went to all this effort to translate a chapter that was already out there, and am working on a series that someone else has already picked up, but it doesn't really matter in the end I guess.

Anyway, here's a link to the chapter page. It's also on the Translating Stuff page.