Buster Keel Chapter 33 (English)

Have Chapter 33 of Buster Keel!

This one was a bit of a shorter game, with only 44 pages and 3 double-spreads (that must've been fun for the artist 🙃). Still, with haphazard slapping of text and minimal redrawing, I'm clocking in at just under a month since the last.

Although part of it is definitely due to having more free time, with the world being turned upside-down right now.

Anyways, this one is a good one!!! I really hope y'all enjoy it as much as I have - I mean, I have low standards, but I was pretty giddy throughout the whole process.

I'll probably be taking a break from editing to build up some more translated chapters - there's only one more in the backlogs now. But the project is still going strong! :D


So here's Buster Keel! Chapter 33, typeset in English.

Also on the Translating Stuff page.

Comments, etc.

Random restructuring update:

Comments have been enabled on a few pages. Sorry if anyone wanted to comment but was unable to do so (and resorted to using my contact form - lol my bad, though I appreciate your perseverance). I'm just new to this platform and clueless about how Blogger works. They'll be enabled by default on future posts and pages, and comments can be made anonymously. Please note though, comment moderation is on.

Added a list of Labels (i.e., tags) in the side bar (for desktop) in case that helps with organization and navigation.

The aforementioned contact form has been moved into the footer.

Buster Keel Chapter 32 (English)

Uhmm... so Chapter 32 is done. I don't know how... it kinda just happened.....

Maybe too quickly? There were a couple of mistakes that needed to be corrected in this one so I don't doubt that there're more I haven't caught. Oh well, I'll correct them as they're found.

Also downloaded like seven new fonts trying to find a good one to use for a different effect.

I can tell I'm kinda eager to move on to the more exciting chapters. We get some interesting things in ol' 32, but I think there's even better stuff going forward.

So look forward to that!

Here's Buster Keel! Chapter 32, typeset in English.

Also on the Translating Stuff page.

I am a nerd

Part of my scanlating process involves downloading the raw en masse from a cloud storage, which unfortunately names all the images unhelpful things like "IMG140240.png".

For the past four chapters, I've been clicking on an image... clicking it again to put it in rename mode... typing in a better name... repeat.........

And yeah it gets really tedious when there's 50 images to rename. So I automated it with a Python script (renamer.py). Took maybe, one second? to run ten lines of code and rename all the files for Ch 32. 🙃

The other annoying bit in the pre-processing is cropping the screenshots of the raws down to just the page. I did this all manually as well, in GIMP. Rectangle select tool... zoom in to the top left corner... line cursor up with upper left of page... click and drag while zooming out, then zoom in to the bottom right corner... line cursor up with lower right of page... release... Image>Crop to Selection.........

Again, very tedious and annoying. Then I wrote cropper.py, first using GIMP to identify the pixel coordinates of the extremes of my images, and input them into a library crop function. Run, and maybe a minute later (image processing always takes way longer) all the images were cropped perfectly for Ch 32. 🙃

I know that I'm lazy. But I still don't know how to feel about this... why am I programming when scanlating... why am I thinking about automating everything I do with scripts.......

Buster Keel Chapter 31 (English)

It's done! That was the fastest chapter edit ever. Finished within 72 hours. I guess that's what happens when you spend a month and a half ignoring your project.

It was surprising how much of the keyboard shortcuts were ingrained into my muscle memory, too, which definitely helped.

Anyway, this' Chapter 31, the last chapter in Volume 8! I have all the remaining volumes, so next up will be Volume 9. I'm amazed at myself for actually committing and scanlating a whole volume-full of four chapters.

There's a couple of extras at the end of this chapter, and I also translated the author's afterword. The first extra I sort-of cleaned, but was too lazy to insert all the labels, so, uh, have fun looking at the pictures.

The tournament's finally drawing to a close (though the arc is nowhere near over) and things are finally getting interesting! To be fair, this chapter grew on me, I didn't really understand it that well the first time around. Typical. Hyped for that next chapter!

Stay tuned for volume 9! (Or don't, who knows when I'll get around to it lol).

Here's my scanlation of Buster Keel! Chapter 31, hope you enjoy!

Also on the Translating Stuff page.

BK Ch 31 is coming!

I'm still working on scanlating Buster Keel, I swear the project's not dead!

Finally got some time to myself and edited thirty-six pages in two days. *Pats self on back*. *Conks self in head for taking so long to get around to it in the first place*.

The full chapter should be up sometime tomorrow or the day after. Uh, at least sometime this week, let's not set the bar too high.

And lol, turns out these chapters are actually being found and read (oh god oh no)?? Thanks for leaving the pleasant comment, random visitor! Do know it helped motivate this recent burst of editing.

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.