This is why I love Futago. ‘Nuff said.
Futago Volume 3, Ch.14 – EPPPPPPPIC.
Principal Volume 1, Ch.1 – Hello? It’s from the Genius-Maestro-Genius Ikuemi Ryo. She’s been writing shoujo since the ’80’s, and knows her stuff. I head-locked Pirato4ka for the cleans, wrestled Miwachan to do proofreads, and then pummeled Lypipheria (our new typesetter) to finish the typesets. If the manga wasn’t THAT good, would we go through all this trouble?
Message to our Readers [re. Omiai & Release]:
Lilly, just because you’re an anime freak doesn’t mean it’ll turn a guy off on a date. At least my 23-year-old brother (who we will call Canon in D because that’s all he’s been playing since he got his electric guitar) seems to think it’s pretty cool for you to be in touch with your “otaku” side.
Canon in D: She seems like the kind who will leave my Gundam collection alone.
Mimi: What if she’s vertically-challenged?
Canon in D: I’ll just have to stoop a little lower to kiss her.
Mimi: D’Awwww.
(Canon in D uses his left foot to nudge Mimi out of room/closet-hole/burrow and slams door in her face.)
Mimi (from other side of door): D’Awwww.
I guess this just means you were meant for a “boy”.
Ageha_chan: You know how you were giving me tips on how I could weasle my way out of an omiai? And you know how you said, to a) Act like an extreme liberal; b) Say you don’t EVER want kids; c) Tell them you’ve a spending problem and are actually tens of thousands of dollars in debt – not including your student loans; d) You’re spending has also caused you to be a hoarder. Introduce them to the show “Hoarding: Buried Alive” if they don’t know what hoarding is; e) You don’t actually cook or clean and only shower maybe once a week???
And remember how I didn’t reply back for so long?
Consider it a pregnant pause where I was too embarrassed to acknowledge that all of the above were true. ( Except for the once-a-week-shower thing.) (I’m not that depraved!)
Rexy: I wish I could convincingly tell people that I don’t want kids. But for some reason, after I hit 26, they just started looking ridiculously cute to me. Seriously, if a cute kid were to come waddling by my desk right now, I don’t know if I would be able to restrain myself from trying to lure them to sit on my lap with candy. xD Yeah, I know. This might become a dangerous trend in the future…
Deets: I always have a wrinkle here or there, and chronic “bed hair”, so I am fully-prepared. 
You can look forward to these releases next time you see us:
3 AM Dangerous Zone Volume 1, Ch.5
& (and) Volume 1, Ch.1 (Fixed) + Ch.2 [?]
Heartbroken Chocolatier Volume 1, Ch.3
Junai Rosen CH.1
Love Master X Volume 1, Ch.1
Nina My Love Volume 1, Ch.7 & Omake [?]
Teketeke Rendezvous Volume 1, Ch.1
& More
thank you very much for your hard work, and for sharing so many great mangas.
I’ve just read the last releases of Shitsuren chocolatier you’ve done and I was wondering something about the french dialogues you’ve left as the same as the japanese version. I hope I’m not bothering but I’ve found two mistakes about the writting. If you wanna correct them, would you like me to tell you or would you prefer to let them according to the original ?
We’re actually going to re-release the entire Volume 1 again in early March because there was just way too many things that needed to be changed. Regarding the French dialogue, would you mind sending your corrections to me? Also would you like to freelance for the team in the future? Just to help out with the few French lines there are? Pretty please? There’s a lot that gets lost in translation from French to Japanese, and you’d be a big help to the team.
I absolutely LOVE you guys you guys have the best projects going on WOOT WOOT for futago
I LOVE IKUEMI RYO!!!!! YAYAYYAYAYAY!so happ to see ya doing one of her works. :DDD Principal looks good so far. I also missed Futago!! YAY FUTAGO! ok i should go lay off on the sugar. thanks for your hard work
Thanks for the update on Futago.
I haven’t commented here before, but I have been watching your RSS feed for the last few months and I’d like to say first of all: thank you for all of the releases! 🙂 Not a lot of good josei gets scanlated and you have a great line-up here.
However, I would like to say one thing about that… while it’s exciting to see what new series you’ve picked up (I see three ch1’s in that list), it’s also kind of frustrating seeing more and more new series picked up and other series left abandoned for months (and years?) because of that. And once you’ve claimed them, the (slim) possibility of someone else picking them up goes out the window. I’m not commenting to say “release faster!!”; I’m truly very grateful and think your group is awesome. I’m more commenting to say: I’d rather have 10 releases of 1-3 series, than 10 releases of 8-9.
Just my two cents 🙂 Thank you again for all your hard work!
By way of explanation, the new projects slated for February were in progress for a long time now, and are done by staff not connected with the projects that have fallen behind. The staff for those projects have all but disappeared, and we have just recently shuffled chapters around to new editors to get them up and releasing more regularly again.
There are also some projects that require extensive and difficult redraws that seem to scare off a lot of editors into obscurity. (Some won’t even answer my emails anymore…) Heartbroken Chocolatier & Nina My Love are two of the biggest offenders, considering one chapter can go through a process of at least 4 ~ 6 editors before finally getting done.
Our goal this year is to release EVERYTHING more regularly, so you can look forward to everything being updated at a regular pace from now on. 🙂
Since I’m an editor there, I can’t help but give you my opinion too. 😀 In a way, I agree with you. To be honest, I have thought the same thing many times. However, with time, my opinion has changed a little. First of all, as you stated, there is unfortunately very little chance that another group would have picked up most of our projects. Besides, Hatsu is very open to doing joints and wouldn’t refuse one without a good reason. And we will never fight over a project. If another group ever decided to pick up one of our active projects, we would simply drop it without complaining or insulting them (or trying to compete) :D. In fact, we would probably be happy. Or at least, I know I would. We would be able to read this series faster without doing anything. It must be because I’m lazy but if another group picked up the series I edit (the Basso projects + Teketeke RDV), I would without a doubt be the happiest of their readers. XD
And since, as you said, we are notoriously slow despite our best efforts, I hope that any potentially interested group would at least send us an email to ask if we would agree to let them take over the project / do a joint instead of just giving up because “we own the project since we started releasing it first.” Our only aim is to raise awareness in the series we scanlate. But that’s only my opinion and the other members of the staff may disagree with me. :3
Besides, most of the time, we have enough editors (even if new ones are always welcome XD) but we severely lack translators and QC. Hatsu is our main translator and our only QC so she has a lot of work on her plate. And the best way to attract those is probably to release many different projects. Or that’s how our evil plan is supposed to go anyway.
Thank you very much for your replies. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting such a detailed response. Unfortunately, as I just saw your latest post, it seems that I have offended your group.
Please let me clarify: I didn’t really expect a response because I wasn’t looking for any kind of justification from you; it was a post of personal opinion. I had hoped I was clear in that I wasn’t trying to criticise you – in a lack of releases or any other way. Nor was I looking for a status update on any or all projects. You are providing a free service and are obviously free to offer whatever you so choose, whenever you choose to. I’m not expecting you to make me happy. And as I have edited in the past, I know how troublesome the process can be. I was merely trying to say that I, personally, would like to see your efforts directed at a smaller subset of series.
I have replied here instead of commenting on the follow-up post because I’m not looking to create any trouble or give you grief. However, I do feel a need to attempt to clarify that I meant no offense, and to apologise for any taken. I am sincerely grateful for your releases and will refrain from giving my personal opinion in the future.
Thank you again.
Kineta: To be perfectly honest with you, I didn’t take offense at what you said. I guess I came off sounding a bit defensive there, and now I’m in the cesspool of guilt because I feel like such a Nazi, even though I really only meant to be self-deprecating. Don’t you dare hold back your comments! Unless you really do want to make me feel awful about myself!
On a serious note, what it all boils down to is I was being overly self-conscious, and felt the need to explain to everyone that our picking up new projects really have nothing to do with older projects falling behind. Almost all of the the time, the reason they fall behind is because someone disappears with the chapter and leaves me hanging in limbo, or I fall behind on translations because I have to catch up on scanning/editing/quality-checking.
As for why I can sometimes be a total scrooge with certain projects (namely Feel Comics), it’s because I spend $18 ~ 20 for a single volume. Our josei projects can be very expensive on my wallet, and since we prefer not to accept monetary donations (who ever heard of pirates soliciting money for pirating?), I have a lot of emotion invested in it.
And I’ve been trying to write this comment for the past hour, while the office phones are being unforgiving and merciless and keep ringing off the hook……!!!! I hope you will see this post and understand that I didn’t mean to attack you in any way. 🙁
Hats
I’m really glad that there was no offense taken. Thank you, that makes me feel much better – and I hope you feel better too! 🙂
Glad we cleared that up. (I knew I should have added the, “But they’ll love it more often than not.”) Between the hard-drive failure and my scanner breaking down, I’ve been trying to keep my head on straight, but I guess I still can’t get around the old habit of getting boxed in by my poor choice of syntax. 🙁
I haven’t read Futago yet but the first chapter of Principal was so awesome that I just had to comment right now! I can’t wait to read the next chapter! >.<
THANK YOUUU! Youthe best!! Futago ‘s chap was greaaat , this author is really awesome, Isn’t she? And you’re the amazing one to bring those releases to us…
About Principal, this is awesoooooome!!!!! Ukuemi’s sensei is in the Top3 of my fav author!!! And this work is also a VERY VERY VERY VERY GOOOD ONE!!! So impatient to read the rest , i WISH i COULD READ JJAPANESE TO READ aLL OF WORKS!!
Anyways, THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU KISS KISS
Thanks for the Extreme Kodak Moment (aka chapter)!
Hmm, it looks like another make-or-break moment, but Iketani is really good at revealing cracks & not cliffs. It’s great how strong the characterizations are! Though the last page is more serious than most….
By the way, what’s the different between a regular Kodak Moment & Extreme Kodak Moment?
I love Futago! Keep up the great work!
Principal! I’ve been thinking of picking up that manga for a while now. This will probably push me to finally do so. It looks great!
Thanks for the newest releases! I didn’t realize that there was another work by Iketani Rikako that was currently being scanlated, so I’ve picked that one up to read too.
@Ageha-chan-Surely your hoarding is not so bad as the people on Hoarding: Buried Alive? 😉