JoJo Project Releases

It hasn't been very long since the last chapter at all, but since I had had this chapter cleaned for a while and it's such an important one, I couldn't resist working my tail off to get it out faster than I even thought possible.

This is quite possibly one of the most plot-heavy and overall important chapters in the entire series; coupled with the upcoming chapter 62, more will be done to advance the plot than in the last two or three volumes combined. In this chapter, the history of how Lucy Steel married Stephen Steel is revealed, before we start to unravel the mystery of the President's involvement with the race. And what about the corpse? What will become of it? You might just need a napkin to wipe the sweat off your face after this one.

Mediafire: http://www.mediafire.com/?yzz4nyhyfyy
Sendspace: http://www.sendspace.com/file/fatd2s
Megaupload: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=BPNQR1JX
Rapidshare:
http://rapidshare.com/files/360418321/Steel_Ball_Run_chapter_61__v16ch2_.zip.html

And as always, back chapters are at http://www.mediafire.com/jojoproject and you can go to http://shizukajoestar.blogspot.com to track our progress.

As some of you might have guessed, those of us at JoJo Project aren't always working on JoJo 100% of the time! Freshy and I work on a few side projects assisting other groups, which I'd like to pimp out.

Freshy, who is not just a fantastic translator but also one of the best people I've ever met, is helping out or good friends over at The Invincible Trio with their ongoing effort to retranslate part 4. As much as the current translations have a certain quaint charm to them ("What a beautiful Duwang!"), the series really shines when you have a proper translation, and these wonderful people are trying to make that a reality. Check them out!

As for myself, I'm currently in a three-way collaborative project with Hox (the translator of what feels like 1/2 of the manga I read) and the good folks at Anonymous Delivers (the team who works on Litchi Hikari Club) to bring you a newer and lesser known manga by Usamaru Furuya called "La Croisade des Innocents," a semi-historical manga which tells the story of the apocryphal Children's Crusade of 1212 in typical Furuya fashion. Those of you who like that sort of thing will want to check out Volume 1 when it's finished.

...and don't worry, guys! We totally know what we're doing and this won't hinder the speed of your SBR releases in the slightest.

At last, the long-awaited chapter 60 of Steel Ball Run. It's the start of volume 16. This is my personal favorite volume so far, because it is the most plot-dense action-packed revelatory volume so far. I wish I could hype this chapter up as much as I normally can, but that would involve some pretty major spoilers... so without ruining your experience, you can look forward to the return of an old friend, the return of an old enemy, a white-knuckled battle atop a carriage careening through the streets of Philadelphia, and a revelation that will determine the entire plot of the manga for volumes yet to come.

Mediafire: http://www.mediafire.com/?tyhxl5nyw51
Megaupload: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=IS030KP1
Sendspace: http://www.sendspace.com/file/umnplv
Rapidshare: http://rapidshare.com/files/359668831/ch_60.rar

And as always, back chapters are at mediafire.com/jojoproject.

Translation: Freshy. Editing: Frequency and Shizuka Joestar.

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I would also like to make a small comment about why this chapter is incredibly special to me personally, and to JoJo Project as a team. Back when we were a brand new team, assembled ragtag from a series of late night threads on /a/ and anonib and a few personal connections, we wanted to see if it'd be possible to do the SBR magazine chapters as they came out while waiting for Stardust Crusaders to catch up their backlog, so the end result would be the English scanlations finishing at about the same time as the Japanese. This was the first SBR chapter that I ever personally cleaned, because at the time it was the absolute newest magazine chapter; when I got to help out Frequency with a few pages, there was this amazing sense of nostalgia when I was retouching page 37, where the text goes over Magenta's hat. I remember being frustrated and having nightmares over it a year or two ago when I first found it, and while it was still hard, it really helped me realize how much I've grown as an editor as I comparatively flew through those pages.

With this, we've come full circle and have finally accomplished almost everything JoJo Project set out to do. We put out Stone Ocean at the best quality we could. We caught up, if not to SBR, to where we were before we abandoned magazine chapters as infeasible. From here on out it's new territory for us; it's exciting and wonderful, and I hope you can share in our happiness.