JoJo Project Releases

My lovely little >:3 was a hint. A badly pronounced hint.

Anyway, as many of you already know, JoJo part 8, Jojolion (pronounced like the lion in Evangelion, not like as in rawr I'm a lion), is going to be published starting in Ultra Jump next month. Some very good friends of mine, Project Bite Me! Scans, will be working on it.

Most of the current JJP team will be joining them. The way we're currently planning it is for me to obtain an actual copy of the magazine as soon as possible, so that even if the first chapter is done from mag raws (something I always like to not do), we'll have large enough scans to make it work and still be able to get color pages scanned. This may take up to a month after the issue comes out before I can find it, but it'll be better than public raws. After that, I will be doing raw providing, proofreading, and some minor editing for Jojolion at the same time which I continue to help with SBR; the current arrangement for SBR will continue until the end of the series. After SBR has concluded, I will be switching my editing efforts to redoing part 4 and completely rescanning and retranslating part 5.

I think these arrangements will to work out well for everybody involved, and for the readers as well.

Happy Easter, and more importantly for me, happy "there is chocolate on sale tomorrow"!

You guys. You guys. You guys don't even KNOW what you're in for, or how happy I am for you that you get to read it. I haven't been so excited to have a new chapter released since way back in volume 16 when we were hearing about napkins while Magenta Magenta and Wekapipo fought on a carriagetop. Or maybe even earlier than that. This is seriously a big fucking deal we've got going on right now.

You can basically tell when the chapters that comprise volume 19 first started to appear in Ultra Jump by looking at Pixiv. This particular chapter here spawned a near critical mass of fanart within a week of its release; suddenly Pixiv was drowning in… well, you guys will just get to see! I don't doubt for one bit that some of the same craze that swept Japan is going to hit the English-speaking internet. This chapter also features a few nice call-backs to a previous arc, including one that I am about 100% certain that all you JoJofags have just been dying to see, and introduces a minor meme that I particularly like (a quirk in the President's speech that will become one of his catchphrases for a while).

Seriously though. This chapter is awesome. This volume is awesome. Normally I rather hate how, thanks to my access to the Japanese volumes, I know things before everybody else. This time, however, knowing what's coming and knowing that I get to watch all the speculation happen again except in English is absolutely delicious.

I want to give special shoutout thanks to Freek for some particularly amazing typesetting this chapter; I could definitely not have handled all the stuff with the torn-up note. Thanks to Momo for doing an emergency translation of the author blurb (isn't it hilarious?). And thanks to Red Hawk for doing all the lovely redrawing work. This chapter may have taken a while, but it's been a delight.

Mediafire: http://www.mediafire.com/?dw78nrvfy7xuwnb
sendspace: http://www.sendspace.com/file/l0v1zb
MU: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ESWHPUY0

And keep watching this blog for more chapters… and a special announcement coming Sunday! >:3

That's it guys, Volume 18 is finally complete!
http://www.mediafire.com/?l1yki4ca8979mwy

And unfortunately, again with the late, but this time, it is 100% my fault.

Red Hawk had the cleans they had done for us done WAY earlier, and if it were up to them it'd be out over a week and a half ago. Unfortunately, I'm the JoJo Project contact person and I do some of the typesetting and proofreading myself, so when I'm knocked offline it can be kind of bad... I then had both a dual hard drive failure (my hard drive AND my most recent backup) and then was sent to the hospital for a while. It's so unbelievable that I'd think I were lying if I were reading it... but I swear I'm not. Otafreek, with just a bit of help from a proofreader who joined through JJP for a bit who prefers to remain anonymous, teamed up with the current JJP translator and managed to work some MIRACLES while I was occupied. I'm so proud of all the other people, and of everybody who wasn't a dick while waiting.

I've received even more feedback about the last chapter, which many of you feel was sub-par, and I would like to clear up some lingering misconceptions which I know people have.

1. Red Hawk was IN ANY WAY to blame for ANYTHING
No. No no no no no no no. Red Hawk are really good people to us at JoJo Project. They offered us cleaners to help speed things along as a serious favor. All they did was do some redraws and page joins. Their work is very much appreciated; their experience and speed is something that JoJo Project can't hope to match for ages, and definitely not in time to try and do SBR once a week. The accusations that they're trying to "take over series" or that they fucked up chapter 71 just to call attention to themselves is really worrying. They are not "taking over" Steel Ball Run in the slightest; they stuck their necks out to do JoJo Project and the JoJo fanbase a really huge favor, but if this kind of reaction that both groups have been getting continues, they'll have to call the alliance off, which will leave you guys with slower SBR. Why would you do that? Why?

2. This chapter sucked.
Yeah, honestly, it kind of did. Our QC was a bit off, we weren't sure what to do with multiple people typesetting one chapter, and it didn't help that this is more than likely the most awkward chapter in SBR in ages. We couldn't have picked a worse chapter to have things go slightly wrong on if we tried, and that means everybody at both teams. For the next chapter, it'll be me doing both the typesetting and the script rewriting. If you're still unhappy with it at that point, you can be upset at me myself, not anybody else on either team. Before you judge anybody too harshly, please wait patiently for chapter 72. It is far longer, far more text, and if you don't like it then, well, please direct your complaints to JoJo Project, not Red Hawk.

3. Why are you still posting on 4chan, when all you get is trolled?
From this point on, we aren't. It's not worth it. You can leave feedback for JoJo Project on this blog or on the JoJo boards (in the appropriate threads there) and we will read it, but from this point on, if anybody is making a "new sbr thread", you can count on it not being an actual member of JoJo Project. We're doing this because we love JoJo and we love to spread the joy of this delightfully bizarre manga. When the internet hate machine is on in full force (hurrr hol horse?) and several of the group members are going to be trolled on sight even not in a JoJo thread, it's just not worth it for us anymore to bother with /a/.

I hope this has cleared up as many lingering misconceptions as possible. Wish me luck on chapter 72; it's a wordy one!

Oh snap the release speed is not glacial! Thanks to Red Hawk for partnering with us on this and providing the cleaners we needed.

http://www.mediafire.com/?ml266o898vh29wt
http://www.sendspace.com/file/kfyig0

And because I was made aware of some pretty terrifying feedback from a certain imageboard where a lot of the JoJo fanbase is, here's a few answers to the complaints from Green Oval.

Bawwww Red Hawk get out of our JoJo, I remember when JoJo Project was two dudes in a basement, etc
JoJo Project is still JoJo Project. The only thing Red Hawk is providing us with are cleaners and a bit of help organizing ourselves. JoJo Project has always been rather a motley crew with severe disorganization problems, and a constant turnover of rookie cleaners. We had one of our rookie cleaners on this set, but we let Red Hawk help us with the redraws. It's the difference between 10 weeks and 1 week for a chapter, and no, I'm not even joking. If people are still angry that JoJo Project accepted an offer to help with cleaning, even if it means a drastic fall in speed if we leave the joint offer, we'll consider not doing this any more. But just because some people have some inexplicable issue with Red Hawk does not mean what they did for us at JoJo Project is any less awesome to us or that I am any less grateful.

The typesetting sucks/the script sucks/wtf happened to Freshy
Odd that everybody hates the typesetting this chapter, when last chapter, which was also primarily Freek typesetting, there were certain pages which everybody was praising for being some of the best typesetting yet in SBR. I don't understand it, and neither does he. Does everybody just miss when I used way the hell more fonts because I didn't know what the hell I was doing? As for the script sucking and/or Freshy's absence... Freshy is very, very busy, too busy at the moment to be working on SBR. (She has more important things to worry about like, oh, being Japanese and having family in Japan, as well as college classes with an insane workload.) It'd be nice if she could come back and help proofread, but I'll be proofreading in the future and despite my Japanese being kind of poor, I know JoJo more than most people and I'm not a terribly bad writer (this tl;dr shocked blog entry aside) so I think I can help a lot. Also, you can't blame Kewl or Freek or me or ANYBODY for this particular chapter sounding terrible; ever since this chapter first came out in Ultra Jump magazine, people hated it for sounding terrible in Japanese. We are not miracle workers. We cannot fix that there is stupid shit about winter catfishes and that this chapter is badly written by Araki without changing things so much that we'd really be releasing fakescans or parodyscans. Wait until next chapter before you judge us so harshly.

Shizuka I hate you, you're an attentionwhoring bitch
No, I'm really not, and I'm sorry if anybody hates me. I'm trying to do the best I can juggling what life I have with some severe illness and still trying to get SBR out. If things are occasionally kind of rough, or I make mistakes, I am sorry, but I'm just trying the best I can in a shitty situation. I will be attempting to fix some errors in v18 (which even I know has been a clusterfuck compared to previous volumes) for a full volume re-release, but as it is, I really am doing my best.

Been a bit more than a week but I think we're doing OK!

Mediafire: http://www.mediafire.com/?cmxf7ecs9cbsb68
Sendspace: http://www.sendspace.com/file/7inyac

Thanks to Freek and Kewl for editing and translating, respectively.

Also, at this point, we don't know whether Araki himself is safe from the quakes. Odds are in his favor even if he was in Sendai at the time, but until we get more reliable word than just 2chan, all of us over here are hoping for the best!

I have neglected this blog since pretty much forever, so here are the missing chapters.

Chapter 66: http://www.mediafire.com/?iv6m7idbfs0pwkr
Chapter 67: http://www.mediafire.com/?j2eilpc2v2ktyde
Chapter 68: http://www.mediafire.com/?83h65p52uq934yz
Chapter 69: http://www.mediafire.com/?74snetvfffbwl7d

I would also like to issue some clarifications:

1) I am not the entire project. I'm just the publicity dude, who also does miscellaneous stuff for the team. Please, in comments here and on other forums or sites, direct any thanks to the people who the credit page indicates actually worked on the editing or translation, not to Shizuka.

2) We have way more team members now. Please check the first post in this blog routinely to see who is currently on the SBR project; the part 5 scans, which we are NOT working on until we are done with SBR, are being done by a slightly different team who is still part of JoJo Project.

3) I'm terrible at updating blogs, so please if you need to contact me immediately with a question or you think the status is out of date, please use email to contact me: shizuka dot joestar at gmail dot com. I will respond within a few days, I promise.

4) We're trying for a chapter a week until we catch up with Japan now.