Soba-Scans

Break out the party hats! Believe it or not, it was two years ago today that we put out our first batch of releases as Soba-scans. We hope you’ll celebrate with us!

 Image drawn by karijn

It’s been quite a ride this whole time, but in general, things have tended towards the better. When we first started out we were very cautious about getting called out for mistakes or low quality, so we put a lot of effort into every release. It turned out that our fears were mostly unfounded. But in the process we became accustomed to working harder and paying strict attention to detail, and that helped us out a lot later. It’s our hope that when people read one of our releases that they know it will be of high quality because they’ve come to expect that from us in the past. We certainly know there’s room for improvement as well, but we hope you notice the level of attention that goes into the translation, editing, and everything else.

As far as the near future of the group goes, we’re still churnin’ away at all of our various series and a few other doujinshi. As our main translator I’m trying to make sure that our existing series are as far ahead as possible with their scripts. We work with a wide variety of editors, both in-group and out, so trying to coordinate everything can be a fair amount of effort. We definitely want to get a few of these series finished or caught up to ease the workload a little. In addition, Ziggy’s looking at revising the credits page to make it look a little more professional. We’ve also been looking at the typesetting a little closer lately to make sure everything is as readable as possible.

In the long term, things are a little less clear, but we always want to keep pushing ourselves. Speaking personally (as LD), after two years I’m getting a bit tired of translating anything with sex scenes. With our Manabe Joji and Harumi Chihiro series the plot is good enough to make me want to push through them, but I haven’t translated any one-offs or doujinshi for a while now, mainly for that reason. As we broaden our palette and branch out more and more, we find that some people are a little hesitant to read our stuff because we work with sexual material. There’s one more new h-manga series I’m starting work on now which we’ve hinted at in the past, but after that I may just focus on more ecchi stuff, although I can’t speak for Yumeko and Panzuriel. One idea I’ve been kicking around with this new series is to work on it in private for a long time so we can ensure rapid, regular releases once we’ve built up a lot of chapters. In any case, it’ll be several months away at the very least. What’s everyone think?

As always, your feedback and encouragement is always greatly appreciated. What we really enjoy is sharing these stories with everybody and we love to hear from people who are wrapped up in them. We’ve made a lot of new friends these few years and we hope everyone’s gotten something positive out of our efforts. See you soon!