I’ve been at this manga translation thing for about three and a half years now, and it looks like now’s the time for it to conclude.

We’ve just recently turned in the final volume of Love on the Job for Project-H, and that’s the last outstanding project we had. Ziggy told me she was going to quit after this, and for whatever reason Project-H hasn’t given me any translation work since Makunouchi Deluxe 1 late last year. So at this point I have no work to do and nobody to work with. The stuff I’ve written for the site last year hasn’t been terribly well-received, and the whole licensing engine appears to be churning on happily without any involvement on my part, so I honestly can’t think of anything productive I can do in this little slice of the manga world anymore.

I’d say the best part of this hobby was sharing stories with people and hearing their reactions. I tried to work on series that had some form of merit apart from being, well, porn, and it was great to think that someone else would enjoy the characters and stories as much as I did. Thanks to all of you who got in touch to lend any messages of support over the years.

If there’s one person in the group who’s been crucial to what I’ve been doing but hasn’t gotten enough credit, it’s my longtime collaborator Panzuriel. His analytical, exacting approach to translation was crucial in whipping me into shape for this gig. I owe him a great debt for making me a much better Japanese speaker, and if you’ve enjoyed anything I’ve written over the last few years then you have him to thank for it.

As for what’s next for me, I really have no idea. The future’s almost never been murkier, but I know I’m going to do something involving Japanese. I may never be able to admit it to anyone, but this big silly endeavor has helped me in that regard. Frustrating though it may have been at times, perhaps that made it all worthwhile.

Farewell!

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This is a promotional poster for the French license of Ring x Mama (called “Catch x Mama”) that Manabe Joji posted on his blog. The publisher did a pretty awesome job, if I do say so myself. Project-H’s English version of volume 1 will be out in July, but we haven’t had any involvement with it so I’m afraid I don’t know anything more than that.

After Ring x Mama finished, he started another series in the same magazine called “Kuikomi wo naoshiteiru hima wa nai!” which translates to “No time to fix my wedgie!” If you have a swimsuit fetish then it’ll knock your socks off, since it looks to be about a swim team that’s chock-a-block with buxom young ladies. I haven’t actually sat down and read it but from the few glimpses I’ve had, it appears to be about 90% sex scenes. If I recall correctly it’s going to conclude after two volumes.

At the same time, he’s been running another series in a more mainstream weekly magazine with the title of “Hibi Kore Koujitsu.” ANN recently reported that it’s now concluding in its fourth volume. I have the first two volumes here in print and I must say that the series is very different than what you might expect from him. It’s set in the extremely ritualized and tradition-steeped world of Japanese tea ceremonies. The artwork is quite lush and the only way I can think of to describe the story is dense. You can tell that it borrows from a broader cultural vocabulary that’s very unique to Japan and I think it would be a fascinating yet extremely challenging series to localize. Hopefully if Ring x Mama and Makunouchi Deluxe are successful then we’ll see more Manabe Joji licenses in the future.

With both of those series wrapping up at about the same time, he’s been talking on his blog about what he’s working on next. Obviously it’s still tentative but he says he’s thinking about going back to a “military”-type setting that a lot of his earlier work from the 80s and 90s featured.

Now, how about Harumi Chihiro? It’s been just about a year since Velvet Kiss finished its serialized run in Comic Vitaman, but she hasn’t started any new series since then. She continues to work on “Come Come Vanilla,” which now has two volumes in print, but like a lot of Velvet Kiss fans I’ve heard from, I haven’t even bothered to read it. It seems a little too fluffy and insubstantial for fans of her other series. Strangely enough, I recently stumbled across a figurine that someone made of the main character. I wonder if anyone’s ever made one of Kano…

At any rate, I think Harumi Chihiro has been taking a well-deserved break after Velvet Kiss finished and probably played some advisory role in the movie adaptation that I mentioned earlier. She’s put out a variety of one-shots in a couple different magazines over the last year. I’ve seen a couple of them and they’re fairly nice but not especially weighty. She ran a one-off in the same magazine that runs “Hibi Kore Koujitsu” which teased a longer series on the last page but it never materialized for whatever reason. Most recently she published in “Le Paradis,” a bimonthly romance manga magazine. They seem to have made rather a big deal that it’s her debut in the magazine, giving her very prominent billing on their web site. I’ve seen a fair deal of Japanese twitter buzz about it as well, so that may indicate that Velvet Kiss has made more of a splash than you might expect.

Speaking of Velvet Kiss, it looks like it’s been licensed in Italian now, although someone who speaks Italian will probably need to confirm that for me. It looks like France and Italy have been more active in licensing h-manga during that long dark period when US licensors weren’t touching it with a 12-inch marital aid, and they’re not slowing down. I think our French and Italian compatriots have been able to buy licensed versions of Yamatogawa tankoubons for years now, amongst other stuff. Hopefully these new series from both authors will get the high-quality treatment they deserve and go on to commercial success.

Right now we’re working on getting the last volumes of Velvet Kiss and Love on the Job finished. Velvet Kiss 4 will have two bonus pages at the end like the other volumes, and this will be the first time that they’ll be in English. It also looks like the mid-volume color spread which is usually reduced to black and white will be in color in the English version. It’ll actually be superior to the Japanese version in that respect! Those will be out later in the year, and we’ll try and keep you abreast (heh heh) of any other new developments in the meantime.

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1. An October update

Hey all!

A good friend of mine showed me this article with an interview from Project-H (and we were mentioned~ thanks Yoko!)  I thought you might be interested in taking a look for it yourself:

Project-H worked with scanlators for the adaptation of Velvet Kiss. Is this something you see happening with other Project-H titles that have been scanlated before, or was it a special case situation when the scanlators approached you?

Yoko: I suppose you could say “we hired scanlators.” And it is, just that. They approached us for this particular title. We simply wanted to hire the best and most qualified people for the job. And that was them. It’s been the greatest thing we ever did. It’s also been a great promotion. We always welcome new ways to introduce our products and services to our fans.

 

You can check out the rest here:
http://www.kuriousity.ca/2013/01/handling-hentai-an-interview-with-project-h/

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Now that’s a title I never thought I’d write. But sure enough, Velvet Kiss has been given a live-action movie treatment. It appears to have been produced through Velvet Kiss’ publisher, Takeshobo, and stars AV actress Kanae Ruka as Kanoko, with her trademark twin tails intact. It’s divided into two separate parts (the second being due out next month) and it looks like they’re each 70 minutes long.

Is it a faithful adaptation? Is it any good? I couldn’t tell you, since I haven’t seen it. I’m debating about whether I want to pick it up or not, especially since I don’t have a Region 2 DVD player. It’s not as weird of a move as you might think, though, since Takeshobo has done with same thing with a few of its other successful h-manga series (Glass no Megami, Virgin na Kankei, Hishoka Drop). They all seem to follow a formula of two parts released within a month of each other, and perhaps more curiously, an R-15 rating. This is in contrast to the R-18 rating that explicit pornography is usually granted. I would venture a guess that there are probably sex scenes but camera angles and brevity might mean that they’re not terribly graphic. Maybe about Skinemax level?

I wouldn’t suggest holding your breath for a licensed version outside of Japan, although I would have said the exact same thing about the manga series a couple years ago and look how that turned out. It’s probably a rather niche title even its home market, and hopefully it’s not hobbled by a low budget. I’ll try and write up some impressions if I get the chance to watch it.

Related posts:

1. Velvet Kiss Volume 2 – out now!
2. Velvet Kiss licensed in French

It’s a new year, and believe it or not, we’ve just slithered past our third anniversary in the Year of the Snake. Not a lot of fanfare for this go-around, but we may as well mark the occasion by looking ahead to our print releases in 2013. Here’s what’s on the table so far:

• Love on the Job Volume 2: May 29
• Velvet Kiss Volume 3: May 29
• Velvet Kiss Volume 4: August 28
• Love on the Job Volume 3: September 25
• Makunouchi Deluxe Volume 1: November 27

Depending on how stuff goes we might be able to work on one of the many other titles that are scheduled to come out in 2013, but it’ll be a while before we have any idea of that for sure. I’d hoped to be doing more series that we hadn’t worked on before, but when I was offered Makunouchi Deluxe, I couldn’t pass it up. Rest assured that it’s going to get a far better treatment than it had in the amateur realm.

It’s simpler to purchase past and present releases in digital format now that Wowio isn’t the sole vendor (try emanga or Amazon’s Kindle store). Don’t know if the image compression is any better than what came before, though.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed by how the print releases have been received thus far. Reviewers new to the series don’t seem to see the appeal of them and some of the loudest voices I’d heard in the past going “oh yeah, I’d totally buy this stuff in English if I could!” have been completely silent. Maybe it was a bit of a foolish dream to think that there would be much of any audience crossover, or perhaps we should have waited until more of the books were out in print to announce our involvement. Ah, well.

Still, if you’d told me that back when I first read Love on the Job back in 2009 that I was going to work on the official English version, I would have told you that you were nuts. Hopefully in the years to come, new readers will have a chance to discover these fun stories and characters and get as much enjoyment out of them as I did back then. Ta ta for now!

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1. Happy Birthday, Soba-scans!
2. Welcome to Soba-scans!
3. Soba-Scans: Editing Recruitment!

Believe it or not, I’m actually more excited about this coming out than Velvet Kiss. The old scanlated version was a patchwork of different groups and was pretty compromised as a result. But now that it’s time for the official release, we can make sure that it’s all unified and consistent throughout the whole series. Being able to set the dialog from page 1 has given me a lot more comfort and control over the tone of the work and I’m very happy with how it’s turned out.

The series has more of a comedic aspect to it than Velvet Kiss does, which largely comes from two of the important side characters, Todoroki and Souma. They both didn’t get much of a fair shake in the scanlated version, but knowing their characters in advance let me play up their dialog a little more for the commercial adaptation. Souma was especially fun to write, what with her hammy grand designs and boundless persistence.

It’s my hope that works like this could help bring Harumi Chihiro to a wider audience, since I think a lot more people besides traditional manga fans would enjoy this series. Hopefully digital distribution will help in that regard. I’d encourage you to tell a friend if you’ve enjoyed it. Here’s where you can pick the first volume up:

FAKKU!  |  Acadot  |  Project-H  |  Amazon (UK)  |  Rightstuf  |  Indigo  |  Barnes and Noble

Side note from Ziggy:

Hey everyone, I haven’t been around much lately on Soba-Scans and have been wanting to do a video or give you guys an idea of what I do with Project-H books. Working on a professional quality scan and preparing it for the printer is a bit different than your typical scanlation and didn’t know if anyone would be interested in seeing what I do~ If you are just let me know! My classes are finishing up in the week or so, so I’ll have time to prepare something nice for you all.  I had a lot of fun working on this series, and I wanted to mention as well that Conan from 4dawgz actually was going to be the original typesetter for this series since he was the one who worked on it with us previously, however I ended up assisting him with a collaboration.  I’m very pleased with the turn out, and know you all will enjoy it very much.

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The second English volume of Velvet Kiss is printed and ready! This time around the translation is mine, as opposed to me editing another translator’s work. Everything’s been re-done to a higher standard and this should be a much more definitive version than what was out before.

In addition, Project-H has announced that they now have the rights to digitally distribute releases from Takeshobo, which includes Velvet Kiss, Ring x Mama, Makunouchi Deluxe, and Love on the Job. Here are the details, as we know them: They’ll be available primarily through Digital Manga’s site, emanga, which will be re-launching in November. Other platforms may be in the works but they have to deal with stuff like vendors such as Amazon and Apple being squeamish about carrying adult content. Releases will be downloadable and readable on “most popular devices.” That’s all the information we’ve been given, though, so I don’t have answers when it comes to pricing, file formats, DRM, or anything else like that. But if you’ve been holding back on purchasing the official version because you’d rather have it in digital rather than physical format, you should be able to have the chance pretty soon.

Currently it’s before the official release date, but it sounds like you can buy it already if you get it through Akadot or Project-H. Similar to last time, it looks like other online merchants are selling it with some sort of two-week delay. Couldn’t tell you why that is, I’m afraid, but pick whichever store you like best:

• Akadot
• Project-H
• Amazon (UK)
• RightStuf
• Indigo
• Barnes and Noble

We’re also about a month away from the first volume of Love on the Job (aka Koi wo Suru), so we’ll let you know when that’s available!

Related posts:

1. Velvet Kiss Volume 3 Licensed!
2. Big Velvet Kiss news – Official Volume 1!
3. Velvet Kiss: The Movie

Looks like our favorite Harumi Chihiro series is going to be officially available in another language. I found the news on this blog post that the publisher Soleil Manga is going to translate and release Velvet Kiss in France. Whoever does their covers seems to do a really good job, and I like what they did with this one as well. My understanding is that France has a really big market for licensed manga, so perhaps this was only a matter of time.

I feel like all these recent h-manga licenses go a long way towards taking the wind out of the sails of the argument that scanlation is justified because the mean ol’ creators and publishers won’t let it escape Japan. Clearly artists like Harumi Chihiro are happy to have their works enjoyed outside of its country of origin, but there has to be a licensor and an audience willing to support them.

Having been out of the game for several months now, I look back at all the time and energy I spent on scanlation, and if it wasn’t effort wasted then it was certainly effort misdirected. Sometimes it feels like all I did was just line the pockets of whoever owns those ad-choked manga aggregator sites. I bet if half the effort spent on scanlation were spent supporting legitimate efforts to localize manga, you’d see a lot more h-manga available for legitimate purchase today, and it would be of much higher quality.

Obviously, the issue’s a little more complex than this, but I look at all the rip-off artists and unhealthy bickering surrounding scanlation nowadays and I wonder why anybody bothers sticking with it. I feel like if it’s worth spending effort on anything, it’s to help improve the system that has the support of the people who actually make the manga. They’re happy for you to read what they make, if you help support the system that helps them.

Velvet Kiss Volume 2 should be out in about a month now, so we’ll let you know how you can get it pretty soon. Ciao!

Related posts:

1. Velvet Kiss Volume 3 Licensed!
2. Big Velvet Kiss news – Official Volume 1!
3. Licensed: Makunouchi Deluxe!

Here’s something even we didn’t expect – Makunouchi Deluxe is now licensed in English! One way or another, just about every series I’ve worked on has gotten an official license now. It’s good to know that they’re being given the chance to succeed legitimately under the blessing of the artists who created them.

This is still one of my favorite series ever, and unlike Ring x Mama, I’d be willing to go over it once more and make sure it’s polished to a mirror shine for the official release. I couldn’t tell you whether we’ll be able to work on it or not, though, since that’s up to Project H. We’ll see what happens in the next few months.

Speaking of the near future, we should hopefully see more printed volumes coming to market in the late fall and winter. There’s a pretty long lead time with print, so the stuff we’ve been working on all summer will be coming out then. Right now news is a little dry but as time goes on we should have a new volume coming out every month or two, with any luck.

I’d hoped to have more articles to fill the gap, but after the decidedly, uh, mixed reaction to the previous one, I’m still not sure if they’re a good idea or not. The next one was going to be a look at an actual retail-purchased h-magazine with an analysis of the contents. I know some people would say that because they’ve seen a scan or two that I couldn’t possibly tell them anything new, even though they probably don’t speak any Japanese. If you’re not one of those people and you’d be interested in seeing it, let me know, I suppose.

In any case, Velvet Kiss Volume 2 is currently set for a Halloween release date, and Love on the Job/Koi wo Suru is going to start coming out in November. We’ve been working on Love on the Job a lot this summer and I’m really happy with how the scripts have turned out. It’s going to be miles better than it was before, with much more personality and consistency. We’ll have more on that as it gets closer to release. Ta ta!

Related posts:

1. Velvet Kiss Volume 3 Licensed!

Ripped off from Danny Choo

I should clarify now that I’m talking about professionally-published stuff here – what’s known as “doujinshi” is an entirely separate topic which I won’t go into in this article. I’ve done most of my research based on Japanese Wikipedia and publisher web sites, but if you find any inaccurate information then please let me know. This is a big article, so click on through for the full thing:

Japan’s print media industry is absolutely massive. There’s magazines on every subject you can think of, and competing magazines, at that. This includes a ton of magazines devoted to publishing manga. The magazines themselves are usually printed on pretty cheap paper and sold for the equivalent of maybe $4-7 US. They’re often enormous – they can easily be 4 or 500 pages and as physically big and thick as phone books. The idea is that they’re sort of disposable entertainment. You pick up this week’s or this month’s magazine, read the latest chapters in whatever series you’re following, maybe read a few other things that look good, and then put the magazine out with the trash after you’re done with it. If a reader really likes a series, they can pick up the volumes when they come out to keep it on higher-quality paper that won’t degrade so quickly. Just about all of the manga genres have a ton of competing magazines, and hentai is no exception.

The magazines are put out by publishing corporations. After all, someone has to spend the money to organize the magazine, make the layout, stamp out hundreds of thousands of copies, and distribute it all over Japan. They also pay a manuscript fee to each artist for producing their work so they can publish it. Like other publishing industries, they try to find new talent, promote what they publish as much as they can, and try to adjust to any changes that happen in the marketplace.

Hentai manga, as a sub-genre of manga publishing, is a little harder to define than you might think. As a general rule, a hentai magazine will outright require that every work it runs has to have a sex scene in it. That’s why sex scenes might seem a little shoe-horned in when you’re following a series – it’s a rule the artist has to follow to get published in that particular magazine. It’s down to the skill of the artist to make that requirement into a natural part of the story instead of a weird hang-up. Sometimes you’ll see sex scenes in more mainstream manga magazines, but they’re fairly rare, on the whole. The biggest Japanese publishers don’t seem to dip their toes into hentai very often, so h-manga usually comes from small or medium-sized publishers. They’ll often put out a couple magazines at the same time, possibly to aim at different sub-sections of the market. With that in mind, I’ll break these magazines down by publisher:

Takeshobo

Definitely one of the most “mainstream” h-manga publishers. They run a variety of magazines of different genres, including somewhat low-brow subjects like pachinko, mahjong, and gravure photography. They tend to publish longer, multi-volume series, and unlike most of these other publishers, you can often find their material at normal book stores in Japan. They have a strict censorship policy – the dreaded “lightsaber” effect, where showing anything resembling genitals is disallowed. But this policy is probably what allows them to achieve the level of distribution that they have. They publish two hentai magazines:

Comic VITAMAN – A monthly magazine which focuses on romantic series. This is the magazine that published Velvet Kiss and Koi wo Suru/Love on the Job. They also run a lot of other similar series which you might have heard of, like Virgin na Kankei, Glass no Megami, and How to Go Steady With a Nurse. If your byline is “Hey, I read it for the plot!” then this is your magazine. In general, its series have a bit of a romance theme, but are still focused on male readers for the most part.

Comic Namaiki! – A sister publication which seems to be a little less focused on ongoing series than Vitaman. However, this is where a lot of Manabe Joji series were published, like Ring x Mama and Makunouchi Deluxe. While also fairly vanilla in sexual content, perhaps a bit more focused on the sex itself instead of the plot. There used to be a third comic called “Comic Doki!” which, in my limited experience, didn’t seem to be much different from Namaiki. It seems to have quietly folded a few months ago and some of the regular artists were assimilated into Namaiki.

Wani Magazine Co.

Wani (which means “alligator” in Japanese) focuses almost entirely on hentai, with a few gravure magazines as well. Note that there’s a company named “Wani Books” which is entirely unrelated. Their censorship policy is less overbearing than Takeshobo’s. The outline of the genitals can be drawn, but the offending organs themselves must be covered in solid white. This rule is relaxed in printed volumes, where most of the throbbing members in question can be shown, just with some thin black bars over them. You won’t find their volumes in normal book stores, though, because they have often have more sexually explicit artwork on the covers. Consequently, even in a book store that wants to sell their books, they have to be sold behind a separate curtained-off “Adults Only” section.

Comic Kairakuten – One of the titans of the industry. Has been running since 1994, when it was called “Manga Erotopia.” Consists almost entirely of one-offs, although occasionally a short series makes it through. Home to some really big names in the industry like ReDrop, Naruko Hanaharu, Bosshi, and LINDA. Japanese Wikipedia claims that it has sales on par with some more mainstream seinen magazines, but the site it links to no longer carries the data, so it’s hard to be sure. The content is generally not considered too extreme. Just guys and gals gettin’ it on, with nothing outright non-consensual. It’s easy to find in convenience stores.

Comic Kairakuten BEAST, Comic Shitsurakuten, Comic Hana-man – Sister publications to Kairakuten. Same censorship policy, same general content, and same distribution methods. I suppose they just have enough content every month to put out 4 full magazines of hentai. There doesn’t appear to be a unique theme to any of the magazines, but maybe I’m not looking hard enough.

Core Magazine Co.

Another publisher that focuses almost exclusively on adult content. Censorship appears to differ between magazines, but is generally of the “black bar” variety. They even run some yaoi magazines. Content is pretty similar to Wani’s magazines. Seems to skew a little MILFy but that may just be my unfounded opinion.

Comic MegaMilk – Successor to Comic 0EX. Can’t really find anything unique about this one.

Comic Bangaichi – Japanese Wikipedia says it originally started out with a different name as a magazine that followed Yakuza activities, but under scrutiny, had to change their name. In 1990 it switched to its present format as a hentai magazine.

Comic Megastore – Carries your standard hentai manga, but also features previews of hentai games as well. I may have this a bit confused, but it may be a trimmed-down version of the content in the actual magazine “Megastore,” which focuses on erogames exclusively and doesn’t run comics. Has a sister magazine, “Megastore H,” which appears to be normal hentai fare.

Futubasha

Comparatively, more of a normal publisher. Runs a variety of magazines with themes from fashion to photography. They even publish Crayon Shin-chan, a very popular manga in Japan. Similar to Takeshobo, their hentai material is vanilla enough to enjoy distribution in normal book stores. Censorship seems a bit strict, with a somewhat tamed-down “lightsaber” method employed.

Comic Action Pizazz – Swallowed up the long-running “Comic Men’s Young” when it was suspended early this year. It now runs a lot of reasonably well-known series like Cheers, Offline Game, and a whole lot of stuff from Pon Takahanada. Has a sister publication, Pizazz DX, but I’m not sure how often it’s published or how the content differs, if at all.

Akaneshinsha

Now we’re getting to the edgier side of the market. A small publisher (Japanese Wikipedia says it only has 15 people on staff) with limited distribution, but it has what may be the most limited censorship policy on the market, very small semi-transparent black bars. Runs some loli magazines which I don’t care to go into, so I won’t.

Comic TENMA – Thematically, a little more extreme than what we’ve been talking about so far. The biggest feather in their cap is probably Yamatogawa, one of the most well-regarded hentai artists out there. The censorship is so faint that it may as well not even be there. Its sister publication, Comic Sigma, seems to be more of the same flavor.

Tatsumi Publishing

Like many of these other publishers, Tatsumi runs magazines on a variety of topics from pets to Pachinko. Censorship is of the “solid-colored genitals” variety.

Comic Penguin Club – Oof. Running out of stuff to say at this point. A lot like Kairakuten, only from a different publisher. Mostly one-off based. Has another edition, “Penguin Club Sanzokuban”, and a sister publication, “Comic Bazooka.”

Kill Time Communication

A small publisher, but near and dear to my heart since their non-sexually explicit magazine, Comic Valkyrie, runs Koimoku and Gaiakitan. If you read their twitter, you’ll see that readers have a hard time buying the actual Valkyrie magazines or their printed volumes. Book stores apparently assume that everything KTC puts out is hentai and stuff it behind the curtain.

Comic Unreal – This one is pretty far into fetish country, as the name might imply. Tentacles, gender-bending, and a whole lot of other stuff I’m personally not a fan of so I don’t know quite how deep the rabbit hole goes. Censorship is the absolute bare minimum, just tiny little white bars.

Whew. Believe it or not, this isn’t even a comprehensive list. There’s at least a couple magazines I’m aware of that I didn’t include, and probably many more that I don’t even know about. But even so, try and wrap your head around how every magazine mentioned in this post puts out on the order of 200 pages of content per month (at least). The sheer volume of smutty comics coming out of this little corner of the industry is staggering. It’s probably too much for any one person to keep track of. I’m sure the industry will keep on changing, so this list is just sort of a snapshot of the industry at this point in time.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably thinking, “Gee, I wish I could take a look at some of this stuff and read it.” With the wide variety of content available, there’s certainly something to meet just about any taste. But like any exotic beast, it’s the kind of creature that can only survive in its native habitat. There’s a lot of things about Japan which allow a market like this to thrive, even in 2012 – the widespread cultural acceptance of manga in general, the country’s voracious appetite for printed material, the established distribution and printing network, the willingness of society to allow magazines like this in convenience stores, and the existence of many talented artists who are willing to work in this genre.

Even with a sub-optimal system like scanlation, the majority of this material is likely to stay in its home country, perhaps quickly buried under the astonishing volume of new material that comes out every month. Currently, only the cream of the crop can be given a real, proper English adaptation. Even with a large staff of localizers, thousands of pages of material every month would be a staggering burden to bear, and it’s a much smaller niche outside of Japan. As accustomed as people outside Japan are to seeing this material just pop up for free, it has to make money to be given any real professional attention, and that’s not a sure bet.

Maybe that isn’t a bad thing. Not every hentai manga is a home run. The cliches are well-known, and I get the impression that once an artist retires, they’re not especially concerned about whether their work remains relevant. Maybe a system like J-Comi will help preserve this material when it’s no longer commercially relevant but becomes academically interesting. In any case, I hope I’ve been able to give you some small clue of how this fascinating but almost hidden industry works. It’s my goal to have more articles in this vein in the future. Let us know what you think! See you later!

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