How is it that Kinnikuman is the one popular WSJ battle manga that has never been officially licensed in English?

How is it that Kinnikuman is the one popular WSJ battle manga that has never been officially licensed in English?

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Because they looked at the first few volumes and said "fuck this noise I'm not translating that".

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It's pretty uncommon for 80s manga to get an English release unless they've got an anime that's well-known in the west or the author has another series that's popular. Nisei was licensed for a while, though.

I think Nisei is technically still licensed by Viz, as the information is still up on their website. But they'll never reprint it, so used volumes will continue to skyrocket in price.

On the subject of an anime though, there's been a tag going around on Twitter in support of a new anime that was started by Yudetamago themselves.

I'm not entirely sure if they still have the rights to Nisei or not, since they didn't include it in their digital library. A bunch of other forgotten manga licenses from that time period did (like Pretty Face and Muhyo & Roji).

Lots of series that have been licensed in the past never even finished, let alone get reprinted. What's popular in Japan isn't necessarily what's popular in the U.S., and Kinnikuman is niche. Even the revival stuff that's probably an easier sell to Western audiences is nevertheless a direct continuation of the original run and hinges on it, which leaves you with over 70 volumes of material with a small audience. They would be stupid to commit to that.

We did however did get ULTIMATE MUSCLE

Viz printed the last volume of Nisei in 2011, and as of now there's still some old stock on Rightstuf. So maybe that has something to do with it not being in their digital library.

These days they don't even have to actually print anything, so the cost is reduced significantly. But you just know some twitter shit stirrer is gonna start something over Brocken Jr.

>some twitter shit stirrer is gonna start something over Brocken Jr.
If only they knew about that time when his father brought back the horrors of the Nazi gas chambers.

Because English companies are boring as fuck, but whatever.

I think with enough care and polish, TL'd versions of the early chapters can look good lord knows I've tried

That said, it'd take a lot of effort that I doubt a company as lazy as viz is willing to put in.

>so the cost is reduced significantly.
Maybe, but you still need to translate 70+ volumes. For what? A subscription service (where its marginal added value would be tiny) or digital sales? Neither of those justify it either.

What? is that not what the manga labeled ultimate muscle in my local library is?

I don't think that's inherently true, I think the real issue is how it's presented. With a lot of manga I've noticed, if it's not a top selling series there's little effort put into making the translation very solid, or, cleaning up sound effects, nonetheless barely any marketting

I think it could work, but, it'd take an amount of effort that I don't think lazy companies are willing to put in.

Ultimate Muscle is a sequel series, the original is only available to English audiences through scanlations

The effort they put in (the costs) is in proportion to the expected return. It's not about laziness.

Well, I guess, but obviously if you were to put in a higher amount of time/cost into a series, in order to make it more appealing/marketable (i.e. at this rate fucking anything better than decade old scans) than, you can probably expect a better return.

As well, it's not as if Ultimate Muscle is completely forgotten in the US.

>at this rate fucking anything better than decade old scans
We did what we could with what we had. You gotta remember there were a grand total of like 10 people reading it back then, so absolutely nobody else wanted to touch it.

It has a "Heroic" Nazi

Yeah I get what you mean, I'm not trying to shit on them in and of themselves, especially considering without them it'd be just like tons of other untranslated manga.

I just think a big barrier for entry is that those scans were never really replaced. A lot of people shit on the gag manga chapters especially but I think with better translations/cleaner visuals they'd be just as decent as the rest of the series.

If I hadn't had home trouble right before the end of the series, we absolutely would have gone back and re-scanlated the Toriyama World chapters. We even had a slightly better translator who was willing to do them. But unfortunately I was kind of doing everything in the group besides translation, so once I left it was a struggle to even get the last few volumes textset.

>As well, it's not as if Ultimate Muscle is completely forgotten in the US.

Basically the only people that remember it explicitly are now in their late 20s and early 30s.

Pretty sure OG (the Manga at least) won't get brought over because it's a licensing nightmare from it's days as a gag parody manga where it just name dropped Toku like nothing.

Which group were you a part of?

Nothing some renaming won't fix.

Dude they straight up showed Ultraman.

Nothing some renaming won't fix.

So the same as any series at that time? Because thats how media generally works. DBZ is basically the only series that got extra generational support and that's mainly due to it being a multi-generational series in general.
Kinnikuman's Revival stuff didn't get any western support so people aren't aware it came out.

We weren't really a group, but we used "Team Kinniku" because OneManga required a group name. It was really just one guy doing the translations independently and me cleaning/proofreading/textsetting/everything else because nobody else was doing anything with the translations. And a few regulars in the thread who were sorta honorary members because they did things like upload the chapters to OneManga for us.

What should we rename him as?

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That's understandable. I don't resent anyone for not doing it either, given the landscape scanlations are in lately. More so just meant in general I think they should be redone I'm trying to do so myself but I've been rather busy anyway

Didn't Dr. Slump do something like that too? It's manga got licensed.

All of them are so obviously parodies, i doubt it'd even need much of a change user.

Megaman, obviously.