May 15, 2013
Donkey Kong Country 2 comic (German Club Nintendo) scanlation v2!

A while ago I posted a scanlation I had completed with the help of Caramelman for translation: http://miloscat.tumblr.com/post/39620620143 Well, that post is obsolete now. I got my hands on some way better scans (higher quality, larger, no watermark), and when I found them I decided to redo the whole release. There were a few other issues I corrected as well, with small typos, some additions to the credits page since I’d also got the original comic’s credits, and a much better speech bubble technique that resulted in better looking speech bubbles. This new blanking technique that I’d discovered also dramatically sped up the pace at which I could do this: doing it the original way all over again would have been a daunting task. As it is, I pretty much breezed through it.

So here, now I present to you, version 2 of the DKC2 comic! I won’t repeat all the background and details, check out my original post linked above for all that stuff. I’ll just link to the new one.

I want to try using Flickr instead of the new Google pictures thing. It seems very good so far. The pictures look a bit small, but by clicking on them to zoom, there’s then a button called View All Sizes and you can see the original. Also for those interested in quality or archiving or more convenient viewing, there’s the cbz file download. A cbz is easy to work with, it’s just a zip file renamed so you can easily extract the images or use comic reading applications (CDisplay is apparently good for Windows, I use Simple Comic on Mac).

This time, both sources use the highest quality pngs exported straight from my working files. Who knows if that is the right thing, they’re a little big but after seeing the text artifacts on my previous jpgs I don’t want to compromise on quality. Also Flickr scales them down anyway so I don’t think size is an issue if you don’t want it to be.

Well, I’m very excited that I was able to improve so much on this comic. If you’ve already read it, it’s basically the same but if you want to reuse it, cut out panels or whatever, it’s now much better for that. Also if you previously downloaded it, delete the old one and get this one. Trust me. Ok here’s some links:

Web galleryCBZ version download

9:59am  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZpvIwuk-RYUn
(Notes: 5)
  
Filed under: scanlation club nintendo donkey kong country 2 comic 
April 7, 2013

One thing I like to do when I’m feeling lazy is browse through old gaming magazines, scanned and uploaded by the good folks of Retromags and other places. It’s fun to reminisce about when beloved childhood games were new, or see previews for ones I know were never released. You might even find a comic or two! It’s also worth it to find gems like these.

These two are from an issue of Club Nintendo UK, the official Nintendo magazine of Britain. It wasn’t as good as Nintendo Power, judging by what I’ve seen of that now. But they did have some delightfully off-model art that the staff seem to have drawn themselves. How Megaman and Wario ended up so wonky, and so wrongly coloured, I have no idea.

11:01am  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZpvIwui4gEHT
Filed under: scans club nintendo 
January 24, 2013
Zelda Ocarina of Time comic (German Club Nintendo) scanlation

It’s a new comic scanlation! This one is not from a special edition, but from the regular print run of the magazine. It’s actually two separate comics, printed in issue 5 and 6 in 1998. They form a somewhat cohesive whole though, together with the two part comic in Special Edition #9, which has already been translated and can be found here.

They are called The Gate of Time (6 pages) and The Sleep of the Righteous (4 pages). The first is a weird story that involves Adult Link, Navi, and Sheik telling Child Link about all the stuff he’ll have to do, before he even speaks to the Deku Tree! It’s not really 100% consistent with many actual gameplay mechanisms, and feels like it’s breaking the 4th wall somehow. The second is more straightforward, and retells the beginning of the game pretty much, up to meeting Zelda. They can be seen as following each other, and the Special Edition comics are a prologue so it all works if you read it like that.

Unlike the previous Club Nintendo offering, I don’t know who wrote this one. But it was also drawn by Work House Co, from Tokyo. Again, big thanks to Caramelman who did the German translation, which was so good I didn’t have to do much to it. The original was a bit wordy in some parts, but I tried to preserve as much of the content as I could, since this comic was more about the dialogue and plot, especially part 2. Some of the speech bubbles are a bit squished as a consequence.

This one also had a lot less jokes and stuff, so the main draw here is just Zelda fandom. I was surprised to find this hadn’t been done already actually, as the translation community is fairly busy over there. Check out the History of Hyrule site for a ton of manga and other comics (although it’s a bit hard to navigate).

I also realise I’m stepping a little on Opentrain’s toes with this, as they have pledged to translate all the regular issue comics eventually. They’re being slow right now though, and this is the very last one before the lower-quality N-Gang shorts start up. I thought this was more important too, since it is quite close to the game, and a bit of an outlier really in the whole Club Nintendo canon, being fairly serious and true to the game (early Special Editions are like this too).

Anyway, for this comic I used a new technique which made my previous method look like the wild scramblings of a gibbering idiot. Basically, my new image editing program, Pixelmator, has a “magic eraser” tool that made blanking speech bubbles an absolute breeze. More accurate and so much quicker. It also has a good text manipulation mode, so I only needed the one program for the whole process. And I’m happy with how it turned out, I’ve learned a lot about fixing little things to make the text look better.

So that’s it. I’ve decided to just do one version of this, it’s jpegs, but the highest quality. It’s a little janky up close but I’m just a perfectionist, I’m sure it’s fine for most people. Enjoy, and share and whatever!

Download .cbz (to read .cbz, I recommend Simple Comic for Mac and CDisplay for Windows)

Web gallery

6:23pm  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZpvIwucWVDm8
(Notes: 10)
  
Filed under: zelda comics scanlation fandom club nintendo gaming ocarina of time comic 
January 19, 2013
Club Nintendo comics database

I have some Club Nintendo-related stuff to share. For my own purposes, I made a spreadsheet a while ago to track the titles, issue numbers, character appearances, and availability in German and English of all known Club Nintendo comics. I felt it was worth publishing on the Internet in case there’s anyone like me hunting for these comics, so here it is on Google Docs.

The information here leans heavily on Super Mario Wiki, as most of the regular issue comics involve Mario or Mario series characters. A huge step in this process was the Opentrain translation project, who have completely translated the first four years’ print run comics, and are hosting an archive of almost all the raw German comics.

I will try to keep this updated if any new information comes to light, so if you want to know where to find any Club Nintendo comic, check here and I might be able to tell you. Oh and on that note, if you can add any information on where to find any of these comics, message me here or through my email (which I think Google Docs should tell you).

1:39pm  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZpvIwuc5FqCJ
(Notes: 4)
  
Filed under: comics scanlation club nintendo comic 
January 4, 2013
Donkey Kong Country 2 comic (German Club Nintendo) scanlation

UPDATE: I made a new version of this comic. Announcement here: http://miloscat.tumblr.com/post/50456307633 I also replaced the links in this post to the new ones.

It’s finally done! I’ve been working on this comic for a long time now, on and off. You may recall I previously released some DKC2 gag manga pages, and single pages from Kirby and Star Fox comics. All those mini-projects were practice for this.

This comic has never been translated before, as far as I know. It appeared in a 1995 “Special Edition” of the German Club Nintendo magazine. Some of these were free giveaways, not sure about this one though. It contains humour, action, and some game tips and covers most of the adventure through each world, up to the top of K. Rool’s Keep. It was written by Marcus Menold, John D. Kraft, Thomas Görg, and Markus Pfitzner, and was illustrated by Work House Co. Ltd., Tokyo.

This comic is important to me as it was the last Donkey Kong-related western comic that wasn’t available in English. Although Donkey and Diddy do appear in other regular Club Nintendo comics, those are mostly cameo appearances in ensemble comics and not a retelling (as this is) or unique Kong adventure. Incidentally, many other Club Nintendo comics have been translated online. The other DK ones are on the DKVine forums, and Opentrain are about 1/3rd of the way through the regular print run comics. There’s also 3 on the Bomberman wiki.

But back to this release. This started when Caramelman from the DKVine forums offered to help me translate it, as he is German. Big thanks to him for translating the whole thing, each line, into English. He did a great job and even tried to adapt the idioms, etc. I have handled cleaning the scanned pages (mostly the speech bubbles), editing the script and typesetting. Thanks also to my wife Everbloom for helping out with the final editing stages and for painting the beautiful credits page art. Special thanks to my parents-in-law for some small German clarifications. Scans were sourced from nintendo-power.de, they’re not great scans in terms of fidelity but consistent and level. They have all of the special edition comics there in the original German.

I should also say that my editing philosophy was not strictly literal translations. If something was idiomatic or awkward in the German I changed it. Throughout I emphasised flow in English rather than 100% the same words as the original. I also added a few little lines for the sake of a joke that weren’t there originally. Hopefully I wasn’t too blatant about that. Having said that, several lines in the German rhymed like the characters were singing or chanting (for humour, I guess), I mostly tried to make the line rhyme in English too.

Ok, so that’s the comic. I recommend everyone take a look, if only because I spent so much effort on it. I’m very happy with how it turned out. It’s a fine reminder of a time when the world of games could be immersive but still fun and silly. It also has some admittedly very funny faces. I could say a lot about the value of these types of things in helping develop personalities for characters but I’d better just stop prattling and post the links.

Please, enjoy.

Web gallery

CBZ version download

1:45pm  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZpvIwuavagzl
(Notes: 7)
  
Filed under: donkey kong donkey kong country 2 comics fandom scanlation gaming club nintendo comic 
October 28, 2012
Kirby’s Biggest Case comic from Club Nintendo, page 19. Another small mini-project, to complete an unfinished comic on the web. Kirby’s Rainbow Resort has a great page on various Kirby comics and manga, with a very nice design. The only thing it was...

Kirby’s Biggest Case comic from Club Nintendo, page 19.

Another small mini-project, to complete an unfinished comic on the web. Kirby’s Rainbow Resort has a great page on various Kirby comics and manga, with a very nice design. The only thing it was missing was the translation of the other CN Kirby comic, printed during the regular run, and half of one page from their translation of this comic, which had been corrupted somehow.

This comic, by the way, is from special edition #3 of the German magazine, and unlike most of the special issues, isn’t based on any one game in particular. Instead, there is a framing story about Kirby being a private eye with his assistants, Dedede and Bluefish, with interstitial dream sequences and so on to exhibit brief plugs for the spinoffs Kirby’s Dream Course, Kirby’s Ghost Trap, and Kirby’s Block Ball.

Anyway, this was a very quick job to add the lower third of the page just to make it complete, as well as retranslating the section that I had added. Font doesn’t match but meh, like I said it was a quick job.

I tried to post a topic on KRR’s forums about this, but it hasn’t been approved yet so if anyone’s involved over there, get on this! I can’t stand seeing things like this incomplete.

Speaking of which, here’s the links for the only Kirby comics I know of:

KRR’s nice page with lots of manga (mostly 4koma and a small bit of the CoroCoro comic, Dedede who lives in Pupupu, which is even cuter than usual) and the two Club Nintendo comics. There’re a few 4koma translations but it’s mostly the native Japanese. http://www.kirbysrainbowresort.net/multimedia/manga/

The English translation of Kirby and the Secret of the Glibber (ie the other CN comic) is included as part of the CN translation project by Opentrain. This has not been brought over to KRR either, so you spies get onto that too! It’s in the 1994 edition, here: http://opentrain.199xchan.org/?p=223

Of course, Kirby also featured fairly regularly in other comics during Club Nintendo’s run, in crossover situations. Highlights would be the Wizard of Oz parody wherein he is evetually turned into a toaster, and Die Nacht des Grauens (The Night of Horrors), in which he, Link and Mario become demon hunters. To see these and other comics, check out Opentrain’s site. They’ve done 4 years of comics so far, but also provide a link for the (almost) complete German raw collection.

10:05pm  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZpvIwuW75fEd
(Notes: 4)
  
Filed under: kirby comics scanlation club nintendo comic 
October 23, 2012
Lylat Wars (Star Fox 64) comic from Club Nintendo, final page. Small follow-up comic project while working on a larger one from the same magazine. This is the final page of a comic printed in special edition #6 of the German magazine Club Nintendo. I...

Lylat Wars (Star Fox 64) comic from Club Nintendo, final page.

Small follow-up comic project while working on a larger one from the same magazine. This is the final page of a comic printed in special edition #6 of the German magazine Club Nintendo. I only did this page because the rest of it (or at least as much as anyone has scans of) has already been translated, and is hosted at the Arwing Landing gallery. Can’t figure out how to contact them about it… But now, all the pages I know about are available in English. If anyone can get them to put this up, let them know!

Other Star Fox comics:

1992 Star Fox comic, Nintendo Power

1997 Lylat Wars comic, Club Nintendo (German, translated)

2002 Star Fox Adventures prequel manga, Japanese Adventures website (Japanese, translated)

These three are hosted here: http://arwinglanding.net/gallery/index.php?cat=5

2002 Star Fox Adventures 4koma collection, translated: http://s127.photobucket.com/albums/p138/sfamanga/

1993 Nester’s Adventures comic featuring Star Fox, Nintendo Power (courtesy of Retromags): http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5774303/Nester%2047-035%20Star%20Fox.jpg

1994 Star Fox mini-comic on back of Corn Flakes box, with Game Watch giveaway: http://www.anthrofox.org/starfox/watch/index.html

Random 4koma strip I found somewhere, looks legit: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5774303/StarFox4koma.jpg

UPDATE: Arwing Landing has disappeared from the Internet, taking all of its galleries with it. Also Dropbox sharing doesn’t work any more. Basically, ignore all the links above and just go here for where I uploaded all these comics.

10:37pm  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZpvIwuVq7N4D
(Notes: 15)
  
Filed under: comics scanlation star fox star fox 64 lylat wars club nintendo comic 
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