December 24, 2017
[Comic] Club Nintendo (NL) Christmas comics

image

Just in time for Kerstmis (as the Dutch call it), here’s two short comics from the Dutch edition of Club Nintendo magazine. This version of Nintendo’s official magazine shared a lot of content with other European editions. In fact after translating the first image I realised that it was already printed in the UK edition, but what the heck, here it is anyway. I’m pretty sure the second image has not been available in English before, though!

Thanks to Geoffrey de Vlugt for uploading the magazine scans here, and to my friend Dangermouse for some translation assistance.

Web gallery

Download archive

9:13pm  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZpvIwu2TISWpE
(Notes: 3)
  
Filed under: comics video game comics scanlation mario 
January 9, 2014
Quick comics update

Hey dudes, Christmas has been a busy time as you might expect so I haven’t been on the bloggo so much. One of my current comics projects is stalled with an unwilling translator and another one I tried to start but had holidays to deal with first. I’m not feeling terribly motivated right now but it would really help if I got some enthusiasm and excitement over this busta comics find.

Abusuzuki is an Arabic scanner of video game manga, and boy what a scanner! I was linked here through some bad news unfortunately, as the Tanjou Rockman scanlation group has been semi-abandoned. The remaining member linked this site as a source of many raws, and I need to share this link because if you’re interested at all in video game comics, you need to check out abusuzuki.

They’ve scanned and uploaded a multitude of manga, maybe not too much super-rare but just having full scans of all these volumes is a treasure. You’ve got a lot of Rockman, a whole bunch of Mario (including Yoshi and Wario), some Donkey Kong and even a couple of Sonic. There’s 4koma collections from all the big names: Action, Enix, Koubunsha, Keibunsha. And a ton of Bombom’s preferred format, story adaptations rather than simple gag strips. Plus a few more unique ones here and there too. It’s like History of Hyrule is for Zelda, but without the nice presentation, just raw manga.

All in Japanese of course, but I think you can appreciate them well enough without knowledge of the language. Anyway just wanted to link that because hey, I never knew about it until now. And it seems the scanner has reached the end of their collection, so go grab it all before the links stop working (an all too common occurence when dealing with filesharing sites).

1:54pm  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZpvIwu13kpkaw
Filed under: comics video game comics scanlation 
March 8, 2013
DKU comics

I’ve been working on a rather large article for a while now, and it’s finally ready! I’m not posting it here though, because it’s hosted over at my favourite Donkey Kong fansite, DKVine. It’s a rundown of all the printed comics ever published that are DKU (provided they are available on the Internet, otherwise I don’t know about them). It’s got descriptions and highlights and then, you can even view the whole comics themselves under each paragraph! It’s amazing!

I should take a step back though. First, anyone who’s read this blog for a while will know I like video game comics. They’re a great way to expand on a game world, and while I like comics fine, they’re way better when they involve the established characters and worlds of video games that I’ve played. They also are an easy form of merchandise to collect and appreciate digitally.

Second, I like lists, spreadsheets, categorising and organising things. This article started as a rough list in TextEdit and a series of links to where you could find these comics on the Internet. I decided to expand it inot a hopefully-interesting to read article, in the hopes of helping anyone else who like me was on the hunt for DKU comics.

Third, some background if you are unfamiliar with the DKU. It’s a concept that describes a shared universe of video game characters, starting with the Donkey Kong Country series. Diddy Kong Racing expanded the Universe to include Banjo Bear (and all subsequent Banjo games), Conker the Squirrel (and etc), and Tricky the Triceratops (who makes all following Star Fox games DKU because it’s the same guy in Dinosaur Planet and DKR). That’s the basic gist of it but it makes for some interesting hypothetical interactions as it expands. The DKU is the guiding principle of the site DKVine (which even used to be called DKU itself, and before that Donkey Kong’s Jungle Vine).

The article really became a thing though when Matt (Waddle Dedede on the forums) asked me to follow through on a suggestion I made in a comic thread. It’s thanks to him that it got published and that it looks so damn sexy. Seriously, check it out, it’s got flippy tags and subheadings and expandable images and everything! He made it all happen and I am very grateful to him for what seemed like a lot of work.

Oh yeah, I should put the link. Here: http://www.dkvine.com/features/milo_investigates_dku_comics.html Also, if anything else comes to light, I will post about it in the linked forum thread (which I think you have to get to through the news announcement post; or just check out the DKU subforum). Actually, here: http://www.dkvine.com/interactive/forums/index.php?showtopic=8159

Why are you still reading this? Have you read the article? I’m really happy with it, I’d like for you to read it. It’s got a wide range of crazy and weird comics, most of them in English. Yep so that’s that.

8:12pm  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZpvIwufnJmQd
Filed under: comics scanlation fandom dku gaming comic 
January 25, 2013
Super Mario-kun Vol 12 Special Stage 1 scanlation (DKC)

My other latest project, a single chapter of Volume 12 of Super Mario-kun. I’ve posted before a series of 4koma strips from another volume, and now I’ve graduated to a proper story. This is a brief one-shot based on Donkey Kong Country, but not really retelling the game. Rather, it’s the story of Mario and Yoshi crashing their plane into Donkey Kong’s territory on New Year’s Eve. They then have to find the missing banana hoard (again), which is in the possession of a Rockkroc. It’s silly (to be expected of this manga) but a bit of fun, and a rare friendly interaction between the Kongs and Mario.

I started working on this when I realised the Zelda comic was going much quicker than my last. I was waiting for Caramelman to finish the translation but still had the comics itch, so I picked this up and translated it myself. I used Google translate mostly, and this site for the meanings of the various sound effects used. My sister-in-law, a Japanese linguistics student, helped a lot to refine the script after I’d done the first draft, also introducing me to Jim Breen’s online dictionary site. She then signed up to Twitter so I’d have something to put on the credits page. :)

I’m releasing this chapter alongside my previous 4koma translations, which come from Vol 14 of Super Mario-kun. If in future I scanlate any more SMk, I’ll update the archive and web gallery, to keep all of it in one place.

.cbz version (use Simple Comic on Mac, or CDisplay on Windows)

Web gallery

If you’re after more Super Mario-kun translations (not by me), there’s not a whole lot but I’ve found a few:

Chapters 1-7 of Volume 1 (Super Mario World) are hosted here, by various translators. A better version of some of these chapters is contained in this archive. A single short comic from Volume 19 (Yoshi’s Story) has been translated here, and a 4koma from Volume 35 here (Christmas-themed). Apparently another translator has done Chapter 9 and 12 of Volume 1 (12 in colour), links here and here, but the host is currently down so I can’t verify. Keep an eye on that one. Finally, a chapter from Volume 38 (Super Mario Galaxy) has been translated here.

Oh, and if you’re wondering where I got the raws from, well a while ago I stumbled upon a filesharing site folder full of very nicely scanned volumes, with no hint of who scanned or uploaded them. If you’re interested in the original Japanese or want to translate some yourself, have a look here.

If you know of any more around the Internet, let me know. And also, spread this DKC one around and enjoy!

9:11pm  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZpvIwucbXjdR
(Notes: 19)
  
Filed under: comics scanlation super mario kun donkey kong Donkey Kong Country comic 
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 29, 2012
Comic editing

Since I’ve been working on these comics—translating, cleaning, editing, typesetting—I wanted to write a little something about my process. Self-indulgence is one of the purposes of this blog after all.

The translation is the most collaborative part. I try my best with Google translate and dictionary apps, but I’ve also had some help. With Japanese, my sister-in-law (a linguist who has studied Japanese for many years) has been a great help. I also used the iPhone app “imiwa?” extensively for kanji recognition. With German, I managed to secure the assistance of a German speaker from the DKVine forums, Caramelman, who is doing most of the translation work on my current project. My parents-in-law also lived in Germany for several years, so they have answered some of my questions. This is usually the first step, and I put it all in one or several text files using TextEdit.

The step I refer to as cleaning usually just involves whiting out the speech bubbles, although for the Kirby comic at least I had to do some image compositing. This is easier with some scans than others. The Super Mario-kun scans were very clean with great contrast so it was easy to just draw white boxes over the text and leave it at that. The Club Nintendo scans are not as nice, so I have to go around each speech bubble with the paint brush tool while zoomed in. They are somewhat pixelated at that level of zoom, so the granularity of editing makes it easier. I try not to edit or change any of the actual art outside the speech bubble, that’s an obvious decision on my part. All of the image editing is done in Seashore app, which I settled on after trying many different painting apps.

The editing and typesetting phase occur simultaneously, and sometimes require retranslation on my part. I type out the contents of the next speech bubble, change the wording if it needs to fit better, sometimes change the size. After all that, I usually ask my wife to proofread what I’ve done to make sure it sounds natural and flows well. The font I use throughout the speech and narration of a comic is SF Toontime. Again I tried various programs to find the best way for this process of positioning text boxes, and none of the paint apps were any good at it. Finally I hit upon OmniGraffle, a professional tool for making flowcharts and stuff, which I used during Honours at university to make diagrams for my thesis. It works great, and now I have a workflow for each stage of the comics process.

Oh there is a final step. After cleaning I try to save as raw an image as I can, to import to OmniGraffle. I then export, and finally use the export options in Preview to make the final product as close to the original in terms of data size. This usually involves saving to jpeg and adjusting quality, which I’ve found doesn’t make too much of a difference visually. The image size is the same throughout.

Well that was fun. See you next time.

8:41am  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZpvIwuW9Jxmz
Filed under: comics scanlation 
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 
October 8, 2012

DKC2 gag manga translation

I’ve posted a few times on here about the official Japanese manga “Super Mario-kun”. Well, for a while now I’ve been planning on scanlating a small bit of it, for practice and to see if I could do such a thing on a larger scale. I already have scans, so it’s more like translating and editing—I’ve never owned anything rare worth scanning. I chose to start with these because they’re very short, only a few panels on a few pages; they’re very simple, being a children’s manga they have simple language and plenty of furigana over the kanji; and the scans I had were very clean, well aligned, very high contrast, which made the typesetting and all easy.

What I’m presenting here is a series of 8 4komas (4-panel gag strips), and 2 picture puzzle activity pages, that went in between chapters in a volume of Super Mario-kun. This volume was a recreation of the story of Donkey Kong Country 2, except with Mario and Yoshi, because they’re the main characters of the manga. You’ll find they tend to visit a few places they’re not supposed to, like Wario’s Woods, and their past selves in the Yoshi’s Island volume. Only natural, with these 3 sub-series being part of the greater Mario Universe.

Don’t expect any heavy themes here, especially from the spot-the-difference page. The nature of this manga is visual jokes, occasional toilet humour (not in these, though), and over-the-top comic violence. But, and this is the reason I translated this at all, it is a contribution towards the overall Donkey Kong pseudo-canon. I’m not sure what to call it actually, the body of work of DK-related materials, not all of which are strictly in continuity but which are still important (at least to me). Anyway, I’m a fan so I was interested in a comic about silly monkeys.

Give them a read, and if you’re a true fan like me, save them to your computer and spread them around. Although I intend to post this on DKVine and DKC-Atlas myself, so I’m not sure where else you would go with this.

EDIT: By the way, credit to my sister-in-law for translation help. There’s only so far you can get with online dictionaries and apps. Also thanks to my wife for helping to make some lines more natural.

11:47am  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZpvIwuUpWm0s
(Notes: 31)
  
Filed under: scanlation fandom donkey kong comics donkey kong country super mario kun comic 
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