Many people have asked us if we can pick up long-languishing manga series xxx. The answer is simple: no. Happy World is really quite a special series, and I would like to take the time now to give a brief overview of just how we got to where we are today.

Someday back in May I was quite bored. Sometimes when I am bored I pass the time by downloading random Hmangas off of Tokyotosho in the hopes of getting a good laugh. I ended up with something called “Aneru Sex,” which at first glance appeared to be about fucking angels. I discussed this concept with Yu-rin, and he linked me to the Happy World OP on Youtube. I liked Elle’s design, so I downloaded the OAV. It was nothing special, but I liked Elle a lot so I decided to check out the manga. I was hooked by volume three.

Imagine my despair when I discovered that the manga scanlations stopped in the middle of a story arc in volume six, and that it didn’t look like more would be getting done anytime soon. Throwing my better judgment to the wind I decided to use my very limited knowledge of Japanese to go through the raws. I was stunned and amazed by the contents of the later volumes. The rest of the series deserved to be scanlated more than anything else I had ever seen, and I knew that the only way it would happen is if I made it happen myself. So I did.

Of course, it wasn’t quite as simple as that. Our scanlation efforts had a rocky road at the beginning, and we had numerous challenges to overcome early on. But the point is the same – if you want a series scanlated badly enough then do it yourself. You might think this isn’t quite fair. You might not have ever had any experience with scanlation. You might not have scanlators who you can convince to pick the series up. You know what? All of these difficulties applied to me as well.

So how did this happen then? I’ll touch upon some key points, in the hope that what I have to say here will help out anyone else that decides to take the same route we did.

Getting Started:First, you need to get a single new chapter scanlated. For us that was chapter 38. I spent somewhere between six and eight hours puzzling out a translation for it via my single year of Japanese in college and Wakan. Yu-rin then threw a quick edit together, and we had a scanlated chapter. If you don’t know any Japanese at all and don’t have someone who can translate for you, then commission the translation (this will be discussed later). If you don’t have anyone who can edit, then learn how to do it yourself. There are many excellent guides available on the internet, and I will remind you that Moogy learned how to edit and typeset for the sole purpose of working on this series.

For the actual release Yu-rin and I revived the name of a dead scanlation group that Yu-rin had been associated with long ago. This was mostly to provide us with an established web page and irc channel. It was a nice head start, but setting up these things from scratch shouldn’t require too much extra work.

You also need to get some attention built up for your series, especially if it has been languishing in scanlation limbo for years. We did this by paring our first release with a batch for the rest of the series in order to attract both new and old readers. We then aggregated our release on as many sites as possible. Indeed, our torrent releases have always existed primarily to get our releases listed on Tokyotosho.

Staff: With any luck people will actually read your first release. With even more luck some people might pop up who are interested in helping you scanlate. It’s best to accept any help you can get early on, but remember that random people on the internet who appear to help you out are highly likely to simply disappear without notice at some point. Being unprepared for the disappearance of staff who I had grown to rely upon was the main cause of our lack of releases in the month of June.

Really, the best staff members you can have are friends. These are people who you can enjoy working with and who you can count on to not vanish into thin air. I ended up pulling Moogy and Benny into this by simply not shutting up about the manga for days while talking to them. Eventually they read it themselves and become just as crazy about the series as I was. So see if you can shove your series of choice down your friends’ throats until they want to help you. Hopefully your series is as good as Happy World is – I really don’t think I would have been able to convert my friends if I was working on anything else.

Translation: This is really the key issue. Anyone can learn to adequately clean and typeset raws in a day or two. Translation is not quite as simple. And without translation you are dead in the water. Worse still, you probably won’t get any response to translator ads even if you place them in every place you can conceive of. We certainly didn’t. We did eventually acquire one translator, but she leads a very busy life and couldn’t keep up with the pace that the rest of the staff wished to go at. So to complement her translations we turned to commissions.

Some people don’t really like the idea of commissioning translations. I’m not one of them. I don’t see any problem with paying someone for a service they are rendering me. Sure, many people out there translate for free, but how many of those do it for you and get a chapter or more done every day? The people I commissioned from were a pleasure to deal with, and they brought me consistent and quality translations that I simply couldn’t get any other way.

Still, translation commissions can be fairly expensive. I’ll be very frank with numbers here in order to give you a better idea of what you may be getting yourself into if you do decide to go this route. Of the 35 Happy World chapters that pew pew released, 24 of them had translations that were commissioned, for a total cost of $370. This is actually incredibly cheap as far as translation commissions go – I spent quite some time searching around before I settled on who I would commission from. All of this money came out of my pocket initially, although I have recouped about half of it through donations. I’m at a stage in my life where I am able to cover a cost like this for something I really, really want. This last bit is important. A friend just pointed out to me that I could have bought a PS3 with that much money, but I can honestly say that Happy World translations have brought me more satisfaction than something like a PS3 ever would. I really can’t think of anything else I would have rather spent this money on.

If you decide that commissioning is not for you then good luck. You will need it. However, if you do decide to give commissions a try, then check out these sites:

http://sahadou.com/

http://desudesu0.wordpress.com/

http://kusanyagi.blogspot.com/

I particularly recommend Kusanyagi. He’s fast, very friendly, and very cheap, although you may need to clean up his scripts just a little bit. I’m sure there are more people out there doing commissions, but these are the only ones I am aware of.

Ultimately, I think that getting a series scanlating is something that many people are capable of. Of course, there are some people won’t be able to pull this off. If you have no skills, no money, no friends to help you out, and want scanlations for that cool series that is just like Naruto except better, then you might be out of luck. But otherwise there might just be a chance. Hopefully what I have written here will give you a better idea of just what you might be capable of doing yourself.

Final Thoughts: I really need to thank everyone who has worked with me on getting this series released. Especially Moogy and Focht, who are both completely insane and in the end did far more work than me. The one chapter a day blitzkrieg of a release schedule would not have happened if Moogy hadn’t of assumed most of the leadership responsibilities when I became busy with school, and I have never seen anyone pump out free work as consistently as Focht did with his raw cleaning and typesetting. I also extend heartfelt thanks even to the the staff that vanished from the face of the internet. I probably would have given up on this project had they not appeared to help me early on.

So what’s next? We don’t really know. We’re considering Cocoon, another Takeshita work, but no promises on that. I also have a copy of Happy World End that I need to get scanned. Happy World End is a commerative Happy World doujin release compiled by Takeshita himself comprised of some prototype sketches, chapter summaries, and thoughts from the mangaka and his assistants. Translating it wouldn’t really be feasible, but I will be releasing the raw scans on this site at some point in the next week or so.