"In this chapter we get to see the amazing image of Kabuto Juzo on the cover of Forbes."
Couldn't have said it better myself!
Shin Mazinger Zero Volume 3 Chapter 3
As always, thanks to OtherSideofSky and HappyScans!
And now, I'd like to take a moment to discuss the production side of Dynamic Pro Scanlations with you all. As you have no doubt noticed, the content output of this blog has dropped dramatically over the last few years. It's a far cry from when I first started, way back in July 2008 (Seven years!), where I was putting out 50 pages of Shin Getter Robo every few days.
This is due to a variety of factors - The process of releasing a chapter takes much longer than when I first started due to the fact that I scan everything myself in most cases and I've got a much higher standard of overall quality compared to my first releases. Dynamic Pro Scanlations isn't so much a scanlation group as it is my personal little webpage where I upload scanlations that I have collaborated with others on. There's only one guy at Dynamic Pro Scanlations - me! I find translators and from there I handle everything else. Scanning, cleaning, QC, typsetting, redrawing... It's a lot of work on my end.
Of course, I get plenty of help from HappyScans! who do everything in their power to make the process easier on me but at the end of the day there won't be any chapters released unless I can invest a substantial amount of time to working on manga. All in all, it's somewhere between a part-time and full-time job in terms of the amount of the hours I have to invest. Especially with Shin Mazinger Zero, which is by far the most difficult and time consuming manga I've worked on in terms of editing.
I could ramble on, but let me cut to the chase - real life is a bitch. As I get older, I have less time to play around with this wonderful hobby of mine. The number one obstacle between me and released chapter is bills. I need to make money to eat, live in a home, maintain electricity and have an internet connection. Unfortunately, this leave very little time for scanlation and leaves me spending every waking moment working on either my real job or manga. It's wearing me pretty damn thin after seven years.
That's where you come in. I want to help English readers enjoy great manga, but I need your help. Namely, I need your help in the form of donations. There are thousands of people who read these releases (if not tens of thousands given online reader statistics) and if just a fraction of you donated small amounts - one or two dollars - then I could make so much more time for scanlation.
In the best case scenario, I could release a chapter of Shin Mazinger Zero every week. Now, this doesn't account for times when OtherSideofSky is busy but we have a surplus of translations for this series at the moment to the point where he could stay well ahead of releases at the pace he's been going at so far (bless his soul). To do this, however, I figure I would need at least $50 in donations per week to keep up such a pace with how long it takes to edit a chapter of Shin Mazinger Zero (It would end up paying me about $5 per hour, and that's not counting the time it takes to initially scan and clean the volumes). That means instead of waiting potentially years for Shin Mazinger Zero to be completed, we could churn it out well before the end of the year. Which would also drastically increase the odds that I'm going to be able to work on the sequel manga, Shin Mazinger Zero vs Ankoku Daishogun which is currently being serialized. In addition, this would also ensure that I get to other manga series faster - such as Yagyu Jyubei Shisu by Ken Ishikawa, God Mazinger and the more recent Maoh Dante by Go Nagai. Now, I want you to realize that even if you don't donate, I WILL complete Shin Mazinger Zero. But donations will help me devote more time each week to doing so.
I would like to think that at this point, I am a reputable figure for you all. I've been at this for seven years and I've only ever taken donations in the past in order to pay for shipping when I needed to order manga from Japan for scanning. Other than, I've had to personally shell out hundreds of dollars for hired translators and manga from Japan in addition to spending uncountable hours editing over what's getting dangerously close to a decade. So, again, I ask of you all - please donate to Dynamic Pro Scanlations if you want to help us release faster and more great manga that's going to be in the highest of quality. Thank you for your continued support.
UPDATE: It's only been a couple of hours, but we've already reached the donation goal! Thank you so much! I'll try to find a good donation progress bar soon to keep everyone updated. Other than that, stick around because the next chapter of Shin Mazinger Zero will be ready before next week's over. And don't forget to check back in a couple of days for that surprise I mentioned last post.
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