Well, well.
500 releases… Already? Time flies when you’re having fun… Not many groups have 500 good releases (Well, I’d say ~460 of ours are actually good, butmeh.), so I feel awfully proud.
Back when we started out the group, it was a lowly group doing magazine scanlations of Gantz and Naruto. I’ve been around for 499 releases, I joined a day after the first release. I’m glad to say… We’ve improved a lot sincethen. Just download Gantz 218 on our bot and look at it. The typesetting, the editing, everything… Is just awful.
We started with Gantz because the founders (coolerimmortal & Seal_Broken) were huge Gantz fanboys. They also wanted to build staff so they could eventually work on Gantz Manual. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that Gantz Manual will ever be done. Unless Dark Horse has the license for it… Then maybe. We’ll see.
Afterwards, we needed a HTTP mirror. Someone offered us a download mirror if we did Naruto and credited his Naruto site. Funny thing is, we never ever actually got the site for our mirror, but someone else (I think it was Gottaname) offered a mirror to us and we’ve used that. We also continued Naruto for 2-3 months. At the time, we were doing a One Piece chapter. Originally, we were just using it as a chapter to train people without any intent of releasing. One way or another, it got released. Sheeeesh. (If someone still has that chapter somewhere, please send it to me. I wanna read it :x)
After Gantz & Naruto, we started scanlating Elfen Lied, Battle Royale (didn’t release until much later), Get Backers and Full Metal Panic. We wanted to be a group that picked up stalled/dropped projects. Came close to scanlating Addicted to Curry, Anima+, and a few others. Lack of a translator prevented those series from ever happening.
Fast-forward 2 years & 3 months, and here we are. To be honest, I really can’t remember very much from what happened from then to now. I just now there was a lot of staff problems, a lot of translation problems. Now the staff problems are not as bad, and I could always use more translators :p
I would now like to thank a few specific people for helping make everything Illuminati-Manga is today;
*coolerimmortal & Seal_Broken. Thanks for creating the group and accepting me in it. Then again, you guys accept anybody who applied. Thanks anyway.
*[MadECCHI]. Thanks for giving me the bot we’ve been using for a year & half now. It’s been the greatest possible thing for distro.
*Deus_Gear. I think you’re the only one who’s been around since the beginning and hasn’t quit or anything. Thanks a lot DDR. It only took you two years to make a good looking site
*Anath. Well, I kinda stole you from your group. Well anyway~ Thanks for
helping me & my editors improve by showing me new, more effective editing
methods that I make editors use every time to do chapters. Not to mention you
QC some stuff time to time.
*My biggest thanks go out to lambchopsil & illiteracy. lamb was the first
Quality Checker that ever came and applied to use. This was a huge blessing in
disguise. I really have to thank lamb for being the one to raise the standards
for the releases. Standards that have increased since then and will continue to
increase as time goes on. You’Ve also done a lot of work for me, so I
have to thank you for that as well. If ever you come back to scanlations, give
me a call
.
As for illiteracy, you’re who I would call my right-hand man. You’ve been
around for about 2 years now, and you’ve always been so helpful and so
incredibly talented. If ever I needed a tough redraw or a double page done,
you’d do them and you’d never complain. You had even done a tutorial (Which is
now gone, unfortunately…) for our new editors. You’re the best editor I’ve
worked with, so my huge thanks for sticking around and helping us out.
And lastly, thank you to everyone who’s ever helped out in the scanlations
process. A lot of you have helped out greatly over these years, but there’s too
many of you to name, so a big thank you to all of you.
In any case, the 500th release is Riki-Oh 21. The trigger is !Riki21. For
the previous chapters, the triggers are !Riki01 !Riki02 !Riki13 to
!Riki20. (Volume 1, Volume 2, Chapters 13-20)
Have a good one.
