cheerfulThis hasn't come up in a long time, because our favorite non-super-text-intensive manga artists tend to go on long hiatuses, but for some of our more favorite series, we like to get the new volume right away, and then translate it so we can read it at the same time. This makes it a lot easier to squee about things together, instead of having one of us read it later, and then quote all her favorite parts, while the one who read it first is like, "What are you talking about?" because she can't remember what happened. We'd probably translate Skip Beat! for the same reason, except that it's Hana to Yume and trying to find extra time to translate a Hana to Yume series...we would definitely be overworking ourselves. (Actually, more like probably overworking ourselves, but still.)
So we translated Saiyuki, and it was like, "Whoa! We haven't translated Saiyuki in, like, three years!" (It's been so long, even in the series, the youkai are like, "Whoa, everybody thought you were dead!") Actually, two years and nine or ten months. We translated the last volume of Gaiden back when Mimsy was dying. So it was kind of a bittersweet nostalgia thing, but Saiyuki remains awesome, even if it is very repetitive (Hakkai says that if it works for them, then that's their style), so it was mostly sweet.
We got the special edition volume one, which came with a booklet called Dice of Destiny. Kazuya Minekura had mentioned it on her blog, so we already knew about it and were really excited to see it (it was published somewhere else first--somewhere we couldn't reasonably access--so we'd given up hope of ever seeing it, but here it is!). If I remember correctly, the dice of destiny are rolled, and the Saiyuki characters are forced into new roles! We don't remember the specifics on how it works, but we did look at the pages where Sanzo was a manga artist and everyone else was his assistant (except for Jirou Shin, who was his editor). It's awesome.
Today I'm thankful for getting to read more Saiyuki, awesome bonus features, finally beating Soldeen, someone trading us an Okdoria card, and not having to go to another pool party tonight.
