Sunday, March 8, 2009

Amanchu! Ch04 [ACS] (LQ) - A Path In The Air

Amanchu! Ch04 [ACS] (LQ)

HQ out

30 comments:

  1. Now with new and improved 200% bigger watermarks. "Yay".

    ReplyDelete
  2. Pure Greatness.

    It's getting better and better.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thank you very much !! =D

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks!
    This manga is nice :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hello, considering the swift pace of translations for the remaining Aria chapters and the slow monthly schedule of Amanchu, what are your plans for the future?

    Will ACS cover the early Amano works, like Roman Club or the Crescent Sound? Will you be doing the Aria games or CDs?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Probably laze about doing nothing for the month.
    Other Amano projects that's not Aria/Amanchu = very unlikely. games are no, drama CD's are "maybe", we'll see.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Hello, it looks like the chu04 direct download link is not working here currently, starts but does not finish.

    The link

    Maybe Mediafire's no. 143 server crashed due to extreme Amanchu download traffic? Now that would be strange!

    (Bittorrent is poisoned by more and more ISPs nowadays. They need entertainment industry money to survive the big economic crisis, so P2P will be over soon.)

    ReplyDelete
  8. Great! Thanks for this.

    As mentioned before It would be awesome if you guys could do some of the drama cd's. Not really interested so much in Amano's earlier works.

    ReplyDelete
  9. - Hikari looks too gorgeous, she used to be a 15 year old ditz in the first three chapters and now she is a lady who looks more like 18. This is a bit strange. Also, those drysuits look like a mecha pilot uniform.

    - Are these girls going to do bottle diving or snorkel only? Is there a legal age limit for scuba diving with compressed air?

    - Me thinks Katori sensei will arrive at the pool beginning next chapter, before the girls have time to get out. She will either scream their heads off or join the act. Possibly Hikari took on Katori Mato's suit, which could create some embarrassment?

    - Wonder what role Tea will have in the story, since domestic cats do not swim, rendering him/her (which?) a mere decoration in Amanchu! Aria Pokoteng was at least able to get on a gondola.

    -What about an anime adaptation by Luc Besson?

    ReplyDelete
  10. With this monthly pace I may well be a pensioner before Ooki's moble phone secret is revealed.

    Is there a way to speed up Amanchu to weekly or bi-weekly release? Like writing tons of mails to Comic Blade?

    I'd hazard a guess they are already sitting on two or three years worth of publication ready Amanchu! material, so a speed-up would not hurt them.

    ReplyDelete
  11. yeah no, comic blade is a MONTHLY magazine, no amount of "mail" is going to change that - especially from foreigners who don't even purchase it in the first place.
    I have no idea how fast you think it takes to put out a chapter (and I believe Amano has no assistants?), but it would probably be closer to 2 or 3 months worth at most.

    ReplyDelete
  12. > I believe Amano has no assistants? <

    The back cover of Aria vol 12. lists 4 people as AQUA assistants and 10 people as ARIA assistants, though they probably did not work on the project all at the same time.

    Me thinks it would be impossible to do it alone, anyhow. I think she has at least a senior and a junior assistant at any one time.

    Since Ms. Amano is such a well established mangaka at Comic Blade they could indeed accept her new project with just two-three months of advance material. That's a pity because not even hacking CB's computer network would give us much advance loot if that was the case ... waiting is the game.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Well, regardless of whether I have to wait long for the Amanchu chapter to be released, I'll be more than happy to pick up each chapter as they arrive anyway.

    And yeah, I'm only here for Amanchu. Which is not to say that I don't love Aria. I'm just sticking to the official manga for now. I'm kind of on the fence on whether I should get the scanlations anyway, though, since I AM a bit afraid about Tokyopop possibly abandoning the manga eventually, despite saying otherwise. Well, I'll just have to wait and see.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Personally I'm collecting all the TP versions aswell, just as I prefer reading manga in book form as opposed to on a monitor - which is why I haven't read any of the old chapters previous to [ACS] - it's just TP seem to be really really slow...

    ReplyDelete
  15. You may get an e-book device with a stable electrophoretic screen. Those look like paper and do not need backlight to read and a battery charge lasts for weeks.

    You could read/store scanlations on them without creating waste, although it appears only the iLiad brand has enough screen resolution to be useful for manga JPEGs.

    One should consider that recycling is very advanced in Japan. Manga publications are not supposed to last, they are black and white, they are read once and thrown into the selective waste collection bin and become toilet paper eventually.

    The bookshelf collection aspect we have in Europe and USA is simply not there, many of the japanese people don't even have flats large enough to allow much personal storage. Therefore I don't see a problem with collecting electronic scanlations.

    Maybe if the western republishings would be entirely coloured, that could make them collectible. Actually that would be quite easy to do, e.g. Disney has software which autocolours early 20th century movies for TV re-release.

    I would say it would be even simpler to do for mangas and help US/European adoption. People here are expecting that full colour = quality.

    ReplyDelete
  16. A thing about Amachu chapter 4: Pikari dons a drysuit, cause its still early spring and cold. Yet, I remember a similar thick hood should come with the suit to prevent your brain cells from freezing up. She conveniently omitted that, for good looks possibly, but if so, that's not very authentic of a diving story.

    On the other hand, if the girls donned the hood they would look like out of some early 70's second rate sci-fi...

    ReplyDelete
  17. "I would say it would be even simpler to do for mangas and help US/European adoption. People here are expecting that full colour = quality."

    Not always. Talk to fans of the Conan the Barbarian comics, and you are very likely to find someone who didn't appreciate the newer, colored Conan comics.

    Either way, I'm very much familiar with manga/comics being black and white for the most part, and see no problem with that even for collection purposes. Maybe that's just me, but there you go.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Oh, about the e-Book idea; I think it's neat. Much like anime is now being sold for streaming or downloading purposes to some small degree today, I think the same could be done with manga. I haven't really looked into it much yet; I'm a bit of a collector myself, so I like the idea of paperback comics still. But that's not to say I don't like the idea of official scanlations being sold. Or even owning both versions of the same manga in a legal way.

    ReplyDelete
  19. This is a cute chapter and I am amazed about how obvious Amano makes the romantic attraction between the two girls. Sure, she is known for these kinds of relationships between her characters, but she was usually more subtle about it. Is this saying something about her?

    I am not so amazed about Hikari's apparent age-up, since a suit like that is likely to emphasize... certain forms, especially when deflated. The girls are 15-16, not 12.

    Whether you need a hood to stay dry depends on the kind of suit. I guess you don't need one in these. And you have to admit: Futaba's hair looks way cool sprawling out in the water like that.

    ReplyDelete
  20. >romantic attraction between the two girls

    Just I'm the one who's not seeing this, in either Aria or Amanchu? I think they're just friends. Not seeing any romantic attraction here, it's all normal.

    ReplyDelete
  21. Just I'm the one who's not seeing this

    In ARIA we have Aika's obvious crush on Alicia. There is Akari's constant blushing when Alicia gets closer, among other things. And don't forget the ''Arietta'' OVA.

    Hikari's actions skirt the line between friendly ditziness and subtle flirting. Futaba also responds very much as if she just got a compliment from a guy.

    Sure, it's painted with lots of shades of gray, but it's still there--and also very realistic. Things don't tend to be so black and white at a certain age.

    ReplyDelete
  22. Dunno.
    Aika's "crush" seems to be just very enthusiastic admiring of a role model. Seen already and I think it's normal.

    >There is Akari's constant blushing when Alicia gets closer

    I know a certain someone who blushes everytime somebody purposedly gets closer to her. She even runs of sometimes. Just like Alicia, I'm using this to get her to say something that she finds too embarrassing.

    Well, yeah the OVA... no complaints... but it also seems normal.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Actually...

    http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RomanticTwoGirlFriendship

    So yeah. It's normal. Perfectly.

    ReplyDelete
  24. From Above Trope:

    "Hikari and Futaba from Amanchu! seem to rush into this headfirst. Hikari's behavior toward Futaba could be construed as flirting—and Futaba seems very responsive. It's perhaps a bit early to tell for sure, but romantic two girl friendships are not unheard of in works by Kozue Amano (who also made ARIA). "

    Lulz. Okay, who's this Troper here? I know you're here. :P

    ReplyDelete
  25. He he. That troper would be me. That's hardly any surprise, I guess.

    Amano's works just give me a sense of recognition, since I used to have crushes on other girls quite a lot when I was younger. They usually didn't go much further than holding hands and blushing a lot, which is pretty much the same pattern you see in her stories. And that's also where I start to wonder about Amano-sensei herself ;)

    Of course I could also just be a relentless yuri fangirl who just wants to impose her views on any work dealing with girls. But I hardly ever get that nostalgic feeling from any other work than Amano's. Perhaps that is because most yuri is made by men and I long for a feminine touch, however minute it may be.

    ReplyDelete
  26. Wow, interesting girl you are.

    It's interesting how I found this trope while I was trying to defend the innocence of Amano-sensei's work; it turns out it was more innocent than I thought. It also made me think; I know people see me strange because I'm not talking about sex all the time, or I think sex is not the best thing in life like how other ordinary men thinks; but this thing was strange for me too.
    And I also could draw a line with my relationship with my cousin; people say we're too close to each other, and they always misunderstand us; we think it's just normal, innocent sibling love.
    And it made me think, how differently we see the world since we started watching anime. We're more open, more intelligent, and we know about people's feelings more. And everything about feelings and relationships interest me, because I want to be a writer.
    And we don't start sentences with "and".

    ReplyDelete
  27. and shounen fanservice for the target audience

    ReplyDelete
  28. I know people see me strange because I'm not talking about sex all the time, or I think sex is not the best thing in life like how other ordinary men thinks

    I never claimed that the attraction between Amano's characters is sexual, but I certainly view it as romantic, which is a subtle but important difference. Relationships between girls can have a lots of shades of gray and I like to play with that in my own stories and novels. Well, you know the old adagio: "write what you know".

    Some people get upset when someone labels Amano's work as "yuri", but I think it is. It's a very slight, subtle, emotional form without blatant sexual overtones, but it's yuri nevertheless.

    I do agree with the fanservice bit though, but I get the idea that it mostly gets picked up by female readers rather than guys. I might be point in case, and let's not start about Erica Friedman ;)

    ReplyDelete
  29. Hmm... it is certainly an interesting stuff. Dunno, maybe because I'm just surrounded by simple-as-a-brick people, (I'm in a boy's school, what do I expect?) so I'm pretty interested about subtle feelings and complex personalities. I think I've just learned something new about girls' friendship.
    And learned to separate sexual and just romantic attractions; because some think the two is one.

    This will help with my current Aria spinoff project, and my other original works what I've put on hold, because of this Aria one. (What is started as a project to improve my style of describing scenery, but evolved to a full 30+ chapter long "series", where I experiment with every new thing I learn, and use it to create a my own, detailed and creative story telling style what would make my original works fun to read... or something like this.)

    At least, from now, I won't get upset when somebody calls Aria a "yuri". Because it's true, but a more more subtle, non-shounen like way.

    Btw, as far as I know, Aria have more male fans than female.

    ReplyDelete