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Say Hello to Black Jack Manga's Sato Seeks Translators (Updated)

posted on by Egan Loo
Shuho Sato's communal digital manga site to earn over 1 million yen this month

Shuho Sato, the creator of the Say Hello to Black Jack, Umizaru, and The Isle of TOKKOU manga, began asking for volunteer English translators for his manga on his Twitter account on Tuesday. He added later that day that he already has French, Korean, Chinese, and Malay translations.

To that end, Sato posted the first chapter of Say Hello to Black Jack on his Twitpic account and invited people to submit translations. With Sato's permission, Eiichirō Fukami of the Gadget Tsūshin website posted the current results as a slide show on Nico Nico Seiga (the still-frame version of the Nico Nico Douga video site).

In a separate development, Sato projected that his digital manga site, "Manga on Web," will earn over 1 million yen (over US$12,000) this month. This is the highest monthly total since the site launched in April. However, he noted that the other artists on the site only averaged several thousand yen (under US$100).

Sato had posted all the chapters of Say Hello to Black Jack for free, no membership required, on October 4. By October 24, the site had received in the range of several billion page views. Of the 400,000 new readers that accessed the site, about 3,000 (or about 1.3%) registered as members.

Sato has been self-publishing his own manga titles online in Japanese since last summer. He uploaded his latest work, New Say Hello to Black Jack, within a month of its serialization in Shogakukan's Weekly Big Comics Spirits magazine. His Manga on Web site also distributes other creators' manga online as well. In February, Sato revealed that he earned about 500,000 yen (about US$5,500) within the first six weeks of 2010 through online manga.

Over the course of several blog entries last year, Sato described the state of the manga industry which led to his decision to self-publish his manga online. He also addressed the issue of unauthorized uploads of manga in a series of Twitter posts last month.

[Via Ko Ransom, ITmedia News]

Update: Corrected information about non-English languages. Thanks, Spaceman-Spiff.


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