Kodansha USA’s 2019 Digital Release
So with the recent announcement at Anime Expo 2023 that Kodansha USA are going to be publishing Initial D physically in America for the first time in 15 years, I thought I’d rant talk about their earlier digital release for a bit.
Back in 2019, around the same time I was just getting into the series, Kodansha announced they would be releasing all of Initial D digitally through Amazon’s ComiXology service. The series was released onto the platform in two chunks, with the first 38 volumes releasing April 17th, and volumes 39-48 on June 20th.
The release can be rather easily split into two chunks, the first 33 volumes (which I’ll talk at length about shortly) and the latter 15. This release was the first time volumes 34-48 had been released officially in English, and they had a decent treatment. These volumes were completely standard for a modern manga release, and are generally pretty solid to read. Not too much else to say about them.
The first 33 however, did not receive the same treatment. Instead of a brand new translation, they reused the old Tokyopop translation of the series, something I hear they also did for their other ex-Tokyopop series, such as GTO. This was admittedly rather disappointing, especially given how the rest of the series was done. It’s also the least of this releases problems.
The quality of the scan used is notably lower quality than the new volumes with lines being more pixelated than a normal release, dark colours are too dark, light colours are too light, the release has several points where placeholder text is still visible (this has never been fixed either), the typesetting is frequently poor and misaligned, some double pages feature actual tears down the middle. Its overall just an embarrassing job.
I assume they didn’t wish to put too much money and effort in, after all its been years since Initial D finished, so they reused the old translation and hastily slapped it together. From a fan perspective its a little baffling (people have been ragging on the Tokyopop version, as well as just Tokyopop as a company, for my entire lifetime) but from a business perspective I suppose it does make some sense to want to save some money on a digital only release (though it does still suck tremendously, but its not going to matter for much longer).
Despite all of this, it’s the version I recommend to people (for now at least). The quality may be bad, but its still higher than the previous scanlations. It may have tonnes of translation errors (an almost irredeemable amount) but the scanlations are similarly riddled with baffling translation mistakes (some of the bigger ones I may cover on here if they’re notable enough, Ichikoro springs to mind). The only main thing other than that is the nicknames, but I think I adjust to them fairly quickly, if you can just swap the names in your head then it’s a poor but readable release, not to mention that they stop doing nicknames after Emperor, with Sudo being the last to receive a nickname in the manga.
With the new Omnibus 2-in-1 releases on the horizon, and them having been confirmed to have a completely new translation and typeset, I’m looking forward to seeing the replacement for this release. Hopefully this will just fade away and remain solely as a weird little footnote.