Age of The Beatles by Moto Hagio

Scatteredness

I suspect this is something I’ll have to get used to: that I when I sit down to write a post, it’s about a totally different subject than what I had been planning for days. You would think that this wouldn’t surprise me, as I have this approach with life in general.

A while ago on the Internet Archive, I saw a scanlation of Boku wa Beatles, a manga by Tetsuo Fujii and Kaiji Kawaguchi. It’s about two members who are part of a Beatles cover band who get transported to the past. I got the idea of seeing if there were other manga that are somehow related to The Beatles. So I thought to see if there has been anything translated in English and checked Baka-Updates Manga. (Weird tangent: I somehow knew for decades that there was a manga that is very tangentially connected to Led Zeppelin, but I knew none connected to The Beatles. Very funny series, by the way.)

Examining Some Terminology

Thinking about it, I should define terminology and concepts a bit. It would probably be confusing if I didn’t. (There have been times where I had adapted a, “Who cares?” attitude out of spite when authors assumed that an unfamiliar audience knew what they were talking about. So I am trying to write so that readers don’t have to look up additional information to understand me.) Forgive me if you are already familiar with this.

I think a huge portion of people are aware of what manga is. Though, if not, manga are comics from Japan, very rudimentarily-speaking. Many are aware that a lot of manga have been translated into English and sold in bookstores. What I think might be less known is that many manga fans, not publishers, who know Japanese will translate series for those who don’t. This is done because there are tons of series that have not and very likely will not receive releases in other languages by publishers. Because there is still interest by these non-Japanese speaking fans to read these, other fans decide to translate.

Translations can be formatted so that they are companion scripts that you read along with untranslated books. But most of the time, scanlations are made instead. Scanlations are scanned pages from manga where the translation is pasted in place of the original text. These are made available online to readers. Sites, such as Baka-Updates Manga, keep track of who has made these scanlations and where to find them.

Moto Hagio and the State of Vintage Manga

Anyway, I didn’t find much on Baka-Updates Manga. There were a couple of irrelevant results. But I found one other scanlation that piqued my interest. (Not that Boku wa Beatles hasn’t. But I have yet to read it, and I have no past experience with the creators of it.) This was “Age of The Beatles” by Moto Hagio.

I suspect that even a lot of American manga fans don’t know who Moto Hagio is. And honestly, that’s very unfortunate. She is a mangaka, a manga creator, who has significantly shaped the state of manga for female readers of various ages. She also holds great cultural and historical importance in Japan. Many of her works philosophically cover themes pertaining to women’s experiences and gender.

Even though I do not read manga to the extent that I once did (and that’s a long story), I still have some interest. Moto Hagio was one of my favorite mangaka when I read more manga. I want to return to this hobby, but it’s quite expensive!

I was attracted to vintage series by mangaka that significantly shaped. These tend not be as popular as contemporary series that are released in the U.S. A lot of these vintage series were, and often still are, not known by many American fans. But they haven’t been necessarily confined to Japan. Many of these vintage series that were made for a female audience have had more of a presence in France and Italy, and to a lesser extent, Spain, Brazil, and Germany. Series for a male demographic have had a better foothold with American publishers. (And that applies to manga as a whole.)

Anyway…

“Age of The Beatles” is a four-page illustrated essay written and illustrated by Moto Hagio. It was featured in the March 1981 issue of For Lady. Manga series in Japan are often released in monthly anthologies before they are released in sets consisting of many volumes. Though, the manga in these anthologies may not be part of a series and might be only a couple of pages long. These stories often don’t get as much of a chance receiving translated releases by publishers.

Because of how vintage manga is more obscure in the U.S., I couldn’t find much information about For Lady in English. It seems to be a lesser known anthology containing josei manga, manga written for women. And it was published by Shogakukan during the 1980s. (Like how you find in the U.S., you have several publishers in Japan that compete with each other. And they market according to different demographics, too.)

I was hoping that Rachel Thorn, English translator and anthropologist who has been heavily involved in examining manga created for a female audience, might have something floating around about this publication. But I see that she does not. (This does give me a hair-brained idea of picking her brain for a possible post idea for this blog…)

To be forthright, “Age of the Beatles” might not have much impact on most who stumble upon this post. I feel that not knowing about Moto Hagio or any of her work provides less context in a subtle and perhaps subconscious sort of way. But if you’re someone who revels in the concept of fandom, this might strike a chord with you.

The Scanlation’s History

Scanlations are often made by groups of people who have different roles. Translator is probably the most obvious role. But you often have scanners, those who make raw scans of the pages found in manga; proofreaders, those who check for and remove grammatical mistakes and misspellings from translations; cleaners, people who remove Japanese text from scans and use digital photo editing techniques to improve the quality of scans; typesetters, people who add the translated text to the cleaned scans; and quality control people who act as beta readers so that issues with the scanlations hopefully be caught before the scanlations are made available to the public.

The scanlation of “Age of The Beatles” was released on April 4, 2015 by Golden Roze Scanlations. (Strangely, the page on their blog refers to the work as “Ages of The Beatles.” And first page of the scanlation says “The Age of The Beatles” instead.) Molodokian was the translator, VigorousJammer did both the cleaning of the scans and typesetting, and AMTT acted as quality control.

Something commonly seen with scanlations is that groups do not have dedicated scanners. Instead, they use scans from those who scan en masse. And they make those scans available for any scanlation group to use. They also make these scans available for those who want read the manga as they originally were in Japanese, too. Because of how expensive and involved it is to import manga in their original state, some fans are willing to spend the time and money to get these manga and make them more readily available to an international audience. In the case of “Age of The Beatles,” Feh Yes Vintage Manga was the scanner.

The Scanlation Itself

I’ve decided to post copies of those scans in this post because both the scanlation team and scanner of this project are defunct. (I also removed some extraneous white space from the margins of these scans.) Often, fans who scan and scanlate don’t do this forever. Many scanlation groups operate for a couple of years at the most. Members of these groups often get involved with other aspects of life and have to give up this hobby. Groups that purchase their own manga to use for their projects might fold simply because they can’t afford to buy what they want to scanlate, too. Also, translators can be quite hard to find. And drama can break up groups, too.

While both Golden Roze Scanlations and Feh Yes Vintage Manga still have parts of their presence available online, the former’s original website refers to broken links to the actual files for the scanlation. (And the site they had moved to doesn’t even work anymore.) Even though there are four pages to this essay, two of those pages are part of one image.

.zip Archive of the Scanlation

I have also provided a .zip archive of this work. While this is available in many formats on the Internet Archive, a simple .zip archive consisting of images of a common file type is not there. In my copy of the archive, I provided the scanlation credits image Golden Roze Scanlations included in this release. Many scanlation groups include these or a .txt files with the scans that document who worked on providing the translation. I didn’t include the staff recruitment ad that they originally included in this release, as the group is defunct. Scanlation groups often advertise their need for staff members through these means.