I'm a 3rd year English student and this semester I'm writing my BA diploma on the development of scanlation. In the background to my work I'd like to include some information about the increasing popularity of manga/anime in and outside Japan. A good idea would be mentioning some titles of the oldest Japanese mangas known and couple of the very first scanlations done in the past. I've tried to find those in some articles or interviews available online, but it's very hard. Hopefully, I found some info that the first published manga in Japan was "Eshinbun Nipponchi" ( in 1874). If you come across any articles or books with the info I need, please, let me know. Any links to the sites or books titles are enough ;].
Oh, and if anyone knows the names of the oldest scanlation groups, I'd be extremely thankful for your help.

Some of the oldest groups include (but not all):

Toriyama's World
Manga-Sketchbook
MangaProject
Aku Tenshi
Mangascreener
Manga Daisuki
MangaSync
MangaCity
Hawks
ShoujoMagic

You'll probably notice that some of these groups still exist...

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A just ruler amongst tyrants

Osama Tezuka is like the Walt Disney of Japan with Astro Boy, like Disney is with Mickey. He revolutionized manga. ;D

Just Wiki him. -_- You'll get more information than I can explain.

Hasn't Omanga been around as long as The Hawks.

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Sarcasm just doesn't work over the internet.

I recently did a paper on anime (for religion class of all things) and I used Anime Explosion! The What? Why? & Wow! of Japanese Animation by Patrick Drazen. The book is basically about the Japanese culture depicted in anime, but he does have a chapter or two on the development of anime. He also writes about popular animes, but he uses his favorites so he's a bit biased. You can read the first few pages here and see if it's what you're looking for.

Last edited by leoak at 7:21 pm, Apr 1 2008

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Cogito Ergo Sum (I think, therefore I am)

Oh shoot, I meant to add them to that list, but I forgot...
And yes, you're correct

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A just ruler amongst tyrants

A lot of those don't exactly hold a candle to the others... I remember when the Hawks started, for example, and it was years after Zyph took over Omanga. Really, the oldest 'groups' were single people. And the oldest established (and ambitious) group that I know of would be the Ranma 1/2 translation project.

I've got the oldest scanslation files that I've ever heard of... it's a translation of some Saber Marionette anime comics that was done in '98 (or around there). Don't know exactly where it is, but I keep all my old drives and could try to track it down for you... it's nothing all that impressive, though. It would probably be better for your paper (if you want to mention scanslations at all) to interview people who ran the earliest groups and ask them who was around before them, then try to find those people.

Yeah, the oldest scanlations were done mostly by individuals or temporary collaborations. The oldest scanlations I have are of Love Hina from around 98 or 99. Surprisingly some of the scans could be considered medium to high quality.

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Sarcasm just doesn't work over the internet.

If ur doing a report on this an you really cite us? Or are u just looking for a place to start researching.

Im pretty sure chinese and korean scanlations came out before the english started to come out. I remember the first time I read manga online was when I was in gr9 and that was 5 years ago.

I've lurked in some old threads in the From Eroica With Love fandom, and found references to fans snail-mailing CDs with the scans to each other. Thank God for the internet.

to lambchopsil thank you for the names. i'll check them ^^

to Dubby thx for the info. but if it comes to writing a diploma work, wikipedia isn't considered to be a reliable source ;P

to leoak i'm wiriting my work on the development of MANGA ;P not anime. but thx anyways ^^

to SnoopyCool omg! you've got old scanlations. it's be soooooo awsome if you could send me some of those (my e-mail: verauko[at]tlen.pl). even single pages, to show how the quality of translation and editing changed over the years. in fact scanlation is the thing that i want to devote my work to, not the subject that i merely want to touch on ;P.

to silent killer could you send me some of those scanlations? (my mail - verauko[at]tlen.pl). i'd be extremely thankful. btw, is there (in the scanlated files) any info included what year it was scanlated, or should i look for it on the net?

to funkmu1 i'm not sure if quoting forum posts in a thesis would be a good idea ;P. but i think that mentioning some people who i'll address my words of appreciation to at the end of the work would be nice. i don't really know if that's acceptable, though ;P. i have to ask my thesis supervisor if i can do that. if he says yes, i'm naturally gonna ask for permission to use the nicknames of those who helped me

Ok. As you may have guessed, fan translations have been around for ages. (here's an example of a Ranma translation newsgroup dating back to '89). Scanslations were a bit harder to come by until the late 90's just because scanners weren't exactly standard equipment in most homes and so on and so forth, but for sure, the first scanslations weren't highly distributed on the internet. They would have been treated like older fansubs and mailed or traded in person around anime clubs. If you have any established clubs in your area (for example, I'm in Austin, and the UT anime club was actively translating anime (and I assume manga as well) long before I was interested in it... I doubt they were unique in that regard, and I'm sure a lot of those clubs kept all that stuff after the digital revolution).

And I'll check for those zip files over the weekend... no promises, though, it's hard to find a random 500kb file >__>;

Assuming the HDD that those scans were on still works after being chucked to the ground by a greedy five year old, I'd probably be able to get them to you faster. Another thing about early scans was that they weren't put up on the internet to be leeched like they are nowadays. If they were even up on the internet, they'd be sent from one person to another via e-mail. Although if you want manga with a time stamp or something I'd go digging around early Manga-Sketchbook releases. One of the editors must have had a habit of dating things.

There's also one other group that had been around since before or atleast just after the turn of this century. Dual translations. They had some really high quality scanlations for 2000. They didn't last very long and the only series they ever actually managed to finish was Devil and Devil. They also tried their hand at a stupid high quality scanlation of FLCL. But they must have dropped it once tokyopop released their version.

One more thing. The oldest attempt of fan translated manga would have to be in the sixties. Two hippies from berkley or somewhere there abouts translated Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix, or atleast what was printed of it at the time.

Last edited by silent killer at 3:06 am, Apr 3 2008

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Sarcasm just doesn't work over the internet.

Wikipedia's not a reliable source, true, but you can use some of the sites it cites

If not I'll get you some web pages~ there was this one page that I really liked that I came accross a while back. Let me see if I can find it

Don't forget that SnoopyCool is also an old scanlator group xD So you might want to question them too aha~

I'll edit this post as soon as I find those sites for you ^^