Not to be confused with Azumanga Daioh, Azumanga - The Kiyohiko Azuma Anthology is, as you might expect, an anthology collection of Kiyohiko Azuma's earlier work. Before his current popularity, Kiyohiko Azuma was a prolific gag manga artist, and both officially and unofficially created gag manga for a variety of franchises. Eventually he was hired by Pioneer LDC to create gag manga for some of their anime series; his manga would be printed in series' merchandise. (CD booklets, Laserdisc sleeves, game manuals, etc.). Eventually, Pioneer collected the various gag manga and illustrations drawn by Azuma for their series into this combination artbook and manga anthology, first published in 1998. (He would later swipe this name for his completely original series, Azumanga Daioh) This book is not just a standard manga - in fact, its size alone is unusual, as it measures about 10" x 11", the size of a Laserdisc sleeve. This was done to accommodate several comics created for and printed on the back of Laserdisc covers or in their large booklets, ensuring that the comics remain the same size. On top of that, this book also came bundled with a CD-ROM, which includes various extra bits and comics they could not find the original manuscripts for, all wrapped up in a nice, 1998-era collection of webpages. Eventually, after Azuma's Azumanga Daioh franchise took off in popularity, most of the contents of this book were printed in a much smaller form called Azumanga Recycle, first published in 2001. However, not everything from the first Azumanga made the cut; notably, nothing from the El-Hazard franchise was carried over, and there was no CD-ROM this time either. On top of that, the first Azumanga includes more glossy, full-color pages while Azumanga Recycle instead prints the same comics on much smaller and cheaper manga paper, sometimes even just printing the comic in black and white. In other words, even if you've already read my previous translation of Azumanga Recycle, there is still plenty to discover with this release! Azumanga features surreal, comedic gag manga parodied from the following anime series: Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki (OVA) Tenchi Universe (TV) Tenchi in Tokyo! (TV) Tenchi the Movie: Tenchi Muyo in Love (Movie) Tenchi the Movie 2: The Daughter of Darkness (Movie) El-Hazard: The Magnificent World (OVA) El-Hazard: The Wanderers (TV) El-Hazard: The Alternative World (TV) Battle Athletes (OVA) Battle Athletes Victory (TV) Magical Girl Pretty Sammy (OVA) Magical Project S (TV) ...all of which was originally printed in Laserdisc & VHS releases, drama CDs, PlayStation & Sega Saturn games, the magazines Anime V and Monthly Newtype, and movie theater pamphlets, just to name a few. The CD-ROM contains liner notes that can help explain a little bit of the context of each set of manga. Despite Tenchi Muyo and Kiyohiko Azuma's popularity overseas, this book has never been officially licensed or translated into English. While this is unconfirmed speculation, this might be due to licensing issues - Viz Media has the North American license for the Tenchi Muyo! manga series, while Yen Press has the license to Azumanga Daioh & Yotsuba&!. Previously I had translated Azumanga Recycle, and I chose to do that one first because that book is of a normal manga size - this original version of Azumanga was too big to fit on my scanner! After completing that, I got in contact with MartyMcFlies, who owns a much larger scanner and has already scanned Laserdisc covers himself. Shout out to him for making this project possible! After getting the scans back, I got to work converting my Recycle translations to fit on the pages of this bigger version of Azumanga, which took me longer than I expected. After that, I translated the manga which did not make it into Recycle, so I had to do those ones from scratch. Finally, I dug into the CD-ROM, and translated both the manga present there and the text on the web pages themselves. All in all, this book was a total of 130 pages, 94 HTML files (not all having text), and 51 translatable digital manga. This project took me about 8 months to complete, not counting the considerable scanning effort put in by Marty.  See you next time! manga.mrmanager.org