April Fool's Day Release: 3 Akagi Zawa Zawa Anthology Chapters

Rather than doing some lame bait and switch joke, I figured just releasing a few new parody shorts of Akagi would be better, and probably better appreciated as well. The theme for these chapters isssss... shorts done by the mangaka of other mahjong/gambling manga! That's right, we have for you chapters done by Owada Hideki (author of Legend of Koizumi/Mudazumo Naki no Kaikaku), Shinobu Kaitani (author of One Outs and Liar Game), and Maeda Jirou (author of HERO)! They're all super short, though, the one we did last time was literally 5 times longer than any other manga in the collection. Let's get to it!

Thanks to Biggums for the quick cleans, and to Tambur for the impeccable typesetting! Maybe there will be something tomorrow for our anniversary as well? I sure hope we didn't forget!!

The Akagi Manga
Akagi: Baseball Edition
Chicken

This one is short even among the shorts in the anthology, but it fit with the theme I was going for with this release so I tossed it in. It's done by the same mangaka who did Legend of Koizumi, so it's no surprise that Koizumi makes an appearance, and the awkwardness of him appearing as-is in 1965 is the punchline of the manga. TO BE CONTINUED... never.

This one's pretty good. It's done, obviously, by the author who wrote One Outs, Shinobu Kaitani. In this short, Akagi is now a professional baseball pitcher! I didn't know he could pitch! And what's more, he claims he'll shut down the battery with a single pitch! How can he do this?! Well, with a pickoff attempt. Yeah.

Finally, this one's done by Fukumoto's assistant, Maeda Jirou, author of HERO! A lot of the humor in this chapter doesn't translate very well, but let me try and walk you through it. The name of the game that Akagi plays at the start of his series is Chicken, but in Japanese it's called a "Chicken Run". For this reason, this short literally has chickens running towards a goal, risking their lives in a chicken run. Hopefully just Chicken works well enough to get the joke across.

Next, the lines that Akagi and Washizu say over the first three pages are taken directly from the first few chapters of the Washizu arc, with some words changed to make them parodies. I used my translations of those chapters as the basis for those lines, but if you've never read the manga scanlations it might go over your head because it's not the exact same wording. I guess I have myself to blame for changing the wording, but oh well.

Finally, the "Get paddling!" lines are taken from the Ten manga, and also from the HERO manga during Hiroyuki's flashbacks. I again used my own translations from HERO as the basis for the wording here, but I think it was similar at least in the Ten scanlations.

Well, I hope you enjoyed these three super-short chapters, and will come back to see all the surprises the Zawa Zawa Anthology still has in store! When will we be releasing more chapters, you ask? Well.........