YQII wrote...
Tenzou wrote...
Still kinda weird to rehash content
I believe it's mainly a way to showcase the long history of the magazine, as well as the growth of the artists featured. It not as obvious with a relatively new artist like Homunculus, but there's a not yet released Tsukino Jyogi chapter from an older issue that dates back to 2000, and there's naturally a much greater contrast between that chapter and modern works by that artist.
In a way it also works in our favor, because while we can't possibly go back and localize 20 years worth of content any time soon, this allows us to do a few chapters here and there from the vast library. Even if it's not an entire book, more Homunculus is something users have asked for, so I think this will at least please some.
Finally, I don't think it's ever a waste for us to work on something that's been scanlated in the past. While some elements are subjective, like the translation—outside of actual mistranslations, what makes one translation better than another typically comes down to taste—there are ways in which our releases are simply objectively better—such as working with the uncensored source material rather than imperfect scans. This is also one of the reasons why we don't have any problems with the scanlation scene. We won't force anyone to stop translating something that we'll work on, and something already being scanlated doesn't stop us from doing our own version.
I went off on a bit of tangent there in the last paragraph, but the short of it is this: I too would like to see new stories from Homunculus and the rest of the artists, but there's definitely value in these older works too.
I like and respect your opinion, very interesting take, I still think you're giving them too much credit and they're just filling on missing deadlines. I honestly don't recall any instances of this in the past, but if they did happen and I missed them they were not a recurring trend or never felt on purpose.
Look at Comic Penguin (all three), they've been doing this recycling thing for over a year, with a lot of names (be it Takuji or Cuvie or whatever), and the same happened to Comic Sigma (went from okay second fiddle akaneshinsha magazine to not-hanaman).
In a business that saw roughly ten magazines either dying and/or being rebooted over three years (we lost Potpourri Club last month and Ero-Tama which was already a rebooted Junai Kajitsu was
again rebooted into JSCK), you cannot help but be suspicious.