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NEWS: Viz Media Responds to Sailor Moon Sailor Stars Anime's Booklet Errors

I got vol. 2 from Comixology. I started reading the UY series when Viz began to do the localizations back in I think 1989, and soon after, bought the Japanese widebans which collected the entire series in 15 volumes.

I expected them to replace Gerard Jones as localizer (understandable, given his being jailed for being a pedo) but the localizations were just so bland, it's almost like they used the anime localizations Animeigo used as a guide and took the life out of them.

The books are around 400 pages long, around the size of the widebans so I expected them to replicate those. Nope. They printed them by dividing the books into two parts, like they were trying to reprint the standard tankobons. But then, they added around 10 or so pages of filler that focused on a particular character (in this volume's case, Shinobu and Cherry, which they devoted around 10 pages EACH). The chapters were horribly out of order.

For instance, you had the story where Ataru, realizing how Lum just went to bat for him (once again), decides to hold her hand and walk with her. In the Japanese original that progressed into the story involving Ataru's diary. Here, they shoehorned a story from the first volume where it made no sense (the drunken fox spirit).

Worst of all, one of the stories was literally missing four pages in the middle of it! Specifically, the drunken fox story.

Considering how Viz is wanting to use this title to relaunch UY, historically their worst-selling title (but one of my all-time favorite manga), this was clearly not the way to do it. I've been looking around to see if anyone else was talking about this mess, but found nothing.

Maybe it's just because I'm a very long-time reader of this series, but paying $10.99 for digital for this really upset me, and really burned me out of buying more. I still have the wideban set I bought nearly 30 years ago, so I'll just stick with them.