For a while now I've been making mention of another series which I've been working on, and, after several weeks of on and off work, I'm at last able to present the first nine chapters of Kentou Ankokuden Cestvs (in English it works out as something along the lines of Cestvs - The Legend of Boxing in the Dark Ages). This is a series which I've been interested in for a while, especially as it's one of the few manga series set in Rome, and I'm very much a classicist at heart.
Set in the time of Nero it follows a young slave-boxer called Cestvs as he tries to fight his way to freedom. It's sort of dumb in a lot of ways (it often stretches the definition of what boxing is) but it's amusing to me nonetheless. There's 15 volumes as well as an ongoing sequel so there's plenty to look forward to!
The manga's author, Shizuya Wazarai is a relatively unknown figure. A school friend of Kentaro Miura (of Berserk fame), his only other original series is a fairly amusing three volume title called Blaster Knuckle, about a former boxer fighting vampire/werewolf KKK members. Other than that Cestvs (and its ongoing sequel) have seemingly been all he's worked on.
Now it might be asked why I bothered to release nine chapters at once. Aside from a gross sense of masochism on my behalf, the reason is that the first volume (of eight chapters) has actually been previously scanlated. Unfortunately the original work is, at least in my opinion, rather poor. So much so that I decided it'd be best to just re-do it all (feel free to compare my version of the first volume to the original scans!). Given that I've always found redone versions of already uploaded chapters to be a bit of a tease, I also went through chapter IX just to have something new as well. It was probably more effort than it was worth but hey, it's done now.
A couple of points should probably be made about the translation itself. I stuck with calling the main character Cestvs (with the v) as that's seemingly how the author romanized it (it's dumb but I guess he wanted to be authentic). Throughout the series itself there are a fair few footnotes, as well as the end of volume notes on historical facts about Rome, which I opted not to translate. For one I found them to rather needless (it's easy enough after all to search for information on the historical facts involved), plus it would've made things rather messy to include it all. I also left all the chapter numbers in as Roman numerals, in part because that was how it was in the Japanese text, in part because I quite like it anyway.
All that text aside,
Cestvs is something I hope to get through in a fairly timely fashion, but as ever we shall see. Next up should hopefully be the long awaited next chapter of
Survival. I sort of stalled on it while doing
Cestvs and there's one bit of editing which is causing me nightmares but it should be done soon! After that will be the next chapter of
Somali. There's one other series I'm working on but it's long and a real pain to do, so it probably won't pop up any time soon. I don't think I've ever really stuck to what I've said in these posts though, so it'll probably end up being something completely unintended instead! For now at least though, enjoy
Cestvs.
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