There's this Tumblr account called 90sfantasyanimestuff that posts - well, guess. Not everything is literally from the 90s, but it all hews to the same SNES RPG aesthetic. It's one of the few Tumblrs I still check out regularly.
The account posted a couple images from the 1989 Ultima: Quest of the Avatar manga I translated and an industrious Ultima fan by the handle of Blu3vib3 had used to create a scanlation. I don't really use my Tumblr much anymore - I don't know what to do about the AI problem, and though I miss a good number of people on there, the toxicity of the platform itself is not something I miss in my life - but I thought to give a link to the scanlation, just in case anyone wanted to check out the manga.
When I went to retrieve the link from my page, I discovered that Blu3vib3's site is gone. I found the scanlation on one of those manga piracy sites, but as far as one reliable, reputable place for it to be stored - no, no longer. (This also goes for The Fall of Magincia, the original story that has Katrina impaling the main villain with the prow of the ark God commanded her to build because his opponent, the hero of the manga, is a pirate, and he needed a thematically-appropriate weapon for his dramatic killing blow. I see my site has this scanlation listed as "partial," and as all of the pirate sites end the story midway, I imagine Blu3vib3 never got around to finishing it.)
I didn't think to download the scanlation back in the day, not only because it was uploaded page by page as individual images vs. one PDF, but also because...well, as foolish as it sounds, finished translation projects becoming undone, in a manner of speaking, just wasn't something that occurred to me until now. It should have, particularly in this age of an ever-centralizing internet and the death of the personal webpage (not to mention Game Informer being wiped from the digital earth, which happened as I was writing this entry), but I suppose I figured that the scanlations would always be extant somewhere out there, particularly given the internet's passion for archiving and pirating video game stuff.
But Ultima is of a certain age, and its relevance and cachet have naturally decreased with time, and preserving its ancillary media might no longer be much of a priority - even within the Ultima fandom itself, which contains a great many creative and friendly folks but, due to the period in which the franchise had its heyday, has a lot of the old-school PC diehards who've never grown out of the RTFM mindset and consider console games illegitimate and view the Japanese end of the fandom, with its cutesy NES ports and its heart-shaped paladin shields and its idol songs and those big-eyed manga, not as something to taken in stride or as an unserious source of fun but an outright malign influence. Anger-making. (One of my all-time favorite responses to my work was prompted by one of those Ultima fans replying to a translation announcement; like Blu3vib3's site, it seems to have been eaten by time, so I cannot repost it verbatim, but it went something like: "I have never once read a single Japanese manga or comic book that ever made any sense.")
(ETA: Thanks to a kind soul with serendipitous timing liking an old post of mine on Tumblr, I now have the exact quote, which is even crankier: "40 years of reading comics and I have yet to find a single manga or anime that makes any damn sense.")
Plus, since Ultima, unlike many other RPG big guns, originates in an English-speaking nation and not Japan, some of its U.S. fans look skancewise at the whole fan translation scene for OoP stuff, as it's not part & parcel of the fandom as it is in, say, Final Fantasy or Persona. To them, it's not a preservation effort or an attempt to bring unreleased parts of canon to markets deemed financially-unfeasible or otherwise negligible by the franchise's publishers; it's just a bunch of punks doing legally-sketchy garbage. (I recall Blu3vib3 and me answering questions and talking about project details in the comments of one fan-run site discussing the manga, and the maintainer popped in to announce that he wasn't sure anything like...someone translating and editing a comic outside a corporate project? had ever been done before, and he was going to check to make sure we weren't getting in over our heads. Yeah, you do that, buddy.)
Anyhow: the Quest of the Avatar scanlation is extant, in a tenuous manner, but those manga sites come and go, cycling their content in and out like the wash. So if you want it (or Fall of Magincia) for posterity, grab it now!
(This reminds me: I've had the final book-length manga, The Maze of Schwarzschild/Schwarzschild's Labyrinth, for probably over a decade now but haven't translated it because a) it was a miserable sequel to a book that ended well just because Seiji Tanaka wanted to draw a space manga on the franchise's dime and b) it drew heavily on the '70s movie The Black Hole, which is basically "what if Jack Chick wrote Star Wars?". No one in that decade has stepped up in the meantime to translate, despite an appeal on HG101 that nonetheless doesn't bother to credit the person who translated the first three. I would say "if I don't do the work, it doesn't get done," but I'm familiar with the monkey's-paw inversion of that.)
