>>114666ADV was the official and only distributor of Azumanga in West.
When the manga was first released in the West,
it was released by ADV in four volumes with vol 1 in September 2003 and vol 4 in April 2004,
then in November 2007 they released the whole manga as one book (aka an "Omnibus").
The DVDs of the anime were also made by ADV as well as the English dub.
However must be noted their manga translation is totally different from their dub
(most notably it "sounds" nothing like the dub)
because the two were created by different Divisions within ADV;
"ADV Manga" and "ADV Films", so other people worked on the manga vs the dub.
Then later in December 2009 a different company called Yen Press made their own translation of the manga.
And they intentionally wrote their translation to "sound" like the dub of the anime, which is insanely annoying.
And that's one of the problems with the Yen Press version. The other problem being they made stupid changes
and translated very freely like that "great big honking jugs" and "holy cow" example.
But they also translated a few things better (more directly) than ADV did, but those are special situations.
So the ADV version is the original version everyone in the West was reading before the YP version became more common.
And it became more common because the ADV manga went out of print, and scans of the YP manga became dominant online because
those scans were of higher image quality. Should be noted this change (which version people were mostly reading) didn't
occur in 2009 immediately as the YP version released, but rather it took many years for it to happen.
It took nearly 10 years for the YP manga to be uploaded online. But nowadays the YP manga is almost
always the version one sees online, and in book stores (as the ADV Omnibus is long out of print).
See this
>>103232 &
>>109729 for related info.
