Pokemon twice a day for six days a week not enough?  How about a daily comic strip?  Yup, from the people who bring you the American versions of the Pocket Monsters manga comes a daily Pokemon comic strip.  There are six black-and-white installments and a Sunday color version. 

It's brought to us by Ashura Benimaru, one of the executive directors at Creatures and co-creators of Pocket Monsters.  Gerard Jones, who did the English Adaptions of Pokemon Adventures, Pokemon: Magical Journey, and the Dragon Ball titles also contributed to the Pokémon comic strip.

But there was a problem:

Most Japanese comic strips are read from top to bottom.  .  The Pikachu and Metamon pictures to the right are little bios which are supposed to help those uninnitiated with the show/game better understand the comic's gags.

Once put into the standard American left-to-right format, though, it proved to be too big.  Most newspapers just won't give this much space to a daily comic strip.  Click on the image to view it full-sized.

My question is...why not just get rid of the Pikachu and Metamon bios?  It makes perfect sense without them.  And besides, the people reading it would already know who all the pokemon are.

So to solve this "problem," they've made a whole new stip.  It's craptacular!

This is NOT Japanese.  In fact, it looks more like a comic you'd find in a college newspaper than something printed in a nationally-published comic strip.

So we have to put up with crappy art and bad humor.  Wouldn't you have rather read the Japanese version (translated, of course) instead?  I know I would. 

Viz's collection of Pokemon Comic Strips.  112 pages of crap!