Manga Guide Update:  CoroCoro Ichiban! November 2024 Issue
September 23rd, 2024

Dogasu @ 23:53 JST -- You may remember I did a complete overhaul of this site's Manga Guide earlier this month. Part of that was because the section was in real need of a dusting off, but another reason for doing all that work was to prepare for a return to doing monthly manga chapter summaries.

So for today's update, I've added summaries of all four of the series that ran in the issue of CoroCoro Ichiban! that came out this past Saturday.


Pocket Monsters Special, aka "Pokémon Adventures" in the West. The first summary I'm doing for this arc is right in the middle of a Gym Battle, which I know isn't super ideal but at the same time I've gotta start somewhere!

Pokémon Card Game Yarouze~!, the "Pokémon tries its hand at a Yu-Gi-Oh! type manga" series that's been running for over ten years at this point. I've been wanting to cover this series for a while now as it's incredibly underrepresented among Pokémon fans but the fact I know next to nothing about the Pokémon Trading Card Game has been a really huge barrier. I'm be considered "fluent" in Japanese, by some measures, and yet whenever I try to sit down and read this manga I have no idea what anyone's doing at any given moment. The summary you see for this month's chapter is the result of hours of research and so I hope the end result is a summary that at least makes some sense.


Pokémon 4-Koma Gakuen, one of the current series of Pokémon related comic strips. This particular iteration, which has the Pokémon characters all attending the same school, has been running since 2013. I struggled to find a way to summarize what is basically a series of newspaper comic strips but I think what I settled on makes the most sense.

Pokémon Frienda Oshiete! Friender-Man, the comic based on the current Pokémon arcade game Pokémon Frienda. This one is like Pokémon Card Game Yarouze~! in that it's pretty much just an advertisement for whatever went on sale that particular month but it's far, far less technical than the card game manga so it was a lot easier to summarize. It seems like the publishing schedule for this one's going to be pretty irregular so we'll have to see how many chapters of this end up coming out.

Since I didn't have pages for three of these four series I went ahead and whipped up some sections for each series as well.

Later this week the next chapter of Kousaku Anakubo's Pocket Monsters should be posted online, and then on Monday the 30th the next issue of Pokémon Fan will come out with its own series of 4-Koma comics, so there will be plenty of manga summaries to come!


"Rica Matsumoto Essays: Laugh & Peace" Chapter-by-Chapter Breakdown
September 18th, 2024

Dogasu @ 19:51 JST -- Earlier this year singer / stage actor / voice actress Rica Matsumoto released a book called "Rica Matsumoto Essays: Laugh & Peace." This 288 page book is a collection of autobiographical stories, written by Ms. Matsumoto herself, about various things she's learned throughout her life. It's not specifically about the Pocket Monsters animated series, per se, but she does cover the series here and there.


So for today's update I'll be doing the same thing for this Rica Matsumoto essay book that I did for the book Pokémon Story earlier this year and provide a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the release. Each entry contains the essay titles, both in English and in its original Japanese, the page numbers you can find each essay on, and a brief two sentence summary of what they cover. The goal of the page is to document what this book actually is, especially since information about it online is basically non-existent.

I don't know if this book will ever get an official English translation, but even if it doesn't I think this page will do a pretty good job of letting everybody know what this book's all about.


Rumor Guide: "Characters curse in the Japanese version of the Pocket Monsters animated series"
September 5th, 2024

Dogasu @ 23:55 JST -- It's been a while but it's time for the next entry to the Rumor Guide, "Do characters curse in the Japanese version of the Pocket Monsters animated series?"


I take a look at three cases where it seems as though someone says something surprising in the Japanese version and then work to determine if those interpretations are in any way accurate. At the moment I only have three entries on this page but if you've come across any other examples of, say, a fansub that has Satoshi and his friends saying something a bit colorful then please let me know and I'll see about adding it to the list!


Manga Guide Revamp
September 1st, 2024

Dogasu @ 18:26 JST -- This isn't going to be the most exciting update ever, but for the last few weeks I've been working on completely overhauling the Manga Guide here on Dogasu's Backpack. A lot of the changes are very behind-the-scenes and therefore won't be super apparent to you all, but it was still something that very much needed to be done. Here's a brief summary:

• The entire guide has been reorganized to place different series in new categories. Unfortunately this means that every page now has a completely different URL now so if you've ever been kind enough to link to any of the pages in my Manga Guide I have to ask you to please update them.
  
• The section on Pocket Monsters Special has been completely revamped / reorganized, not unlike the way I revamped the Kousaku Anakubo's Pocket Monsters section earlier this year. The Pocket Monsters Special section was kind of a mess before, with chapter summaries from each arc being spread out across multiple pages, but that should all be fixed now.
  
• Various name spellings throughout the section have been corrected to be consistent with the rest of the site.
• Every broken link in the section should hopefully be fixed now.
  

Again, most of this isn't going to be immediately apparent to most of you but it was the kind of housecleaning task that was long, long overdue.