Manga Guide:  Pocket Monsters Special, Pokémon 4-Koma Gakuen
October 26th, 2024

Dogasu @ 23:41 JST -- The issue of CoroCoro Ichiban! that featured the new chapter of Pokémon Card Game Yarouze~! I just went over also featured new chapters of both Pocket Monsters Special and Pokémon 4-Koma Gakuen and so I've added synopses of those chapters as well.


In the new chapter of Pocket Monsters Special, Violet realizes he's being targeted by the Star-Dan, Scarlet drops in on Meloco, and Violet and Scarlet finally meet face-to-face! In Pokémon 4-Koma Gakuen, meanwhile, the Pokémon students all take turns making music.

And for those of you wondering, Pokémon Frienda Oshiete! Friender-Man, the fourth series featured in last month's issue of CoroCoro Ichiban!, did not have a new chapter this month. This isn't the first time this comic's skipped months (there's a gap between Chapters One and Two) and so this isn't completely unexpected.

And with that, all the manga that was in this month's issue of CoroCoro Ichiban! have been covered. There's no Pokémon Fan issue coming out this month (the next issue's scheduled to come out November 29th) and so other than maybe a new Kousaku Anakubo's Pocket Monsters chapter later this month (though who knows at this point?) the next batch of Pokémon comics we can expect should come out with next month's issue of CoroCoro Ichiban!


Manga Guide:  Pokémon Card Game Yarouze~!
October 24th, 2024

Dogasu @ 23:36 JST -- This month's issue of CoroCoro Ichiban! came out earlier this week and so I've got a summary of the newest chapter of the current Pokémon Trading Card Game manga, Pokémon Card Game Yarouze~!


In this month's chapter, Retto and Letto compete in a round robin tournament in order to win themselves an Alola Nassy ex card from the Paradise Dragona expansion pack. There are a total of six card game battles crammed into this chapter and so there's quite a lot of different cards and strategies getting showed off in this one!

I'm still working on the best way to cover these chapters in a way that makes sense. I think what I've got now is okay, but as always if you have any feedback or suggestions then please let me know.


Episode Comparison: "The Pokémon Water War"
October 9th, 2024

Dogasu @ 08:48 JST -- Now that I've got last month's manga stuff out of the way it's time to go back to updating the Episode Comparisons section with the next Japanese to English comparison in line. This month I'll be taking a look at the premiere episode of 4Kids' third season of the show, "The Pokémon Water War!"


This episode has it all! Random dialogue rewrites, digital paint, cut footage, music edits...it's just one thing after the other with this one.

As always, let me know what you think via the links below!


Manga Guide Update:  Pokémon Fan Issue 90, Kousaku Anakubo's Pocket Monsters
October 4th, 2024

Dogasu @ 22:30 JST -- The latest issue of Pokémon Fan, the Pokémon magazine that gets released whenever the hell Shogakukan feels like it, came out on September 30th and so for today's update I'll be covering one of the three comics featured inside. That comic is Pokémon 4-Koma Dai Hyakka, and it's another four-panel comic strip series.


Pokémon 4-Koma Dai Hyakka is one of the classics -- it's been running in one form or another since 1997! -- so I'm happy to finally have a section for it up on the site. Like with Pokémon 4-Koma Gakuen, I'm offering brief summaries of each comic strip to help document what kind of gags are being featured this time around.

There were two other comic series in Pokémon Fan but I'm not going to bother covering them for the time being.

The first one is Pokémon Chou Dajare Club (ポケモン超だじゃれクラブ), or "The Pokémon Super Pun Club," by TAK.BR / Santa Harukaze (TAK.BR/春風邪三太). It's yet another four-panel comic strip series, only this time the punchlines it has are all based around untranslatable Japanese puns. Covering a series like that would take way, way more time and effort than I'm willing to put into something like this so I'm going to just skip it for the time being.

The other series is Pokémon Quiz Puzzle Land Pikachu no Takara Sagashi (ポケモンクイズパズルランド　ピカチュウの宝さがし), or "Pokémon Quiz Puzzle Land: Pikachu's Treasure Hunt," with the comic portion being done by Kemon Kawamoto (河本けもん) and the puzzles by Hiroshi Takase (嵩瀬 ひろし). In the current iteration of this series, Pikachu and the Paldea starters help whatever Pokémon needs help that issue, with the twist being that every page has a quiz or puzzle that readers are invited to solve. So the comic will be something like "Let's try looking under this rock...oh look! A Pokémon themed word search!" And then half that page will taken up by a word search, or a maze, or a rebus, etc. And this repeats over and over for like nine pages. It's not really a series I could cover without also posting all the puzzles, and then translating them, and so I'm just not going to bother.


In non-Pokémon Fan news, I also added a bunch of summaries to Kousaku Anakubo's Pocket Monsters manga page! I actually added those about a week ago, I just never bothered to report about them here. The newest chapter was scheduled to come out September 29th (last Sunday) but the 29th came and went and...nothing happened. A few days later CoroCoro decided to revamp its entire website and in the process they removed all the comics I had just summarized. They also changed the release date of the next chapter from "September 29th" to "TBD," and Kousaku Anakubo's promotional X page hasn't posted in about two weeks so there's no telling what's going on.


Finally, because I know a lot of you are wondering, I am working on the next Episode Comparison and hope to have it up very soon.