Manga Guide: This month's CoroCoro Ichiban!, Pokémon Fan chapters
April 26th, 2025

Dogasu @ 16:53 JST -- It's time for this month's Manga Guide round up!


Pokémon Card Game Yarouze~!, the "Pokémon tries its hand at a Yu-Gi-Oh! type manga" series. In this month's chapter Retto and Letto compete in a quiz show with questions related to the newly released "Glory of the Rocket-Dan" expansion pack. Can the two Pokémon Frienda players answer all the questions correctly?

Pokémon Frienda Oshiete! Friender-Man, the comic based on the current Pokémon arcade game Pokémon Frienda. In this month's chapter Renda finds out about some of the new features of "Wave 5" before trying out the promotional Pokémon pick that came packaged in this month's issue of CoroCoro Ichiban!


Pokémon 4-Koma Gakuen, the series of Pokémon related comic strips that runs in CoroCoro Ichiban! In this month's collection the Pokémon students compete in a school field day.

Pokémon 4-Koma Daihyakka, that other collection of four panel gag comics. In this issue's chapter, which appeared in the issue of Pokémon Fan that came out yesterday, the Pokémon play hide-and-seek.

There are two other comic series running in Pokémon Fan but I'm not really covering them at the moment.

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 its punchlines are all centered around untranslatable Japanese puns that make coverage of the series take way, way more time and effort than it's probably worth.

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. Covering a series like this would require me to translate and/or post all the puzzles, something that, again, takes more time and effort than it's probably worth.

The next issue of Pokémon Fan (and therefore, the next chapter of Pokémon 4-Koma Daihyakka) is scheduled to come out July 18th, 2025.


Episode Comparison: "The Stun Spore Detour"
April 21st, 2025

Dogasu @ 22:41 JST -- It's new Episode Comparison time! This time let's take a deep dive into what 4Kids changed when taking the Japanese Orange Islands episode "Nyoromo and Kasumi" and changing it into "The Stun Spore Detour."


This episode doesn't have quite as many rewrites as the last few have had but there are still enough of them to make a pretty interesting read! Rocket personality changes, Japanese loach catching outfits, and the name of the weed everyone's trying to get their hands on are just some of the changes you can read about in the new comparison.


Manga Guide: Pocket Monsters Special Scarlet & Violet Chapter 19
April 7th, 2025

Dogasu @ 09:08 JST -- After a bit of a break it's time to check back in on what's new with the Pocket Monsters Special manga!


First, the third Pocket Monsters Special Scarlet & Violet graphic novel came out on March 28th and so I moved all the chapter summaries over to the graphic novel's page and then added the appropriate chapter titles. I do eventually intend to go through each chapter again to check out the differences between the original magazine release and the graphic novel collection; as usual there are a few art touch ups here and there!

Moving away to non-graphic novel stuff, Chapter 19 made its debut on the Weekly CoroCoro Comics website with a longer than usual chapter this past Friday and so I've posted the usual summary and behind-the-scenes info. The new chapter is currently behind a paywall but hopefully it'll be made free to read at a future date.


In non-manga news, I'm getting very close to finishing up the next Episode Comparison and so hopefully "The Stun Spore Detour" will be up before the end of the week.