It feels good to have finally released the Pokemon Adventures retrospective after months of editing it on and off. Doubly so after refueling my passion for the series upon flipping through the Pokemon Adventures artbook that Viz just put out earlier this week. It’s chock full of beautiful color art and illustrations from Satoshi Yamamoto’s entire run on the series, from the early GSC stuff to the recent ORAS arc. In addition to gorgeous renditions of the cover artwork, there are a lot of great colorized versions of iconic scenes from the manga that you can’t find in the regular volumes, which are a real delight. Even more so is the inclusion of the first chapter of the Pokemon Ranger webcomic Yamamoto drew back in ’06, which has never been collected in graphic novels before or translated in English! Yamamoto promises that in the next artbook, he’ll include more chapters, and considering that this story seems to explain what happened to Deoxys after FireRed & LeafGreen, I really hope he does so. This artbook was a real treat to read through as a long-time fan of the series and Yamamoto’s art, and I highly encourage every Pokemon Adventures fan to seek it out and support this release.

Now, you might be asking yourself “why did he devote an entire paragraph to talking about an artbook unrelated to the content of this podcast?” Could it be…gasp, a paid promotion?! The answer my friends is…no. I wish I could get paid to shill Pokemon products. I genuinely just liked the artbook and wanted to let the people who enjoyed our Pokemon Adventures podcasts know about it. In full disclosure, I was approached by Viz Media after releasing the retrospective to promote the book in exchange for a free copy and I accepted. However, I had already preordered the book months ago, and I received it before I even released that podcast – over a full week before street date. So I’m being 100% bonafide in my appraisal and recommendation of that artbook. Jonathan and I are going to do an entire podcast about the evolution of Satoshi Yamamoto’s art because we love this series so much and want to keep talking about it. Unlike the Pokemon franchise itself, we haven’t sold out yet!

However, if I had to shill for dough – and for a product I didn’t enjoy - I might very well not have a choice in the matter. You see, All-Comic.com needs money worse than a house pet in Kakegurui. Moving to new servers isn’t cheap, and we need a grand to keep the site afloat for another year. If we don’t get your support, we’ll need to put more adds on our site and start taking paid promotions. We even got an e-mail from some guy to run paid ads for his language-learning products on the show. Do you guys really want us to interrupt our podcasts to shill a product we don’t even use? You know what I’m talking about. You all saw how those Naruto Online ads ruined Mother’s Basement’s videos. Now we all start clicking away as soon as he goes into shill mode, even when there’s still half the review left! You don’t want that to happen to this podcast, do you? Then please, for the love of god, contribute to our GoFundMe campaign and keep this site and podcast ad-free for another year!

If you don’t our next option would be to roll the dice on a big gamble and hope we played our cards right. That’s easier said than done of course, especially when there’s a lot of money on the table and it’s a high-risk venture. Kind of like the games featured in the aforementioned Kakegurui, the most popular anime of the summer 2017 season about a girl who literally has snake eyes and gets off on gambling. Unfortunately, those cucks at Netflix aren’t going to put it up until 2018, so we had no choice but to check out the manga instead. Will we go gambling mad over the series, or did we break the bank buying the books for nothing? Place your bets.

PODCAST BREAKDOWN:

00:22 - Intro & Announcements

02:55 - Icv2’s List of the Top 10 Manga Franchises in Spring 2017 
09:05 - BookScan's Top 20 Graphic Novel