It feels good to have finally released the Pokemon Adventures retrospective after months of editing it on and off. Doubly so after reigniting my passion for the series upon flipping through The Art of 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 material. 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. Jonathan and I are even planning to do an entire podcast about the evolution of Satoshi Yamamoto’s art just 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. 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 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 it for nothing? Place your bets.

PODCAST BREAKDOWN:

00:22 – Intro & Announcements

02:55 – Icv2’s List of Top 10 Manga Franchises in Spring 2017

09:05 – BookScan’s Top 20 Graphic Novels in July List
12:35 – Zettai Karen Children Returns From Hiatus on August 23rd
13:10 – Princess Jellyfish Ends on August 25th
13:55 – Nobo & Her Also Ends on August 25th
18:00 – Rurouni Kenshin: Hokkaido Arc Manga Launches on September 4
19:00 – Revolutionary Girl Utena Manga Gets Another New Chapter This Winter
19:40 – Angel Beats: The Last Operation Launches on August 30th
20:37 – Ayami Kazama Draws New Miss Kobayashi Spinoff Manga
22:20 – New ReCreators Spinoff Manga About Magane Launches
23:30 – Vertical Licenses Chi Sweet Adventure Spinoff
24:50 – Sublime Licenses Noboru Takatsuki’s ‘Risō no Are, Sagashitemasu’ Manga
26:10 – Tokyopop to Release a Nightmare Before Christmas Sequel Manga
29:30 – Riichiro Inagaki Discusses Eyeshield 21’s “18+ Rating” in North America
36:45 – Bleach Gets Line Smartphone Game
37:25 – Upcoming Anime News!
44:40 – A Real-life Keijo League is Being Formed in Portugal

46:40 – Kakegurui Review

1:10:00 – Wrap-Up

Enjoy the show, and follow us on twitter at @manga_mavericks, on tumblr at mangamavericks.tumblr.com, and now on Youtube! You can also follow the hosts at @sniperking323 and @lumranmayasha. Don’t forget to also like and subscribe to us on Youtube and iTunes and leave us reviews to help us curate the show and create better content! By the way, I know I said we’d be reviewing Sket Dance this week, but unfortunately we had to delay that for various reasons. Rest assured we still plan to cover it at a later date. On our next episode we’ll be reviewing Death Note to commemorate the release of Netflix’s live-action movie. If you have any questions or topics concerning Death Note that you’d like us to discuss, you can drop us a line in the comments below, comment in the Manga Mavericks thread on Animation Revelation, tweet at us, or send an e-mail! As always, thanks for listening!

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About The Author Siddharth Gupta

Siddharth Gupta is an illustrator, animator, and writer based in Minnesota. They graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Animation from the School of Visual Arts, and have worked on projects for the University of Minnesota and the Shreya R. Dixit Foundation. An avid animation and comics fan since childhood, they've turned their passion towards being both a creator and a critic. They credit their love for both mediums to Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball, which has also defined their artistic and comedic sensibilities. A frequent visitor to their local comic book shop, they are an avid reader and collector, particularly fond of manga. Their favorite comics include The Adventures of Tintin by Herge, Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed, and pretty much anything and everything by Rumiko Takahashi.

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