Discovering Pokémon Adventures

We've been going to library about once a week this summer, constantly returning and checking out new books. On our very first trip of the summer, my wife suggested we could see what Pokémon books the library had—Son One has become obsessed with the show and game.

Our branch turned out to have three volumes of Pokémon manga at the time: vol. 12 of something called Sun & Moon and vols. 1 and 2 of something called Sword & Shield. So we checked them all out and then took them home to figure out what they actually were.

Taking them home revealed that Sun & Moon was volume 12 in a twelve-volume series, so maybe not a good one to start with. Sword & Shield is the most recent manga series, of which there are six volumes so far—and it takes place in the Galar region, the setting of Pokémon Journeys, the most recent tv show which he's been watching on Netflix. I also realized that the manga has been running continuously since 1997, and that our library system had many of them. So I suggested we could work our way through Sword & Shield, and then circle back to the beginning, and Son One agreed.

The next night I sat down with the library catalog to make a list of all the volumes of the manga in order... not counting the two Sword & Shields we already had, it came out to ninety-four!

Like I said, it's been running since 1997. And in all that time, it's had one writer, Hidenori Kusaka! And only two artists, Mato and Satoshi Yamamoto.

So, the English name of the manga is Pokémon Adventures (in Japanese, Pokémon Special), and it runs as chapters in a magazine called "rounds" in Japanese ("adventures" in English), of irregular length. So far there have been 672 of these rounds translated into English.

The rounds are compiled into larger books called "volumes"; there's about nine rounds in a volume on average. In Japan, these volumes are continuously numbered from 1 to 64; in English, they ran from 1 to 29 before they began resetting the volume numbering with each new series. My understanding is that the volume publications will see things tweaked and expanded, sometimes adding whole new rounds to the story.

These volumes lag behind the original magazine publications by quite a bit, though. Volume 64 was the most recently released in Japan, and it goes up through round 616. So to compensate, beginning with round 549 (the beginning of the X•Y series), Viz began releasing what are called "mini-volumes" or "special editions," which collect just three or four rounds apiece, straight from the original magazine editions.

Somewhat confusingly, it seems like they are done out of order at times. Black 2 & White 2 (rounds 525-548) was published July 2013 to April 2020, overlapping with X•Y (rounds 549-595), published October 2013 to November 2016. Bulbapedia is in general pretty thorough, but doesn't have much of an explanation of the original publication process of Pokémon Adventures, so I am not sure why this is.

Our library system has basically everything: almost all the regular volumes in hard copy (and what ones aren't in hard copy, they have electronically) and every mini-volume in hard copy. So the list I made runs through what is currently available in volume form, and then when the volumes run out, switches to mini-volumes to bring it up to the present.

This is how my list currently goes:

• volumes 1-29 (rounds 1-337)
• Diamond and Pearl/Platinum, volumes 1-11 (rounds 338-441)
• HeartGold & SoulSilver, volumes 1-2 (rounds 442-460)
• Black & White, volumes 1-9 (rounds 461-524)
• Black 2 & White 2, volumes 1-4 (rounds 525-548)
• X•Y, volumes 1-5 (rounds 549-587)
• X•Y, mini-volumes 11-12 (rounds 589-594)
• Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire, mini-volumes 1-6 (rounds 596-617)
• Sun & Moon, mini-volumes 1-12 (37 rounds)
  

After I made the list, I discovered our library also has some, though not all, of the Viz "Collector's Editions," which combine three volumes into one larger edition, up through volume 30.

Pokémon Adventures is not the only Pokémon manga, either; there's some that adapt the tv show and movies of course, and our library also has two others: Pokémon: Diamond and Pearl Adventure! (which confusingly is nothing to do with Pokémon Adventures: Diamond and Pearl/Platinum) and Pokémon Horizon: Sun & Moon (which confusingly is nothing to do with the new tv show Pokémon Horizons). I put these on our list, too. Alas, our library does not have Magical Pokémon Journey, the shōjō romance manga set in the Pokémon world.

So for now I seem to be committed to reading these to Son One, though hopefully not forever. By the time we get back up to where we started, surely he will be able to read them himself!

That said, though, Sword & Shield is pretty cute. I like the two protagonists, Henry Sword and Casey Shield; it's interesting to have people in the Pokémon world who have purposes different from Ash's; Henry wants to be an expert on Pokémon "gear," the equipment some Pokémon carry around with them. Casey is a hacker, creating computer simulations of Pokémon battles to aid research, and carrying out a search for her vanished Pokémon. The stuff I have read about the earlier volumes sounds intriguing, too.

Me being me, I went and looked the books up on LibraryThing... and found it was a total mess. Volumes mixed in with mini-volumes, originals not combined with translations, the two Diamond and Pearl series mixed up, most of the mini-volumes not organized at all, lots of omnibus editions unaccounted for, series artists rarely credited. So I spent a few days cleaning them all up! Satisfying work, but who cares other than me? Here's the fruits of my labor, though:

• Pokémon Adventures main series (organized all 60 volumes, combining strays, removing bad combinations; also added the Spanish omnibus editions and the English "Collector's Editions")
• Pokémon Adventures Monthly (in the U.S., the series was originally serialized through the conventional comic market in monthly issues, which were not organized at all on LT)
• Pokémon: The Grand Adventure (in France, it's been released in chunky volumes that don't really line up with the English/Japanese ones very well as Pokémon: la grande aventure; the same divisions were used in the Italian translation, Pokémon. La grande avventura; I combined the two languages and organized them all)
• Pokémon Adventures Special Editions (I did all the mini-volumes; use "Related series" on the side to move forward from Black and White)

Though I am sure some stuff has escaped me, I am fairly certain I have cleaned up 90% of Pokémon Adventures–related material on LibraryThing. One thing I won't be doing, though... logging the books myself, either on LT or on my reading list. I dunno, though I count reading Oz with Son One, this feels different. But perhaps I'll periodically write up my thoughts on them here.