Rejoice, awaiting Pokemon fans looking to fill some gaps in your collection – a listing on Viz Media’s website have confirmed their acquisition of Pokemon Adventures: Heart Gold & Soul Silver. Volume one is scheduled for release early August 2013 for $9.99/US, $12.99/CAN. Listings for this license originally popped up on Amazon (US/CAN) in mid-December.
This three volume arc of the Pokemon story is being published as a separate Pokemon Adventures collection, instead of being in numbered sequence with the on-going series. The same thing was done with Diamond & Pearl Platinum, and Black & White.
Chronologically, Viz Media has already published Pokemon Adventures’ chapters for the ‘original’ Gold and Silver arcs, which are similar but different than Heart Gold & Soul Silver. They both follow the two leads who were named after the originating game series. These volumes were released as Pokemon Adventures (Vols. 8-14), with a box set published this past September (Amazon US/CAN).
Amazon listings (US/CAN) also reveal the date of the first collected volume of Pokemon Adventures: Black & White. Viz Media has been releasing mini volumes of this series since July 2011 to keep in close proximity to the original Japanese serialized chapters. They’ll be releasing those chapters again in thicker graphic novels that are in line with both the price and page count of their other Pokemon Adventures books.
The B&W listing brings two questions to mind: will these new volumes take the artwork from the collected editions in Japan (which often have some updates compared to chapters originally published in magazines), or will it be the same we’ve seen in the minis? And the second question – am I picky enough about bookshelf consistency to sell my minis and replace with these? Knowing myself, the possibility is high… What about you?
Follow
BW has finally started being released in volumes in Japan, and, yup, changes have already started.
The good news is Viz’s release of the actual volumes *do* have the additional pages which is good. The bad news is they have missed a few minor dialogue changes and even at least one changed panel (in the Japanese volume both Bianca and Cheren now plug their ears before Black screams his dream, while Viz’s still just has Cheren doing it; there’s another one or two but I haven’t been able to get the volume to compare yet) so it seems that they’re just re-using their magazine releases and just including the additional content. It’s better than nothing I guess, but they really should include every change. I guess I’ll just have to email them about it.
The only problem with them splitting up arcs though is now due to volume 43’s content being split up, the first BW volume is really short. Pretty much the length of the mini volumes short, which isn’t good since people might not see the point in buying them unless they know about the changes. But the good news is the rest will be normal-lengthed (at least until maybe the final BW volume, since it might have some of the B2W2 arc) so once those start coming out people will probably realize.
The mini volumes are a great way to stay fairly up-to-date with Japan but the problem is having two sets of releases to buy. Sadly XY is most likely going to be the same way, but the good news is with Japan finally on the BW volumes now and working to catch up the volume releases to the magazines hopefully the whatever kind of game Kalos will get after XY arc will be able to just release the volumes only. All I can say is I’m glad I waited for the potential release of the actual BW volumes, and after seeing for sure they’re releasing the actual volumes I’ll continue to do the same for future arcs as well.