The Field Guide to Pocket Monsters: Pocket Monsters Trading Cards and Other Old Ken Sugimori Art

One thing I always love is finding lost art created by the original Pokémon illustrator and designer Ken Sugimori. He created the official art for the games, and lent his input to the look of the anime as well. Through some scouring of the internet, I have discovered some of his older drawings circa the introduction of the series. Much of this art never found it's way across the sea due to outdated character designs. I'd like to share some of my findings and I urge you to share any you find with me as well.

First up is what may be the earliest official piece of Pokémon art. It features Red and Blue striking a pose with their Charizard and Pikachu. (You'll notice that throughout these early images, Charmander appears to have been Blue's starter Pokémon.)

Red and Blue are a little shorter than they usually are in later official images, but their design ultimate will stay unchanged throughout the first generation. Blue would eventually use the belt he uses to store Poké Balls, but he'll retain the necklace that he uses to keep his current badge on. This is an element that never really got expanded on, but you'll see that Red keeps his badge on his cap. I assume it's the last badge he received (in this case, Cascade) because it changes in a few images. Later we'll see badge cases that can display all badges at once.

More noticeably, Pikachu seems quite odd. He was pudgier in the old days and had a noticable white belly pattern that would later be dropped. Charizard's difference is a little less noticeable due to the angle, but he only has one horn instead of two. A later manga called Pokémon Zensho would use this design for Charizard and I thought the artist was making a mistake based on the angle of Charizard's head in the image. But no, as you can clearly see in the next picture, Charizard had a single horn.

I'm not exactly sure where this image originated from. All I've found is that there were a set of Pokémon stickers that these images came with and there are at least 5 (according to the number on the picture). Pidgeot is referred to as "Pijotto" (which is similar to the English name of it's unevolved form Pidgeotto) rather than it's Japanese name "Pigeot." I really like this action shot of the two trainers flying, especially sense Charizard couldn't learn Fly until the Yellow version of the game (and sky battles didn't even exist until Generation VI).

Another image from this series features Red fighting Lass's Pikachu (or Bikachu?) with his Ivysaur. Apparently, Sugimori picked Bulbasaur to be Red's starter.

We can tell this is a very early image because Pikachu's Poké Ball is split into two halves like the original capsule design, rather than having a hinge like in the anime. And while Lasses would become a recurring trainer type in the games, I'm unsure as to whether she was originally supposed to be the playable female option that later became Leaf. The outfit of the mystery female trainer is different, however, as seen in the next image.

This image actually did make it into the official American artwork, and it plagued me for years as I tried to identify the girl. We'll be seeing her again shortly in other books and manga, so don't worry. The mystery has been solved. Once again, we see the trainers standing with their official starter choices. And while this above image is actually from a later round of official drawings, it does invoke one last early piece of the trainers preparing to start their journey.

There is a lot more Sugimori art to be found out there, but there is just one last piece I'd like to share with you. Bandai Carddass created a set of Pocket Monster Trading Cards with original Sugimori images. Unlike the TCG, these were simply collectables that featured info about each of the 151 Pokémon The coolest aspect was that for each card, a Pokémon would be showcasing one of their attacks, resulting in some pretty cool images and angles that hadn't been seen before or since.