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Pokémon card game’s expansion features art from Fist of the North Star creator

Casey Baseel a few minute ago
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Tetsuo Hara shows he can draw for both blood-soaked martial arts action and Pokémon.

The Pokémon Trading Card Game pumps out way too many cards for one single illustrator to handle all of them, and being approached by the Pokémon Company to draw one can be a major feather in the cap of upcoming artists with a talent for drawing cute and cuddly critters…but it turns out it can also be an appealing project for legendary veterans of drawing ultra-violent, extra-macho manga series too.

The game’s new Hado Seeker/Aura Seeker expansion packs (pictured above) are set to go on sale soon in Japan, and among the cards that could be waiting inside packs is one featuring Crasher Wake, the Pastoria City Gym Leader who first appeared in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl. The SAR (“special art rare”) version of the Crasher’s Passion card shows off an especially high level of detail on the character’s muscles, which makes sense once you know that it was drawn by none other than Tetsuo Hara, creator and artist of Fist of the North Star!

Hara, who began drawing his post-apocalyptic marital arts saga in 1983, brings his distinct aesthetic of heavy shadowing to convey the mass of characters’ muscles, plus a whole lot of fist-shaped after images to represent rapid punch flurries, to the artwork. “Crasher is a pro wrestler, so I thought a lot about how best to show his toughness and physique,” the artist says. “I always want to pursue a sense of realism in my artwork, so I have to take into consideration how stylized I can get. At first, I was planning to draw Crashed with even bigger muscles, but after considering how that would or wouldn’t align with fans’ perception of the character, I ended up toning it down.”

For the illustration’s layout, Hara says he wanted Crasher to be up in a wrestling ring, in order to create a powerful presence, but drawing him from that angle ran the risk of making his face look tiny, so he decided to have the character angled to be looking down from on high. This also allowed him to add in a few of the ring’s overhead lights in a stealthy homage to the constellation-motif that appears in Fist of the North Star. Hara also says that once he started adding after-images of Crasher’s punches, he realized the composition needed more and more, so many that he found himself thinking “Maybe I shouldn’t have done this” because of all the extra work he’d created for himself, but in the end it seems like a pretty safe bet that most fans are going to be very satisfied with how things turned out. For those wanting a closer look, the original artwork for the card will be on display at the Pokémon Card Station specialty shop attached to the Pokémon Center Ikebukuro store in Tokyo from November 30 to January 11.

This actually isn’t Hara’s first time to lend his talents to the Pokémon Trading Card Game. In 2024, he drew artwork for a special Palafin card that was part of the Terastal Fest Ex, which also featured an homage to Fist of the North Star protagonist Kenshiro’s iconic Hundred Crack Fist attack.

Hara says that there’s a unique challenge in balancing his personal artistic sensibilities with the atmosphere of the Pokémon world, but that he’s enjoyed finding a way to blend the two, and the experience he acquired working on the Palafin card made the process of creating the Crasher one smoother, so hopefully there’ll be more Pokémon projects for him in the future. For the time being, though, the Hado Seeker expansion packs are scheduled to go on sale in Japan on November 27.

Source: Pokémon Card Game official website via Anime News Network/Ken Iikura-Gross
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