The Pokémon Graphic Novel, more commonly known as is a Japanese manga series created by Toshihiro Ono and serialized in the children's manga magazine CoroCoro Comic. Individual chapters were collected into four tankōbon volumes by Shogakukan, who released the first volume on October 28, 1997 and the fourth volume on January 28, 2000. The characters and storylines are all drawn from the Pokémon anime series, although some events and depictions of characters diverge slightly from the anime, and the world itself has a visibly higher level of technology. The manga was published in English in North America by Viz Communications in a "flipped", left-to-right format. In 1998 the company released the series as individual single comic book issues; the collected volumes came afterwards. At the time of its release Issue #1 was the best-selling manga issue, and best-selling comic book of any type, in the United States. The issue sold 1.001million copies, the highest for a single comic book since 1993. The first volume, The Electric Tale of Pikachu!, was released on September 5, 1999. The third volume, Electric Pikachu Boogaloo, was released on April 5, 2000. In Singapore, the manga is published in English by Chuang Yi and translated as Pokémon: The Electric Tale of Pikachu! for all four volumes. The Traditional Chinese edition in Taiwan of the manga is published by Da Ran Culture Enterprise and Chingwin Publishing. Development Toshihiro Ono, the author of the series, said that he began drawing the series after Mr. Saito, Ono's editor, asked Ono to draw a manga to go along with the anime. During the production of the manga, Ono received scripts of the anime series. The author then altered the stories to fit the desired amount of pages used per storyline. Ono said that his favorite manga chapter was "Clefairy Tale" from the first volume and that he was "embarrassed that I can't say why." According to Ono he did not find any particular chapter to be more difficult than any other chapter. He said that when the episode "Clefairy in Space" ("Subway no Pipi") was going in manga form, Ono had to redraw many of the pages, a time-consuming process. Ono encountered difficulty in drawing Dragonite in the final chapter, as he struggled to "get a face that cute to look powerful." His favorite human characters to work with were Ash Ketchum and Jessie and James. In particular he