Born January 27, 1966, Ken Sugimori discovered the Game Freak fanzine in a Tokyo doujinshi shop around 1981 and spent five years drawing for it before Satoshi Tajiri convinced him to co-found the company properly. He had originally wanted to stay a manga artist but ended up becoming Pokémon's primary character designer and art director — personally finalising and watercolouring nearly all of the original 151 Pokémon to give the series its uniform visual signature. His refining process is famously iterative: a rough pencil sketch traced onto film paper, then redrawn dozens of times with subtle proportion changes until each Pokémon's silhouette feels right. Sugimori still maintains an active hand in every generation as the franchise's de-facto art lead.
First card
Alakazam
Jan 9, 1999
Latest card
Mewtwo
Nov 16, 2023
Master Set
2,362 cards across English, Japanese and Simplified Chinese sets