Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone, Issue 6 (Patreon)

Welcome, everyone, to the sixth issue of Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone! 

Today, we are going to look at a Japanese Yoshi art and merchandise book from 2014 called "With Yoshi" and see its unique illustrations.

Hello! Sorry I'm
not home, but I
have gone to
read a blog called
Supper Mario Broth.
- Yoshi🐾

Let's Go With Yoshi 

In 2014, Nintendo released a book called "With Yoshi" in partnership with the clothing company XLARGE and publisher Gakken. The book features the history of Yoshi, pictures of Yoshi merchandise, some artwork and activities, and even photos of Yoshi-themed food.

The scans used in this article have been provided generously to me by twitter.com user "YoshisMoon".

First, let's take a look at the cover:

It features a very high-resolution version of new official art created specifically for it, namely Yoshi holding an apple. This artwork, in an edited form, was featured a year later for the annual Sapporo Snow Festival in Japan, where Yoshi was shown on the Nintendo sponsor billboard holding a snow apple:

Above the table of contents is a picture of the merchandise released alongside the book: a Yoshi bag with the same illustration:

Immediately after, the first page is a minimalistic splash page:

The next pages are a recap of Yoshi's history, featuring well-known official artwork and screenshots. Most of the material there is readily available in better quality in other sources, but a few of the illustrations stand out.

Page 4 contains the Dinosaur Land artwork from the Super Mario World manual without overlays showing the names of the regions, making it look much cleaner. Unfortunately, parts of the artwork are obscured on the sides, making it fall short of being the "definitive" version of this image.

Pages 6 and 7 feature individual versions of colorful Yoshi artwork used on Nintendo's official website; while the online version has the Yoshis together in one picture, obscuring details of each other, this spread separates them. In the bottom left corner, there are additional rare images of the other three colors, in the Yoshi's Island style.

Page 8 has high-resolution versions of Yoshi's Topsy-Turvy transformations, including the rare Ball Yoshi, which is notoriously hard to find a high-quality image of.

Page 9 is perhaps the most unique artwork in the book - a look at in-progress versions of the Yoshi's New Island group artwork. An alternate version of the artwork of Baby Bowser yelling at Kamek is also shown - the finished one is "B" on the left, while "A" did not make the cut. Note Kamek's more pained expression in "A".

Most of the following pages focus on Yoshi's friends with no original artwork, however, this part is of interest:

The book acknowledges the names of the different characters that have, in Japanese, a name that is identical to Yoshi's but with the first syllables being changed. Boshi from Super Mario RPG is called "Washi", Dorrie, debuting in Super Mario 64, is called "Doshi", and the dinosaurs from Dino Dino Jungle in Mario Kart: Double Dash are called "Noshi".

Pages 14 and 15 show off Yoshi merchandise over the years. While none of this is particularly rare, the images are relatively high-quality over what can be commonly found online.

Page 16 shows off some more uncommon merchandise in the form of Yoshi socks and Mario underwear. Note that due to the fact that the book is a product promotion (as evident by the pricing next to each item's description), it would not have been in the interest of the writers to showcase merchandise so rare that it was no longer being produced, limiting the scope of this section.

Page 18 shows Japanese Club Nintendo rewards that were current at the time of the book's release, hence the number of points next to the items, needed for redemption. The Yoshi plush was another tie-in meant to promote the book.

The next several pages are a promotion by XLARGE and feature children wearing clothes that, while claimed by the book to fit a "Yoshi style", do not actually depict Yoshi or anything Yoshi-related on them. The last page of the promotion contains some Yoshi-themed decorations in the background:

The next 10 pages are information about games that released recently at the time of the book being written; Yoshi's New Island, Yoshi's Woolly World and finally, Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, which was released only a month before the book. As the other information pages, these contain only widely available artwork.

Pages 34 and 35 contained activities suitable for very young children. The one on the left asks the reader to count eggs and Yoshis in a standing pose, respectively, while the one on the right is a maze where Yoshi needs to get from the start to the goal without touching any enemies.

Pages 36 and 37 are one final instance of original content for the book, as they show various Yoshi-themed food, alongside with recipes for each. Of course, due to the extremely fine lines of decoration necessary to produce the pictures on the food, the likelihood of the reader's home-made versions of them resembling the photos highly depends on their culinary skill.

Page 39 points out the differences between Yoshi's normal design and the one used for the Yoshi Cookie in a diagrammatic manner. 

While I believe I have shown most of the images of particular interest from the book in this article, you may want to read the entirety of it yourself. In this case, use this link to download scans of the book in high-resolution JPEG format, again provided by YoshisMoon.

This concludes today's book review. Until tomorrow!

Thank you very much for reading.