I just keep getting ideas for these. Props to ISRO (the Indian space agency) for being the first ever national space agency to successfully reach Mars on its first attempt using its own technology! (ESA was technically the first agency to reach Mars on its first attempt, but it got Mars Express there using a Russian rocket.)

I love the idea of Indian food, but both spicy food and onions don't agree with me, which makes Indian cuisine a bit of a challenge. I usually end up just cooking my own at home. I figured out a delicious recipe for shortcut chicken tikka masala that is not at all spicy, and uses storebought rotisserie chicken because I hate working with raw meat.

But that has nothing at all to do with space.

 No offense, Youngster, but if that's your only basis for wanting to be friends with me, that's a pretty superficial friendship. 

I pretty much gave Youngster the characterization of every elementary-school-age boy I knew back when Pokémon first came out. Including my cousin

On the other hand, now that I've got an awesome niece who plays Pokémon, I just give away my rare Pokémon to her like I'm passing out candy on Halloween. But that's a privilege reserved for nieces.

 I can't stop drawing these--the ideas just keep coming! Not that I'm mad. I've loved space for as long as I've loved paleontology (so like forever), but I've just never really had the predilection for the usual sort of space art. Now I kind of feel like I've found my niche and I'm enjoying it.

Hopefully nobody minds the attempts at quirky hand-lettering through this series. I wanted to add the mission name to the cartoons so people will be able to identify the craft (for example, not sure anybody who's not a total space nerd knows what the Venera landers looked like), but I didn't just want to scrawl the name--I thought it would be more fun to come up with a little logo for each one.

Again, huge thanks to Chris Lintott for encouraging me with these. Always nice to spend my time creating things people enjoy.

 It must be tough being a silent video game player character.

 MaggieJo Widdicombe wanted to see a Pachyrhinosaurus with porcupine quills, because she and Ashley Hall were talking about how bristles have been found preserved with ceratopsians like Psittacosaurus, so clearly this was the next logical step.

Ceratopsians with quills is a terrifying thought. Business in the front, business in the back. I'd rather run into a T. rex, frankly.

In all honesty, I've met a porcupine and they're actually quite friendly creatures. You can hand-feed them and it's really adorable to watch their little noses wiggle in excitement as they nibble on cucumber sticks. Just don't make them feel threatened (just like any other animal).

Also, this pachy is P. canadensis, and at this point I've now drawn each of the three species of Pachycephalosaurus. Do I get a medal or something for that?

 What, you thought he meant challenged to a Pokemon battle?

... Nah, clearly they want a Yu-Gi-Oh! duel.

I tried so hard to get into Yu-Gi-Oh! when it first came out in the US. But the card game was overcomplicated, the anime was boring, and the only other person I had to talk to about it was the 13-year-old boy down the street. I'll just stick with Pokémon and Digimon.

 MaggieJo Widdicombe keeps coming up with fantastic paleoart ideas at Virtual Fossil Friday! Last week she said she wanted to see a Yutyrannus in a Christmas sweater, and I just had to draw that.

Hope everybody has a very happy and safe holiday season!

More sketches!

I've always loved the idea of centaurs that are other things besides half-horse.* So here's an epic jaguar-woman warrior.

Miscellaneous character designs; I was looking through a very old sketchbook of mine (from junior high) and decided to redraw a few of my archaic character designs.

That girl on the top totally looks like a Mega Man fan character**, and although back then I was really bad at adding any sort of context to my drawings, I have vague memories of seeing ads for a new Mega Man game and thinking the character designs were interesting and wanting to draw my own.

 Couple of Hyren and Blynn doodles because they're so fun to write. Looking at my oldest sketchbooks, I'd forgotten just how long Blynn and Hyren have been around. I created Blynn and adopted Hyren (the real ones on the website) when I was 14 and drew some (badly rendered and not very funny) comics about them that were way too unpolished to get into the Neopian Times. Back then, Hyren's character was drastically different than how he's portrayed in my Neopian Times stories--he was quiet and shy and bookish, and actually a lot like how Pharazon's personality turned out. Pharazon hadn't been created yet, though; in fact, Meridell hadn't even been discovered yet, and yes I am very old.

Back when I first adopted Hyren from the Pound, I toyed around with various sorts of mysterious and dramatic backstories for him. I think at one point he was a former pirate. I found a comic that shows him undergoing some sort of weird werewolf-like transformation under moonlight into a warrior Grundo very similar to Ghi Pharun. None of these ideas got very far. It wasn't until Worth Fighting For that I solidified Hyren's past and personality.

Blynn, on the other hand, has just always been Blynn. She came that way.

Her doodle is a reference to the on-site description for Flouds, which says to never feed them carrots but doesn't say why. Perhaps the reason is just too unspeakably horrific.

*This may have something to do with the fact that horses kinda scare me. I don't know why, but I get along a lot better with carnivores than herbivores. Not sure what that says about me. I'm gonna go fangirl some theropods.

**This is not to be confused with the terrible Mega Man fan design I referenced in a post a few days ago. That one was totally different but arguably worse, because bad fan art by a junior high student is at least a little more endearing than bad fan art by a pimply, overly-emotional teenager.

... Maybe I'm a little too hard on myself.

 I got the idea for this one from my astro buddy Chris Lintott's excellent recent lecture "From Mars with Love", where he wrote postcards from several Mars missions. Most of them were very enthusiastic, but InSight was quite disgruntled at having been intentionally sent to the most boring place on the planet, and then its heat probe didn't even work. Can't win them all, I'm afraid.

 When this NPC says that about Team Rocket, it just makes me think that if Team Rocket doesn't have an adequate handle on what other people consider popular or useful Pokémon species, they're going to run into some issues.

Fun fact: I modeled the Rocket grunts in this one after my sister and brother-in-law. Little did I know that they would end up giving me a niece who would inspire even more video game comics!

 Another adorable anthropormophized spacecraft! The Venera landers have always been some of my favorite space missions. Let's engineer a machine that can survive long enough on the surface of of Venus to take and transmit pictures, because why not?

... So, when are we going back?

 I decided to do something I haven't really done in a while and just sit and sketch. I used to sketch prodigiously when I was a teenager and in college. Unfortunately, 99% of what I filled my sketchbooks with in high school was absolute rubbish, mostly janky anime-styled lame character designs from before I learned how to draw, and doodles from franchises I was largely into just to try to please a friend who frankly didn't care about me nearly as much. 

For a while I kept those sketchbooks because of the presumed importance of an artist keeping a thorough record of her work, but finally a few years back I decided I couldn't stand to look at them anymore, and I threw them all away. If that makes any of you cringe, you're honestly not missing much. I really doubt a pencil drawing of an awful Mega Man fan design with terrible anatomy is of any relevance to anyone. It makes me sort of sad that I spent day after day in high school churning out that sort of nonsense instead of actually taking the time to learn to draw and have better friends. Oh well, live and learn.

Right, about the sketches--these are some concept doodles for a novel manuscript I've been working on. I wanted the Plainsmen to have facial features reminiscent of the Middle East and southwest Asia. They're loosely based on the Rigvedic Indo-Aryans, but also take inspiration from the Tocharians of the Tarim Basin. Also a portrait of Jawwad because he's great. I really enjoyed writing the Quo Qu--they're intellectual, numbers-obsessed, and slightly unscrupulous, which is an entertaining combination. But Jawwad comes through for Arun's family in the end.

I was hanging out with my awesome paleo buddies Ashley Hall and MaggieJo Widdicombe at the Museum of the Rockies's Virtual Fossil Fridays, and MaggieJo, who loves Pachyrhinosaurus, pointed out that P. lakustai has a single horn on its forehead anterior to its frill, and she thought that made it look like a unicorn. She then said she'd love to see an actual P. lakustai unicorn, and I just had to draw that.

Man, I want an entire toy line of dinosaurs turned into fantasy creatures. I would have gone crazy for that as a kid. I was a strange child. While other girls my age were playing with dolls or crushing on boy bands, I was reading encyclopedias and building computers. And I turned out just fine(????).

One of my (many) paleo art pet peeves is when people under-muscle dinosaurs. I see this a lot with ceratopsians and hadrosaurs. Some reconstructions just give them these way twiggy limbs, which is ludicrous considering how much bulk those limbs are supposed to be holding up. You can't follow limb bones too closely when putting flesh on an animal--there's a lot of muscle and skin built around those things. If you look at the skeleton of a rhinoceros (a good modern equivalent to a ceratopsian), they actually have rather svelte limb bones--it's just that they're well-covered with thick muscle and tough hide. Let's make our dinosaurs adequately chonky, folks! Soft tissue is a thing!

 With the Pokémon Fan Club, I not-so-subtly commented on fandoms that are really scary and toxic. Like, I thought the whole point of getting together with other fans of a franchise was to enjoy it together, not to argue and bully and make other people feel bad for liking something differently than you do?

On a related note, I'm still playing through Legends: Z-A and Naveen is driving me up the wall. I understand what they were trying to do with his character, but he's so obnoxious with his arrogance, and making it clear he doesn't want anything to do with anyone, and obsession with a celebrity to the point of prioritizing watching her stream over lives in danger, it's not even funny. I just really, really hope he displays some sort of redeeming quality by the end of the game. And by that I mean character development that gives him likeable traits, not some sort of shallow "I showed up to help you save the day and that means we're best friends now" nonsense. I swear if the writers pull that stunt I'm going to have to dock the game points in the story department.

Fun fact: In the original Japanese version, the Pokémon Fan Club is called the Pokémon Daisuki ("We Love Pokémon") Club. In 2004, Nintendo created a real life Pokémon Daisuki Club in Japan whose members have access to exclusive merchandise and media. Its English-language equivalent is Pokémon Trainer Central. It's always fun when franchise creators sort of bring a part of the fictional universe to life like that.

 When this NPC says that, I always get really confused about whether he's referring to someone else's Pikachu, or your hypothetical Pikachu.

So if you don't have a hypothetical Pikachu, it's a very odd thing for him to say to you.

 My friend Chris Lintott and I were commenting on cute cartoon versions of spacecraft, and I mentioned I wanted to retroactively anthropomorphize past space missions, and then the ideas just started coming. Chris had the idea of encounters with the Great Galactic Ghoul, a fictional entity supposed to be responsible for the failures of spacecraft headed to Mars. The Ghoul was created by a journalist in 1969, and subsequently adopted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and even mentioned lightheartedly in some of its official documents.

Mars Polar Lander was launched in January 1999 and was supposed to have landed in December of that year. Instead, communications dropped just before cruise stage separation, and that was the last we ever heard from MPL. The mission failure was probably caused by a software error that caused the onboard computer to mistake the landing legs deploying for actual touchdown. Whoops.

I'm still a little bit sore about MPL because I'd put my name on it:

That said, the concept of sending a lander to the polar regions of Mars was later resurrected for the Phoenix mission (pun intended by the mission team), which was phenomenally successful. So all's well that ends well.

Also, I'm fairly certain this is the first time in 56 years that someone's drawn fan art of the Great Galactic Ghoul. You're welcome.

 There are fans and then there are fans.

Maybe we can all just stop fighting about what constitutes a "true fan" and acknowledge that everybody likes a thing in their own individual way?

 The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs need more love! I just really wanted to draw fan art of them. (I know, I need to get better at photographing my art. I'm trying. Lighting is hard.) (I know my lettering also isn't great. An attempt was made. Ironically, my grandmother is a professional calligrapher. I don't know what happened with me.) I definitely need to go see these guys on my (as-yet-hypothetical) grand tour of nerdy places in the UK (which will of course include Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics).

The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs get maligned a lot for being inaccurate depictions of dinosaurs, but considering that no complete (or indeed articulated) skeletal remains of dinosaurs were known at the time of their creation, you have to cut Waterhouse Hawkins a lot of slack. Hawkins was an extremely skilled wildlife illustrator who was probably the best person in England for the job of trying to come up with believable animals based on fragmentary remains. I think his designs, while incorrect, are actually much more biomechanically workable than those ghastly waddling-tripod dinos of the late 19th century to late 20th century. (That one is Louis Dollo's fault, and he tried with those Bernissart Iguanodon, I know, but if you have to straight up break a specimen's tail to get it into the posture you want, that is probably not the right posture for it.) 

If you look closely at the Iguanodon sculptures, you'll notice that they even have beaks. There was no cranial material known for Iguanodon at the time, which makes this all the more remarkable on Hawkins's part, because Iguanodon really did have beaks. A genius inference.

Fun fact: Hawkins's Megalosaurus has that big shoulder hump at Richard Owen's request; he was directing Hawkins's sculptures, and was aware of a set of tall-spined vertebrae that he referred to Megalosaurus (which at the time was basically a wastebasket taxon for all large theropods). Because these vertebrae were found on their own, it was anyone's guess where they went on the animal, so it seemed reasonable at the time to give "Megalosaurus" a tall shoulder hump like bison have. Nowadays the specimen is referred to Altispinax, which may have been related to Concavenator, meaning those tall spines formed a weird mini-hump in the middle of the back. Interesting case of a dinosaur being reconstructed inaccurately because too many unrelated animals were lumped into the same genus.

I'm a big fan of the work of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, and that's why I wrote him into my novel Thunder Girl. If you want a really beautiful treatment of his work with sculpting prehistoric animals, I highly recommend the picture book The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins by Barbara Kerley and Brian Selznick.

 This NPC's dialogue is supposed to tip you off to the fact that in earlier Pokémon games, a poisoned Pokémon's health would steadily decrease outside of battle as you walked, until it fainted. But I just imagined a different story involving a negligent Trainer not noticing his own Pokémon getting poisoned. (I feel really bad for that Clefairy, though.)

In later games, this mechanic was amended so that a Pokémon was cured of poison when it reached 1 HP, thus preventing the player character from potentially blacking out and being sent back to the nearest Pokémon Center at an inconvenient time. More recent games have done away with this mechanic altogether, which is kind of nice because that poison sound effect reminding you that your Pokémon's health was depleting was kind of stressful.

 Theoretically, more Pokémon can only be a good thing, right? I guess I just wanted to play around with someone bypassing the usual party limit.

Game Freak has said that at times they've entertained the idea of altering how many Pokémon you can keep in your party at once, but decided that would mess with the formula too much. Six does feel like a pretty solid balance between a strategically diverse selection and a manageable party, so I doubt it will change anytime soon.

Most forms of Pokémon media don't actually explain why you're only allowed six Pokémon in your party at once. I think the Pokémon Adventures manga is the only canon that actually does bother with an explanation--in that universe, the Pokémon League restricts Trainers to six active Pokémon at a time because they felt that was the maximum number a Trainer could properly give care to at once. Kinda weird how in the games and anime, it's never addressed. But I guess the writers have other things to do than satisfy pedantic geeks trying to work out fictional logistics.

 After yesterday's cartoon, I got to thinking about how Americans do not have a monopoly on the English language. But don't worry, there's a dinosaur for every occasion.

Incidentally, alvarezsaurids (the family Mononykus is in) are still giving paleontologists a headache about what they possibly could have used those tiny, short, one-clawed arms for. Some people think they could have used them to break open termite nests, anteater-style, but their arms are so short, the critters would have had to lay on their stomachs to do any digging.

I'm probably right about this one, guys.

 Sometimes the truth hurts, Bug Catcher.

Don't worry; someday, you'll grow up to be a Bug Maniac, and then... actually I'm not sure that's any better.

 The other day I was just thinking way too hard about what tyrannosaurs could possibly have used their dinky forelimbs for, and, uh, this is where my mind went.

And then I had to draw it.

Seeing as it's Christmas and all, perhaps now is a good time for a bit of end-of-year pontificating. There's a lot of negativity and contention going on in the world, and the more people bicker and try to prove they're right and force the solutions they want, the worse things get. In this season when I and many others celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, let's try to be peacemakers and find ways to get along and love one another. Let's laugh at some dinosaur comics and remember all the things there are to like and appreciate about each other. The world has a lot of issues to hammer out, but I think the way forward is to work together to find solutions everybody can agree on, and do so in a spirit of unity and caring for all.

This Christmas, would you consider taking the time to find ways to brighten someone's day? My church's Light the World initiative has lots of great ways you can contribute to your family, your community, and to your brothers and sisters around the world. That's what Christmas is really about--giving back in service of the One whose birth we celebrate.

 So this NPC tells you this as a hint that the developers hid some invisible items on the floor of the underground path.

But of course I had to take things a step further, and now I just imagine the underground as a place where people go to ditch all their unwanted junk.

Like Lass.

(It's semi-implied that this is the same Lass from Mt. Moon. I'm sure her "friends" told her they'd meet her here, too. She's been waiting so long that she turned into some sort of zombie mole-person.)

Lass going unhinged is kind of another of the subplots of this comic, and looking back at my treatment of Lass now, I'm wondering if it might have been a little bit of a subconscious representation of some really terrible friendships I was in at the time. I'm glad now I spend my social life talking to scientists.

 I doodled this after a fantastic Fossil Friday where we got to discussing theropod feathering, and it made me want to render a very speculative troodontid*, specifically the undescribed giant species found in Alaska and northern Canada. I just really wanted it to have fluffy snowy owl feet. I also would not be surprised if troodontids had facial discs like owls, because they have asymmetrical ears like owls, so it's reasonable to conclude that they may have employed facial discs to further focus their hearing. Their large eyes also suggest they were probably low-light hunters that likely made good use of sound.

I kinda think this guy turned out like a combination of a snowy owl and a wolf, which is epic.

*There is sometimes some confusion on how to pronounce "Troodon". When the species was originally described in 1856, it was named Troödon (with the diaresis) and is supposed to be pronounced "troh-oh-don". Twenty years later the name was amended to Troodon because the International Committee for Zoological Nomenclature does not allow diacritics in taxonomic names. But it should still be pronounced as if it contained the diaresis.

 You go through all that trouble to retrieve this guy's Dig TM... and he has a Diglett who learns Dig by leveling up. And doesn't want the TM back.

Sometimes I wonder why I even bother with these people.

I loved drawing the guy's face in the third and fourth panels, though.

 Just about any problem can be solved with a fake moustache, honestly.

 I guess you can tell how old this comic is because it's still called Twitter* and not X.

Also, I like how Bill's PC is undoubtedly one of those great old beige CRT-monitor models, and yet there's social media. (You young'uns might have a hard time believing that there was an age when social media didn't exist.)

Fun fact: The Pokémon Bill gets transformed into is different across media that depict this event. The original games never specify what Pokémon he is; they just use one of the generic minisprites that were used for the party menu screen back then (which is how I chose to depict him in this comic). Later remakes show him having specifically turned into a Clefairy and then a Nidorino. And in the anime... he's just stuck in a Kabuto costume for some reason. And has green hair and a British** accent.

(The early Pokémon anime was so weird.)

*I hope nobody minds that I essentially never use X anymore and took it off my list of ways to contact me. I barely used it anyway, and lately I've been more into BlueSky, which is a lot like a more sane version of X. Social media is so stressful. I can basically only handle two platforms at a time, maximum.

**Extra fun fact: Across Japanese Pokémon media, Bill is consistently portrayed speaking with a Kansai*** dialect. The Kansai dialect is notoriously difficult for American English localization teams to work with because it carries cultural nuances that don't really match anything in America. Sometimes a Kansai dialect is translated as an American Southern accent because both have the vague connotation of being more rustic and rural. This is what the translators did for Bill in the Pokémon Adventures manga. I just think it's kind of odd that the translators instead gave him a British accent in the anime.

***Bonus extra fun fact: In Gen II, it's revealed that Bill's hometown is Goldenrod City in the Johto region. Regions in the Pokémon games are inspired by and based off the geography of real-world regions. In Johto's case, it's based off an area of Japan west of Tokyo, and Goldenrod City is a stand-in for Kyoto, which is the seat of the Kansai dialect. It's awesome that the developers paid this much attention to detail.

 Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, after all.

I just thought it was funny that Lass says that first line in the games, but then (like all Lasses) she already has little cutesy Pokémon. This Lass must be wanting a different vibe.

 What if there were PokéVampires in the Pokémon world?

In that case, can I get bitten by a Metagross? Because being part-Metagross would be rad.

This comic also makes me wonder what would happen if a human got hit with a Pokémon move.

It... would probably just hurt really bad. (That seems to be what the Legends series implies, anyway.)

I could go on a whole weird rant about how I don't understand why vampires are so maligned in fiction. It's actually a pretty awesome deal. All you have to do is make a little blood donation, and you're immortal, and have supernatural powers, and can change into a bat and bats are adorable. Nothing wrong with that. As much as I'm not into the Twilight franchise, I feel like that's one thing it actually did right, portraying a mortal falling into the company of vampires as a positive thing. That's a message I also tried to get across in Thunder Girl (and in the sequel I've been planning, which introduces a vampire protagonist)--don't hate on things just because they're different and/or your society has conditioned you to hate them. You could be missing out on something amazing.

 In all fairness, Thunder Wave is actually a pretty useful TM because paralysis is one of the more effective status conditions (doesn't wear off, 50% chance your opponent can't do anything on their turn, major Speed reduction). I just was amused by the idea of finding a lame item in the grass and the game text being all excited about it. 

On that note, I'm planning a full writeup of my thoughts on Pokémon Legends: Z-A after I finish the game (I'm about halfway through, and so far, I'm mostly really liking it with just a few quibbles), and one of the things I think the game did right was the real-time rehaul of the battle system, and how it actually makes non-attack moves way more useful in the main game as opposed to them mostly seeing use in the multiplayer (and battle facility) metagame. I'll go more into detail about that in the writeup, but suffice for now to say that I really want to see more of this style of battling in future games.

 I feel like a criminal organization that tries to recruit preteens is either extremely shady or extremely desperate. Also, that is the worst marketing copy I've ever seen. "Hey kids! Don't you want to come be evil with us?! Don't tell your parents!"

... Although, considering the overall track record of its Grunts, I'm not surprised Team Rocket has a similarly incompetent PR department.

 I don't get Blue. He talks a tough game and then sends out a Pokémon whose only move is Teleport. It's like he's not even trying to become Champion.

 Seeing as it's Thanksgiving and all, and birds are dinosaurs are birds, I thought I'd give you your daily dose of nightmare fuel. I have such a weird sense of humor.

But really, one of my paleoart soapboxes is that, while I love fluffy dinos as much as the next avant-garde paleo geek, extant birds actually have a wide range of feathering schemes, and some of them just have weird bald heads and that's okay. I enjoy playing around with saurian integument and trying to see how speculative I can get.

Fun fact: Those fleshy ridges on a turkey's neck are called caruncles. Turkeys can flush blood to their caruncles and make them turn redder, and it's thought that they may aid in helping turkeys recognize individuals based on differing caruncle patterns. 

Just remember, guys, nothing makes the ladies flock to you like bright red wrinkly skin, a large wad of flesh dangling from your nose, and emitting low-pitched noises from that air sac in your chest.

... In all honesty that's probably not the weirdest thing a guy has ever done to attract a girl.

 After that previous comic, my readers felt sorry for the Slowbro too, so I drew this. I like to think Lass took a remedial course on Pokémon husbandry and now they're getting along just swell.

 After I originally posted this one ages ago, one reader came up with a fan theory that Professor Oak overused Repels, went insane, died, and then came back as some sort of malevolent revenant who gives Pokedexes to unsuspecting beginner Trainers.

Naturally, I took that idea and ran with it, which explains a lot of Oak's characterization in Book 2.

I guess I came up with this one because this guy's explanation of Repel reminded me of a medication ad.

 I always felt bad for that poor Slowbro getting yelled at by its trainer in Cerulean City. Slowbro may be dopey, but they have feelings too!

 When you tell me someone will do whatever it takes for something, I just start to worry.

Also, I had fun drawing the Shady Docks. Sounds like a nice part of town.

Also, I've finally gotten around to starting Pokemon Legends: Z-A and oh man I'm having so much fun. New stuff might be kind of scarce because right now I just want to spend all my free time roaming around Lumiose City and pretending to be noncompetitive but then owning at the Z-A Royale. I do have another revised Neopets story at the editor's, though, and I will start posting chapters on this blog once she's done taking a look at it.

 I don't understand how anyone can say this when Pokémon trainers basically get to make a career out of goofing off with monsters. Sounds like most kids' dream job.

Funnily enough, in Pokémon Sun and Moon, there's a group of older, retired trainers who imply that they didn't make enough money off of being a trainer to earn a living, and had to go into other lines of work. And yet you can still make limitless tons of money winning battles and selling valuable items you find on your journey. Maybe those guys just weren't trying hard enough?

... One thing that I like about video games versus the real world is that in the former, you're always compensated fairly for overachieving. Anyone else go around collecting all the resources in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom? No? I may need to rethink my life.

Also, this makes me think about video game design in general and how sometimes I see games where the dev team put so much focus on things like incredible next-gen hyperrealistic graphics, super-advanced AI, and ridiculously detailed programming, that they forgot to actually make the game fun. Like, my definition of a good video game is something you can sit down with for a few hours to unwind at the end of the day, and come away feeling satisfied and refreshed and entertained. Things like graphics and tech specs should take a back seat (or at least the passenger seat) to an enjoyable experience. And that's why I'm such a big Pokémon fan--because the games are just plain good old-fashioned fun.

 I've had this idea on my mind for a long time, and finally was able to get around to rendering it. Whenever I see one of those "SHARE THE ROAD" signs, I just keep wanting it to say this because I have a really odd sense of humor.

Now I just want to do an entire series of Middle-earth road signs. "WATCH FOR FIGHTING ROCKS", maybe? "YIELD TO FELLOWSHIPS"? "DO NOT PICK UP GOLLUMS"?

 Those sly Rockets. Also don't invite them to Scrabble night. They have a surprisingly broad vocabulary.

(Yes, I know there are no female Team Rocket members in Gen I. While I tried to stay faithful to extant character designs when portraying actual in-game dialogue, I played around with character design a bit more if I had to make up my own characters for a scene. I guess my headcanon is that female Rockets have always existed, it's just that none of them appeared in Kanto in Gen I for some reason.*)

*Although, in Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee, there are quite a few female Team Rocket members, which sort of retcons their male-only population in Red/Blue.**

**I omitted Yellow because Jessie appears in that game, so it is not technically devoid of female Rockets. But at this point I've just become too pedantic. As my sister says, it's not that deep.

 I mean, they're a criminal organization and all, but that doesn't mean you can just jump to conclusions every time a crime happens.

 The constellation Triangulum has always incited me to rage confused me. It's arguably the second lamest of the constellations (only losing to its 16th-century Southern Hemisphere cousin, Triangulum Australe, which is even worse because it's a totally unoriginal knockoff of something that was already totally unoriginal).

So I was really surprised to find out that Triangulum actually dates back to ancient Greece. The Greeks were usually so much more creative than that. Triangulum doesn't even have a story or a myth behind it, it's just... always been a triangle.

Naturally, that meant I had to make up a myth for it. I guess I felt sorry for it.

 Oh, the Team Rocket Grunts. They had some of the most fun dialogue to work off of. I enjoyed portraying them as completely incompetent in so many ways, because let's face it, in real life criminals are pretty dumb. (And let's not forget the Team Rocket trio in the anime, who even after 25 years never figured out that trying to capture Pikachu was a complete waste of their time.)

I just like how this totally random Grunt in Mt. Moon thinks he's cool enough that he can complain to the higher-ups that a 10-year-old beat him in a Pokémon battle, and they'll blacklist the kid instead of firing him for being totally useless.

 I guess this pun only works if you have an Electric-type in your party. Which I did, so I could make the joke.

 Sometimes the stuff NPCs say can be so vague that it's left open to interpretation. Lass's line in the first panel is what she actually says after your battle with her. And that's all she says. So maybe she's talking about losing the battle. Or maybe she's talking about her contact lens falling out in a dark cave. But I'm already off to battle the next trainer, bye!

... I'm not sure why I'm so mean to Lass in these comics.

 Wait, I think maybe he meant useful in Pokémon battles. (In which case actually Zubat is pretty awful because Bite is a Normal-type move in Gen I, and Leech Life does next to nothing, and the fact that it's effective against Psychic-types is totally cancelled out by the fact that Zubat is part Poison-type, and basically just wait until Gen II rolls around with Crobat.)

If you're getting tired of all these old Pokémon comics, well, no one's forcing you to read this blog. I've been dealing with some health issues lately and haven't had a lot of time or energy or ability for new creative stuff. For the time being I need to rest and recuperate and fail at cooking Indian cuisine and try desperately to get around to playing Pokemon Legends: Z-A because those early-purchase bonuses are vital to my survival

Also I hope you caught that Zubat is wearing glasses even though it doesn't have eyes.