T. K. Arispe

 This comic was written back in the day when some people actually still used paper planners. I feel so old.

Also, you may notice that events are scooting along and I barely drew any comics in places like Celadon Gym and Pokémon Tower. That's because Trainer Wants to Battle! really focuses more on riffing on NPC dialogue than on trying to tell a cohesive story. There are about a million Pokémon webcomics detailing a Trainer's journey through a region, and I wanted to do something different. At any rate, if you're a Pokémon fan, you likely already know how the whole Kanto thing goes; I don't have to spell it out for you. By freeing itself of conventional narrative trappings, TWTB focuses more on the people of Kanto just being unhinged, and perhaps allows us to laugh at ourselves and gain insights into our own psyches.

When I wrote these comics, I literally played through the games and wrote down pieces of dialogue that I felt I could make good comics out of. That meant a lot of dialogue got skipped, but one of the cardinal rules of humor is that forced humor is never funny. I would much rather TWTB be the sort of comic where every strip is funny than fuss over narrative completeness. (At any rate, I think it sort of makes things even more unhinged than if I'd tried harder to make sure the overall plot made sense. At the end of the day, it's just about the player character trying to make their way through a world of weirdos.)