The more I overthink old Pokémon core series intros, the weirder they seem. Like, your character is Oak's next-door neighbor in a miniscule town with an apparent population of 7, and he has no idea who you are?

Also, these first few comics are just the beginning of Oak's very strange character development. As the comic progresses, by the beginning of Book 2 he's somehow become this supernatural entity who is known (and feared) by the Pokémon world.

I love when stuff takes on a life of its own like that.

The early intro screens in the Pokémon core series are actually pretty terrifying. You're in this featureless void, and suddenly someone comes out of nowhere and starts indoctrinating you into a world of monster fights, and I've probably thought way too much about this.

Also I thought Oak's face in the third panel turned out pretty great.

 Oak's gotta give the same speech every time. It's a contractual thing.

 And so an adventure begins...

Now that I think of it, I have a niece who's 10, and I'm not quite sure how I feel about the idea of her going off on a region-spanning adventure, catching and training ferocious creatures with supernatural abilities, and confronting a criminal organization, all with no adult supervision.

... When you're actually 10, though, that whole thing sounds awesome.

All right, let's try this again.

A while back, I drew a Pokémon webcomic where I played through two Pokémon games (Blue Version and Silver Version) and riffed on lines of dialogue that caught my eye. (Which is basically what I do when I play video games anyway.) The result was an unhinged, tongue-in-cheek journey through an odd world of insane professors, utterly incompetent criminal organizations, unnecessarily detailed environments, and the side effects of using too many Repels. I'd previously hosted it on a webcomic hosting site, but that site went belly-up some years ago, so I thought I'd bring the comic back online here so more people can enjoy it. I think it's hilarious.

I'll be putting the comics up on the blog sequentially, so first up, here's the title page! It's called "Trainer Wants to Battle" because so much of the dialogue in Pokémon games comes from the things Trainers say to you before and after you battle them.

 Also, the past few weeks have been a learning experience for me. I was experiencing severe social media burnout, feeling like all my attempts to post and network and build friendships on social media were somehow making me feel even less connected, more isolated, and like I just couldn't get people adequately interested in my work (or indeed me) no matter how hard I tried. 

(Read on for self-reflection that has absolutely nothing to do with Pokémon webcomics.)

One last old Neopian Times comic. I'm pretty proud of that background actually. (Although, yikes with the composition. Rule of thirds, anyone?)

 If only stat training worked this way. On the website, raising a Neopet's stats is an arduous, expensive, time-walled process, which makes me wonder how the people on the Battledome high score list ever got there. Sometimes, upon completion of training, a pet gets a random super bonus and gets extra points added to the stat they were training. But only sometimes. Much to Hyren's chagrin.

You might also notice that I hand-drew and lettered the speech bubbles in this comic, as opposed to previous comics where I used the text tool and Manga Studio's speech bubble generation tool. The latter, while handy, was also a bit limiting. These days, I prefer to hand-draw speech bubbles because it gives me much greater flexibility, and I feel that it's more aesthetically cohesive than canned ellipses* and dry computer-generated text.

*Man, "Canned Ellipses" would be such an awesome band name. I feel like that's what Johannes Kepler would have named a rock band.

This is the last "Hyren goes unhinged during the Altador Cup" comic, I promise.

 I don't know what more to say about this comic than that I just really enjoy Hyren taking himself very seriously when no one else does. And his face in the last panel just gets me every time.

Looking at this comic now, I realize I spelled "favourite" wrong! For shame! (As Neopets was founded by two Brits, the franchise uses British English and all Neopian Times submissions are required to do the same. Not sure how this one slipped past the radar. Whoops.)

(And yes, that is why all of my Neopets fanfiction uses British English, if you were confused about that.)

 So on the website, when you "read" a book to one of your Neopets (i.e. basically use a book item on them), they say something cute like "Wow, this is one of my favourites!" The lines are randomly pulled from a prewritten list, which was a fun programming trick back in the 90's, but it also results in Neopets sometimes saying things not really in line with their personalities*. 

*On-site, Neopets don't really have personalities; they're essentially just a graphic and some stats, and a large part of the appeal of the website for creative types such as myself is the fun of coming up with personalities and backstories and psychological issues for each of one's pets.

In this old Neopian Times comic, I feel like I kind of like the art more than the joke, but eh. So in the Yooyuball game you can play on the site, there's an ice debuff that temporarily freezes the opposing team, and I guess I just got to thinking about how that would work in-universe. Except this only works for teams with Bori players.

(For those not in the know about Neopets lore, the Bori anciently magically froze themselves as a defensive measure against the Bringer of Night, an ambiguously malevolent demigod.)

I'm not really sure why I ended up drawing so many Altador Cup-related comics. Either the event just sparked a lot of ideas for me, or maybe I just didn't have much else going on at the time.

 

Another old Neopian Times comic. This isn't really franchise-based humor as much as it is an example of my pets' odd family dynamic. Hyren's usually a pretty chill guy, but there are two things that can instantly make him go aggro: his family being in trouble, and someone badmouthing his favorite sports team. Including members of his family.

There is a bit of an inside joke here; Kreludor has historically not been the highest-ranking team in the Altador Cup (although they did win the Cup at least once, as far as I can tell), but Hyren consistently roots for them every year. He doesn't care whether they win or lose--he's just happy to support a space-based team that's not Virtupets-affiliated. And what Team Kreludor lacks in talent and payroll, they more than make up for in heart and not having cheaters or Elon Hughlis on the team.

 I just love Hyren's expressions in this one. Drawing unhinged Hyren brings joy to my soul. He's fun to write as pretty much the cantankerous middle-aged dad of the household.

(Granted, after the events of a fic that I never submitted to the Times but will post here eventually, Hyren would no longer have ethical qualms about Team Virtupets, but he would still object to them on the grounds that they just win too often and that's boring.)

Another old Neopian Times comic. I'm not sure this one scores many points in the humor department, but I just loved drawing manic Hyren in the first panel. There's always got to be one insane sports fanatic in every household. And yes, I am aware that the background Usul's eyes change between panels. I was trying to not make the background characters look static but actually it just turned out distracting. Ugh, I had so much to learn about illustration. I still do.

 Also, Hyren is a big fat liar. His rivalry with fellow Virtupets commanders Garoo and Gormos was practically legendary in the corps. I suspect that with his military days behind him, sports is the only outlet he can find for his competitive streak.

Another old Neopets comic. This one was written by another user and I drew the artwork. I rather like how this one turned out. Maybe don't put Dr. Frank Sloth in charge of anything ever.

 For some odd reason, I find Dr. Sloth really fun to draw/write. I think in large part it's because of the fun of putting my own unique spin on his personality. Canonically, despite being portrayed as the biggest and baddest of all Neopian villains, he's never really been given much in the way of background or character development--pretty much all we know about him is that he's a genius who specializes in genetic engineering and wants to take over Neopia for unspecified reasons.

As he was a major player in Worth Fighting For, however, I took the opportunity to really delve deep into his personality. My vision for Sloth is that of a hyperintelligent being who's always at least ten steps ahead of everyone else mentally, and has no qualms about using that to his advantage. He's calculating and ruthless, but usually not so much malicious as just really dedicated to expanding his galactic empire and ensuring it runs smoothly and efficiently. If you do get on his bad side, though, he's quite adept at psychological manipulation (as Hyren finds out the hard way in Worth Fighting For). Still, being a Virtupets citizen isn't all that bad as long as you know your place in the system.

I actually wrote a long-form Neopets fic that I never bothered to submit to the Neopian Times that's all about Hyren, his family, a rogue Virtupets officer, and Sophix II traversing the galaxy in an attempt to free Sloth from the Space Faerie Token so he can resume leadership of Virtupets, because after he was trapped inside the token, Commander Garoo took over and became an unbearable despot, and at the end of the day, nobody can run Virtupets better than Sloth.

In this fic, we learn that Sloth created Virtupets and conquered most of the galaxy out of a twisted drive to ensure his own survival, after he was left the last living member of his species when they were eradicated by a freak illness (which he had been working to develop the cure for). He's especially interested in conquering Neopia because it's implied that Neopia is the only world in the galaxy that has magic, a novel energy source that Sloth is keenly interested in.

As for how it all turns out, well, you'll have to wait until I get to posting that fic here.

Okay yes Sloth experiences a change of heart and becomes a good guy. I know that will irritate a lot of Virtupets fans. But I really wanted Sloth and Hyren to get some closure after the events of Worth Fighting For, and I personally prefer the idea of Sloth using all that brainpower for good.

Another old Neopian Times comic. Looking at these now, I feel like at times the composition could have been better; in this comic, there's a lot of empty space and relatively tiny characters (and those hands in the second panel could have been positioned way better). To be fair, though, it can be difficult to find composition that works when you've got a main cast consisting of a 170cm-tall human and roughly meter-tall creatures. (It's also slightly implied in my Neopian Times writing that unmutated!Hyren is on the short side even for a Grundo. Wait, I'm not sure if I ever actually implied that anywhere in writing, or if it's just my headcanon.)

(Actually, another reason why the composition was on the strugglebus was because for these comics, I used art software called Manga Studio that had a lot of handy features, but I often never bothered to customize the panel size. So these panels were much wider than they could have been.)

 Oh, right, about the actual comic. On the site there's a game called Pick Your Own where you go into a Meridellian berry field, click random bushes, and hope you get something good. (Most of the time you don't.) Half-Eaten Berries, despite their appearance, are perfectly acceptable food items that your pets can eat without any ill effects. However, Hyren (due to a quirk in the site's programming) won't eat them. He also won't eat Spiced Apple Pie, but that's another story. :)

Another old Neopian Times comic exploring the oddities of random item generation methods on the site.

Mostly I like this one because the spacescapes were fun to draw. The last panel could have been clearer; the idea is that Mira has been going around tossing space food onto (into?) objects in the Neopian planetary system apparently just for fun.

I could go into a whole lot of unnecessary speculation about how many small planetary system bodies are loose agglomerations of smaller components; therefore it is conceivable that an artificial object, upon impact, could easily become buried in the substrate. #overthinkingeverything

 

 I've previously posted some comics that I never got around to submitting to the Neopian Times, but I realized I'd never posted the comics that did get into the Times, so I thought it would be fun to do that for the next little while. Especially considering the NT archive is huge nowadays, and you've got to be pretty bored to go through past issues and eventually stumble upon these.

First off, here's the logo for it. Squid are kind of a running joke with me. (I also really wanted to have a title that did not at all incorporate some variety of "crazy" or "insanity" because those sorts of comic titles had been way, way overdone in the NT.)

On the site, keeping a Neopet's HP full could be kind of a hassle, especially when said Neopet had a lot of HP, and the more potent Healing Potions were really expensive. Training a Neopet's stats was also extremely tedious and resource-consuming. I feel like the Battledome and training Neopets could have been implemented a lot better (although they did eventually make some good improvements to the system); even though battling wasn't really the biggest aspect of the site most of the time, it played an important role in a lot of events and there were also some much-sought-after awards for it, so they could have made the system a lot less painstaking.

 I've been fangirling radiodonts since I was 9. I'll never look at a pineapple ring the same way again.

I doodled this to commemorate the end of the Cassini-Huygens mission back in 2017.* Cassini-Huygens was one of the big planetary exploration missions going on when I started following space stuff more closely in college**, and I really enjoyed keeping up with the plucky probe's adventures around the Saturn system over the years, until it was finally time to say goodbye (and did it ever go out in grand fashion).

Here's hoping we get missions like this for the ice giants one day!

*If you take a look at the sidebar, you'll notice that I started this blog in 2017. But I didn't put this illustration up then, because Cassini-Huygens ended in September of that year, and I didn't start this blog until October. It narrowly missed out on being one of my first posts, I guess.

*I have been a space geek since I could read, but the proliferation of social media around the time I was in college made space news more accessible, so that's when I really started paying attention to things that were going on in space as they were happening, not just reading about them years after the fact. Plus, as a teenager, I was unfortunately distracted from science by stuff like too many video games, bad friendships, and just trying to survive high school.

 This didn't actually happen while we were playing, but in my headcanon this is how these two met. I thought this would be a fitting sendoff for this comic series. For now, I've got other projects to work on... until my niece decides she wants to play through Tears of the Kingdom. 

 Well, we finally finished the game*. It took us nearly a year (silly school getting in the way of video games), but it was a fun ride and I'm glad I got to come along. These comics also gave me a fun project to work on, so I'm grateful for that. It was nice to flex my cartooning muscles(?) a bit.

Ironically, my niece had been badgering my sister for weeks to just go fight Ganon already. And then this happened. (My sister said, "Do you want me to wait for you?" "No. (leaves the room)")

My sister and niece have started (re)playing Ocarina of Time and I've been watching, but I'm not sure I'm going to draw any comics about that, because a big part of what inspired these BotW comics was the sheer spontaneity of my sister and niece experiencing that game for the first time, my sister having no idea what she was doing (I coached her when she needed it, don't worry), and my niece being totally ridiculous the whole time. When we play OoT, it's more my niece eating snacks while my sister and I reminisce about when we thought N64 graphics were the most amazing thing we'd ever seen. Still fun, but it just doesn't quite fire my creativity the way BotW with them did.

That said, I think we're going to have a lot of fun with Tears of the Kingdom when they get around to playing that.

*Sort of. We freed all the Divine Beasts, beat Ganon, and completed a lot of the Ancient Shrines and some of the side quests. I wanted to take them through all the Shrines and side quests, but my niece's attention span only goes so far and I think they were ready to move on.

 She keeps forgetting the name of Dubious Food and calls it something different every time.

(Yes, I know meat and berries don't make Dubious Food. That's the other part of the joke. No matter how many times I try to explain the cooking system to her, she still doesn't quite get it. I think she's too busy looking for horses.)