Super amazing wonderful exciting news!

After much good-natured pestering from my paleo buddies Ashley Hall and MaggieJo Widdicombe, I've launched a store to sell my illustrations on t-shirts and stickers and whatnot!

I'm so excited to be able to share my illustrations in a new way for people to enjoy (also it makes me a little extra money which is nice), especially since sometimes it can be hard to find good (and scientifically accurate) paleo merch of stuff besides T. rex and Velociraptor.

There's not much up there right now, but I will work on getting more designs up. For now I'll concentrate on shirts and stickers, but I'm always open to suggestions, and if there's anything else you want to see - another type of merchandise, a different shirt color, or even a whole new illustration - please don't hesitate to get in touch with me and let me know! 

 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.)

 Silly Channelers, getting their horror subgenres mixed up.

 Being a Gym Leader who's a narcoleptic comes with its own set of challenges. (I guess maybe it's better than getting hay fever from all those Grass-types.)

 Yeah, sorry, Giovanni, I'm not at all impressed with your underlings. (It doesn't help that they were using stuff like Rattata and Zubat. See, this is what happens when you sell all the strong Pokémon and make your grunts scrape the bottom of the barrel. Giovanni needs to hire a logistics manager. Like I said before, though, criminals are stupid.)

 I was re-reading Tolkien (as one must regularly), and one of the things that strikes me about the man's writing is how much he puts into his descriptions of not only landscape and geography, but the details of just being outside--the color of the sky at a given time of day, how the wind smells, the sounds trees make. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were obviously written by someone who loved nature and thought it worth writing about on its own accord, not just as the backdrop for a fantasy adventure. That richness of detail is what really helps bring Middle-earth to life in the imagination--it's not just a place where things happen, but a place that is wonderful and beautiful in itself, a world where you would want to be even if nothing particularly exciting was happening.

The way Tolkien describes the Shire is utterly charming, a loving homage to a rural England of yesteryear, and it serves as a really effective happy place when life gets stressful. I just wanted to doodle Bag End I guess.

 I always thought it was really odd that somehow, just you defeating this guy in a Pokemon battle causes him to drop an extremely important security item that's crucial to navigating the complex, and ultimately leads to Red ousting Team Rocket from Celadon City.

But, y'know, video game logic: if there's an objective to be met, the only way you're getting there is by doing more of what you've been doing the entire game.

Or maybe this guy just hates his job so much that he actually wants Red to go defeat Giovanni.