To be honest, there's not much of a joke in this one; I drew it because I was taking a short hiatus from the comic and it seemed appropriate to the situation.

But I put a lot of effort into those backgrounds, so I wanted to share it here.

 I don't understand how Sabrina can claim to dislike fighting, and yet she's a Gym Leader. And also the one who kicked the Fighting Dojo from official Gym status.

I kinda take most things NPCs say with a grain of salt.

 Throwback to Gen I, where due to some questionable battle mechanics, the Psychic type was essentially nearly invincible. Psychic types were supposed to be weak to Ghost and Bug Pokémon, but due to a programming error, the only damage-dealing Ghost-type move in the game (Lick) actually did no damage against Psychic-types. The three damage-dealing Bug-type moves in existence - Leech Life*, Twin Needle and Pin Missile - did extremely low base damage and were basically useless by the time you reached Saffron City. To top it all off, the only Ghost-type Pokémon in Gen I (the Gastly evolutionary line) and most of the Bug-types who actually learned Bug-type moves were also part Poison-type, making them extremely vulnerable to Psychic-types.

I have to give props to Game Freak for taking strides to address this imbalance in Gen II, where they introduced two new types that were both advantageous against Psychic, expanded the move pool for Ghost and Bug moves, and introduced Ghost and Bug Pokémon who weren't part Poison.

That said, considering the astounding complexity of the Pokémon Red/Blue battling system for its time, it's inevitable that the developers would make a few slip-ups, so I'm not really complaining about it. It's certainly not something that breaks the game. You just kinda have to go into it acknowledging that you should probably include a Psychic-type on your team.

*For the longest time, for some reason I thought the name of this move referred to actual leeches, like "yeah man, I'm livin' the leech life stealin' HP from my opponents". It took years before I realized that the "leech" part is supposed to be a verb--the Pokémon is literally leeching life from its opponent. I chalk that one up to being a weird kid who knew way too much about stuff like leeches and hagfish and early Cambrian stem arthropods.

 

I'm so excited to hear that (according to Zanno and Napoli 2025) Nanotyrannus is now a valid genus! I actually got to hear James Napoli talk about this seminal paper on a really awesome edition of Virtual Fossil Fridays where he broke down his and Lindsay Zanno's findings (and very generously let us ask tons of questions afterward); it was like reading the paper without the Nature subscription!

To celebrate, I made this graphic because there really need to be more things with NanoT on them. You can get this design on shirts, stickers, and more in my store!

 POV: You just singlehandedly saved a billion-dollar corporation from a criminal organization, and the CEO offers you literally anything in the world as a reward... and then proceeds to give you a totally unnecessary item that has no money value.

That's Pokémon Trainer life for you, friends.

(Also, considering that was the sole working prototype of the Master Ball, Silph's R&D division is not going to be happy it was just handed over to a 10-year-old who is 100% going to accidentally use it on a Caterpie.)

 I always found it incredibly weird that Blue is hanging around a Team Rocket-occupied office building, in an obscure tiny room only accessible by warp panel, seemingly for the sole purpose of battling Red, and doesn't even seem to care about the whole city-in-peril thing. I have to give props to Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee for rewriting this part of the game to make way more sense (instead having Blue work with the player character and new character Trace to infiltrate Silph).

There are a lot of plot elements in Pokémon Red and Blue that we didn't think twice about as kids, but thirty years on raise a lot of questions. Oh, the 90's.

 When you know your Pokémon team can easily cream that of anybody in Team Rocket, you're allowed to have a little sass.