About

Welcome to Glitch City!

Thank you for reading Missing Number: Adventures in Glitch City!  Our comic is a product of love;  love not only of Pokemon (which is quite abundant), but also love of the Video Game genre of art itself.

Some of our favorite webcomics are about gaming.  You have VG Cats, Control Alt Delete, Penny Arcade, 8-Bit Theater, yadda yadda yadda. Too many to count.

But then came F@NB0Y$, a web comic that broadened our view.

Every other gaming webcomic we ran into fell into one of two categories:  either (1) the main characters lived in a Video Game world and made jokes about how their game-like powers (stamena, moralety, character dimensions, etc) differed from the real life world in humorous ways, or (2) the main characters shared a couch and discussed games/gaming/game related news.

Fanboys was different.  Sure, it had fanboy gamers sitting on a couch talking about gaming news, but every once in a while (or more than once in a while) the Fanboys would find themselves in a game related situation… but what caught our attention was… THEY TOOK IT FOR GRANTED!  Yea, Lemmy was shooting fireballs, but that wasn’t necessarily special.  And that caught our attention.

Genesis of Missing Number

We rarely admit it these days, but Missing Number was originally going to be more Penny Arcade and less VG Cats.  The comic was originally called The Dukes of Gaming and featured two guys, their couch, and a wisecracking dog named Duke.  Like every prime time TV show writer out there, we knew what would make Dukes work:  the Gamers-on-a-couch formula worked… so add a wise cracking dog!

The new artist for Dukes, Shawn, eventually talked us off the wall for the concept.  There were too many guys-on-a-couch comics out there.  We needed something a little more original.

After weeks of brainstorming, we had a concept:  A video game NPC sitcom!  Here was the idea:  ala Fanboys, we have a group of NPCs just living out their life in a video game world, in this case Pokemon.  They would take the Pokemon lifestyle seriously;  cramming little critters into airtight balls was common and not of interest.  The key was to set the situation up so that the reader, not the characters, enjoyed the strage situation.  In order to not limit our options, we came up with the gaming “Multiverse.”  Every game has a location within the multiverse, and you can travel from one game to another.  So Chris the main character comes from Final Fantasy’s Corneria city, whereas Dave comes from Skies of Arcadia.  They meet up in Corneria from the Star Fox universe, and move to Glitch City (in the Ohno region), the first city of the game Pokemon:  Unobtanium Version, where they meet up with Ashley who has lived there his entire life.

The art style was intentionally set up to be pixel art.  Various reasons:  for the first reason, up until recently Video Games have been defined by their pixely edges;  the XBOX360 and HDTV finally took care of that!  Pokemon: Unobtanium Version is a Game Boy Advanced game, which is why the characters are sprite-like pixel art.  Backgrounds, however, we allowed to be much better defined;  if you notice the backgrounds in Pokemon, the later versions, they’re all pastel-y.  The combination is pretty unique, and striking (after a few issues when we’d shaken off the worst bugs )

The sprites at the top of the comic are all modified Pokemon sprites made by our former inker.  He found a knack for spriting, and so we have a sprite made for each and every character who makes an appearance in the comic, big and small.  Multi-comic characters earn permanant spots;  some one-off characters are kept in a place of honor after an initial short run in the banner.

It’s up to you weither we’ve pulled it off.  We love comments and hope you enjoy our comic.  Thank you for coming, and don’t forget to tell your friends!  We give away EPICFAIL Balls when we get a referred viewer!  (Disclaimer:  EPICFAIL Balls have a 100% failure rate.)