(Hey, guys! Lee the new Inker/Colorist here. Yes, we’re still working our way through the year-old comics (made obvious by the reference to the “recent’ announcement of Sonic in Brawl), but we’re almost to the point of new issues of Missing Number!

I have to be quick. Y’see, I had to correct a mistake in this comic (for some reason Mario had black teeth, it has to be the coffee) and in the process I turned this comic from a 256-color png to a full-quality 24-bit png.

This may not seem like such a bad thing, but Shawn and I spend a good portion of comic-making time arguing about dropping the quality for much faster download speed, or keeping the quality up, and decreasing download speed. Being the guy putting the final touches on things, I tend to argue for the latter. So please don’t tell him, or it’ll be my hide.)

Smash Brothers Fun!  Snake!  Sonic!  Mario!  Indiana Jones!  We have four more characters in the Missing Number Zoo, so Chris decided to bless us with four more Pokemon Diamond and Perl sprite edits for our title:

(OK… so there’s six.  But two are from a few comics ago (General Pepper and Autumn))

These are harder than they look, because they’re not recolors… they’re complete rebuilds ontop of the skeleton provided by the original sprite guys.  I have more respect for those who can pixel-push every time I see these sprites

We’re 4 issues into the How David Met Chris story arc, so we decided to go ahead and take a break.  Recently Sonic was announced for Brawl.  Old news, I know.  But this gave us the opportunity to draw up one of the comics we had planned… even before this comic was a Pokemon Comic!  Way early in planning for this comic, we decided it should be a mashup comic, somewhat like Smash Brothers, itself.  After planning, we reduced the scope quite a bit, and decided instead to track the lives of a few NPCs living in the Pokemon World.  Hence Missing Number.

It’s fun to think back to those carefree days when we were just talking about the comic.  Le sigh.  OK, back to work.

In other news, we have two new affiliates, Pokevision and Pokecharms.com.  You’ll see them under Game Link to the right.  We’re also looking for more affiliates.  So if you’re interested, contact the webmaster (Shawn @ missingnumbercomics . com) and we’ll see what we can do.  Priority wise, we’re looking for

1. Pokemon Sites
2. Nintendo Sites
3. Gaming Sites
4. Websites run by breathing people

so let us know!

(Also, a side note.  We have quite a decent spam filter on our comment box, so please don’t try to spam bot it.  You just waste my time.)

In other news:

Missing Number now has an official Youtube video.  You must watch it:

Pokemon Abridged.

This is about the funniest Pokemon video we’ve ever seen over here at Missing Number HQ.  Really.  Kudos to HomeStarRunnerTron and crew for coming up with that.  The voicing is well executed (I love their version of Gary!)… just well done.  If you like parody videos, and you like Pokemon, you’ll love that.  If you like this comic, you’ll love that.  Really.

Sadly, however, somebody abused their DCMA powers to have Youtube remove Part 2, so you have to go offsite to get it (read the comments for the video).  This post is already too long, but I have to say something about that, because in a way it affects us over here at Missing Number HQ.  Copyright law allows people to make copies of Copywritten objects of art for a few well defined reasons.  One of them is Parody.  Pokemon Abridged is a parody.  Some people have asked me why Link doesn’t show up more often in the comic.  It’s because he’s Copyright Nintendo.  So I don’t just add him willy nilly.  I add him when I can point to him and say “That’s a parody of video games/Zelda.”  Same with Nook and Crew.  That’s why we’re in Glitch City instead of, say, Pallet Town.  Look at this comic right here!  We’re infringing the copyrights of Hal Labs, Paramount Pictures, Sega, Nintendo, and the Bible!  But we get away with it, because this is a parody.

There are other factors in fair use (for example, originality (the idea was mine, even though the characters were theirs)), but basically, you’re allowed to take somebody else’s art to make a social commentary or a parody.  Alas, somebody didn’t respect HomeStarRunnerTron’s rights to parody when they demanded taking down his video.  It was original (and funny to boot).  It was obviously a parody of the Pokemon series.

And this is why we publish our comics as Creative Commons (By-Nc-Nd 3.0).  We want people to realize that they CAN parody our work.  They CAN freely distribute copies of our work.  They just can’t MAKE MONEY off *direct copies* of our work, or mashup our work (unless making a parody).  It’s true!  <a href=’http://www.missingnumbercomics.com/cms/SomeRightsReserved’>Read about it!</a>

On that note… have a good day.

What’s up with the size difference? Well, when the sketch artists scans the art into the computer, he places it onto a SVG document which renders out to pixels that the inker then traces by hand (to achieve the Game Boy Advance “Pixel Art” feel).

However, somewhere in transition between the sketch artists computer and the inker’s computer, the comic switched dimensions. The inker didn’t know about the inflexible width for comics (700px ALWAYS!)… so it wasn’t until AFTER ink and color that the mistake was caught!

After these two comics (this one and the last one) were completed, we sat back, looked at what we had, and started working on making a comic we could actually produce weekly!

These two comics are like baby pictures… it’s nice to see where you came from… but it can be a bit embarrassing as well!