laughter staves off the existential crisis

Finding these two was a great way to end out the year on a high note as far as PMD content is concerned. With no new games on the horizon, and the general malaise of the Pokemon franchise over the last decade, its fantastic what the fanwork community has done to exceed satisfying the hunger for more

There's incredible potential in taking a more mature direction with the brutality of Pokemon in actuality, what with the main canon being generally unwilling to broach this. A contrary example would be Digimon and how the best of it approaches more mature themes without feeling extra or out of place

It is a delicate balance indeed in trying to take more mature liberties with the writing and level of violence than one might expect from Pokemon. More often than not when comics go off balance from this, the edginess has an uncanny valley effect, where it feels too out of place to feel appropriate

Both of these comics have unique artstyles whom both set themselves apart from the rest of the crowd while providing a venerable feast for the eyes. The have the perfect balance of mature dialog and the right level of brutality, without a lack of tact or diverging from the tone of the originating IP

The inspiration was the scenario of a human turned pokemon, but the author wanted to take this more in the direction of the TV series' setting, thus having the protagonist have to deal with being caught by a trainer and contend with the intersection of human science and pokemon mysticism

Char-Cole: a late y2k era webcomic that has been in development off and on for the last 17 years. It isn't quite PMD-esque in that literally the only thing it shares with PMD is the opening premise of a human turning into a pokemon, instead set in a fictional region in the traditional Pokemon world

It's always refreshing to have a comic set in the PMD world that doesn't rehash the story telling formula of the games; not even having any human characters. These always do an incredible job of fleshing out the PMD setting and making it more realistic and believable that Pokemon live in

PokedanICMA: An incredible PMD manga from a japanese artist, translated into english by a native spanish speaker who interestingly gave the characters their own native languages greatly benefiting individual characterization. It dispenses traditional PMD formula to tell its own story in the setting

Its always satisfying to find webcomics that are well done, have great pacing, are worked on for a long time and have a lot of pages, but actually meaningfully progress story arcs and character development over the course of those years worth of work, instead of padding 90% of the time going nowhere