It would probably be fair to say that I was too old to get into the whole Pokemon phenomenon. Oh, I watched the episodes when they first aired on the Kid’s WB. I did have a younger brother and sister after all, who, I suspect, actually watched the show semi-ironically.

The magic of the show, too, was that it was one of those rare instances that a young adult or adult can watch a kid’s show without feeling too weird about it. Frankly, I blame Beanie Babies and Tamagotchis… which, for you youngsters, were like NeoPets but way, way more annoying.

However, if you asked me to identify a Pokemon beyond, say, the core 20, I’d probably be at a loss. I would totally fail those infamous “Who’s that Pokemon?” stingers, thus bringing shame to my ancestors. I never played the game on the Game Boy, nor was I part of the card craze, nor am I familiar with the show after Ash, Misty, and Brock disappeared. I don’t remember the name of that lame-o Brock replacement guy. Hell, I was totally befuddled by the whole “Gary F***ing Oak” meme and had to google it just to get caught up. Let me tell you, when you have to resort to “Know Your Meme,” then you know you’ve truly lost the pulse of what makes young people tick these days.

So you’d think that I’d be the totally wrong audience for Mokepon, a webcomic on Smack Jeeves written by someone who apparently goes by “H0lyhandgrenade.”

Au contraire, mon ami! Mokepon turned out to be a surprisingly fun read, full stuff that can entertain even a reader with only a passing familiarity of Pokemon. Let’s dig in, shall we?

Worth a read.

It's a parody, and a pretty good one at that. It pokes fun at a lot of the absurdities of the pokemon world (sending children out on a dangerous "adventure", having to tell pokemon what to do) without really subverting them. Since it's not too serious, Atticus' utter lack of knowledge on how the world of pokemon works comes across more as funny than annoying, and his selfish personality doesn't really help him at all, rather turning him into a bit of a butt monkey, which is a refreshingly realistic direction to take such a character. The other characters aren't really anything extremely outstanding: there's the good guy, the mysterious guy, the two criminals and the cheerful but dumb girl but the writing and the interactions between them is natural and believable enough to make for an entertaining read. The art is gorgeous and despite a rough start the updates are now coming nice and regularly. The plot hasn't really kicked off yet, but there are definitely hints of something other than the standard pokemon adventure.

It's also interesting to note that Atticus is really the rival character from a pokemon game rather than the hero, which makes the comic a bit different from its contemporaries. The "hero" archtype, Kahn, is a little bland though, with no really strong personality traits apart from a kind of vague friendliness, coming across as rather flat. George, the tagalong kid, is a bit better in this regard: she's kind of a chirpy miss exposition/cheerful kid without being too annoying about it.

All in all, its a well-made and affectionate parody of the pokemon franchise that's in its early days. You can easily get through the archive in a couple of hours, and its well worth doing it to see if you like it. That's what I did, anyway.