Backstage Pass #24 (Patreon)

On this edition of Backstage Pass, I’ll be talking about…

Scrapped characters! Which actually may still be up in the air for some of them, but I have no idea what I’m gonna end up doing with them, so it’s technically still a surprise.

So booting up my Explorers of Sky cartridge, I decided to mosey on over to see what teammates I had accrued, and I was surprised by the sheer amount of pokemon I was able to recruit. This of course means that not everyone is gonna get used, and even within my own frequent use party members, I may not include all of them in the comic. But I did have a tendency to draw teammates as I caught them, so here are a few!

I was so excited to have this guy, the concept of having a Smeargle in a nuzlocke is super cool to me. What moves will he sketch?? What niche will he fill??? Whoops, he died in the dungeon I recruited him :( I’m not a fan of deaths for characters with short introductions, but I do have a more fun plan for him in the comic and how he departs from the team. Even in my own sketches I seemed to have dunked on the idea that this could have been a cool character and he got blown up on impact.

There’s also this gal I used a Wondermail to recruit because she’s my favorite pokemon:

She’s the most likely to show up in the comic… And the Goldeen subspecies technically already has!

My main issue with her is that as badly as I want to have a Milotic in OBT, I also have most character niches already filled, and trying to cram her in there hasn’t been working out so far. So for now I’ve just relegated her to cameos. She may or may not still find a place in the future, but it’s definitely difficult.

This here is Phoebe! She also has a decent chance of showing up in comic as a minor character, but my initial idea with her was as some sort of assistant and muse to Yohann.

And then there’s this gal here:

Who would have been a reskin for an Absol recruit! There’s just no room for her, but I liked the idea of playing around with daytime Lycanroc since it’s one of my favorite pokemon.

This is just a stinky lil Cacturne I named Frona. I thought it’d be fun to draw her, and I used her a lot in gameplay!

More fun recruits, a Dratini and an Aerodactyl that I hatched! Which ended up looking like a small shiny Charizard, oop.

I love….. Snubbull….. Much like the others though, just no room for her.

And that’s it for cut teammates and characters-! Oh wait, what’s this?

Oh you. My hardest darling to kill- but also maybe had the weirdest background. This guy has enough background for his own Backstage Pass, so we’ll get to this one another day!