Crow's Touhoumon Merry Nuzlocke Run

URL: s7.zetaboards.com/Nuzlocke_Forum/topic/8668549/1
Creator/s: "Crow"
Run: 3/12-current
Schedule: A lot
Section/s: Vols. 6 & 7

Website: Internet forums aren't really designed for displaying a 70-plus-page webcomic. The creator would be better off hosting the comic on one of the many free webcomic hosting sites, such as Comic Genesis, Smack Jeeves, Drunk Duck, or Comic Fury.

Writing: Before reading this comic, I was already vaguely familiar with the Nuzlocke genre, in which webcartoonists play Pokémon under specific rules and then make comics about their gaming experience. This comic, however, introduced me to a subgenre of Nuzlocke called Touhoumon, in which the trainers catch and train cute manga girls instead of monsters. Aside from the obvious thematic problems inherent with having people force human children to be their gladiatorial minions (and remember, a major point of Nuzlocke comics is that the characters actually die in combat), this Touhoumon aspect ruins the sense of familiarity I was expecting to have, as the monsters are extremely iconic for the Pokémon franchise.

As for the story, I can't say that at any point I had any idea what was going on in any of the pages. I got the basic gist that there's a trainer who has her Touhoumon fight other Touhoumon, but I'm not sure I would've even gotten that much if it wasn't for my prior knowledge of the Pokémon franchise. Characters frequently get into fights for no reason, and these fights end abruptly without any suggestion of what happened. There's no clear distinction between the trainer and the Touhoumon, as all the characters are cute manga girls that talk. The first time I read the pages, I started to guess that the one with the red bow's the trainer, but now that I looked at some of the pages again, I think it might be the one with the hat. Really, the only part of the whole comic that made any sense to me was when the group encountered some kind of evil and powerful elemental spirit that fought the Touhoumon for a few pages. But even then, just as the battle starts, the characters inexplicably appear in the next page aboard a boat, talking to a witch, with no reference being made to the previous scene.

Lastly, one of the main characters is a pea-shooting plant from the Plants vs. Zombies game. I don't remember this character ever talking or even moving around in any of the pages, even though it's featured very prominently. I guess it's supposed to be funny or something, but I don't see how there's anything clever about it.

Art: This comic's plagued by liberally copy-pasted doodles of cute manga girls that all look basically the same. The creator comments after one of the pages, "I'm trying to churn out 7 comics a day," and it clearly shows.

The artwork's also almost all just of the girls standing around talking.

Overall: Crow's Touhoumon Merry Nuzlocke Run shows the skill and sophistication of a doodle casually scribbled on a homework assignment by a middle-schooler. If this comic was a Pokémon, it'd be a Level 1. The creator needs to acquire a "How to Draw" book, pronto, and start reading more professionally made comics. Trying to do seven pages a day's also a terrible idea; it's much better to make one decent-looking page a week than it is to quickly churn out a whole bunch of effortless ones.

1/5