Moriarty Naps

…here be Pocket Monsters.

Not gonna lie, it’s satisfying as hell to respond to:

“So, what do you do?”

with “Cartography”. Few know that’s still a thing you can do, fewer yet understand it, and no one anticipates it. Inevitably, the revelation is followed by a “how the hell did you get into that?”

The shortest answer is ~ Serendipity!

The short answer is that I took a class that Daniel Huffman was teaching, and found a vibrant community fostered by the mighty Tanya Buckingham.

A lifetime doodler, I had dabbled in art classes at UW-Madison, but each had a fatal flaw. A photography class taught by someone absent one half and noticeably high the other. A typography class taught by a guy passionate about it in the best ways, but so strict any creative deviation was destroyed and discouraged.

Then I took Cartography, where the final project was “Make a Map about something you love.” I’d go on to spend three days in a cage in a library basement pouring over 35 years worth of phonebooks to assemble a dataset to work with.

Moral of the story: every art class should end on that assignment!!

The shoe fit. The community rules. And still to this day, anytime I want to try out something new or scary, I gravitate towards basing it on something near or dear to me.

Related, the LONG answer to “How the hell did you get into that?” begins, in part, with Pocket Monsters.

My first memory of noticing GOOD vs. BAD data visualization came from Pokemon game guide books. In ‘98 you had limited options for a video game cheat sheet. Haphazard online txt file walkthroughs that pioneered ASCII art, schoolyard rumors, or magazines that only held your hand through the first levels.

Then there were published book guides purchasable at your local Barnes and Nobles. Unlike the text-only archives of gamefaqs, these had full on art. Screenshots! Could be referenced away from the computer! Were chock full of maps!

Pokemon was big enough that it had multiple books on the shelves. Nintendo published their guide in ’98. Also in ’98, Prima, a guidebook publishing firm out of California, put out theirs that would seemingly dominate the shelves.

In ’99, Versus, another California guidebook publishing firm put out their guide. And it incidentally became a introductory course of the powers of good design.

Take all the covers. They each use the same stock illustrations you see everywhere, but the official one looks like a sticker sheet. Prima’s looks identical to the box the game was sold in… which is about as uninspired as they come. Versus meanwhile has ELECTRICITY! Dozens of stock illo’s of Pokemon below the hero, but layered such that they don’t compete with it.

A core part of the games is walking through tall grass to find pokemon. Which one shows up is randomized, with some monsters being rarer than others. Among the biggest things a player wants to know is what those rates are – ”am I spending two hours walking in grass, or two hours?”

One of these guides gives you a shrug of “common”, “rare”, the other gives you hard numbers:

The other core to these games is combat. In the Versus guide you get indicators of where enemy trainers are, and what their teams are. Prima leaves it to your imagination.

Finally, each guide ends in an encyclopedia of Pokemon. Prima gives you a word document, Versus gives ya structure. Tastefully subtle bar chart in the stats!

I come not to bury Prima. With adult eyes, I all the more appreciate how much personality all these guides have. The text blocks are full of opinions, quirks, and jokes. Versus ends with a few ‘suggested teams’, giving the reader a roster of Pokemon they could catch to beat the game. The last one, named Casey’s Team, is a complete joke, full of the worst Pokemon you could battle with.

It wasn’t until this project that I noticed Casey was actually the head designer and editor of the book. There’s only three additional credits on the book’s content, not counting Cover/Back cover designers. Prima also only credits about five people. The bylines on both books are tight.

Couldn’t tell you how many hours I spent in the Versus guide book. The mixture of good data viz, good design principals, and practical info was intoxicating, even to a literal child.

Strategy guides of video games also provide a blueprint to a kid with an imagination. Even without a game controller, any interaction, music, or story, once you’ve learned the physics of a platformer, you can look at a static map of Super Mario World level and imagine how it plays.

My first maps were 100% imitations of the worldly screenshots from game guides. Notebooks were filled with Pokemon and Warcraft II maps. No need for a magic spell to turn them into reality – I can play em’ out in my head! And good lord, I did.

Pokemon Red and Green debuted in 1996 with 151 monsters to catch and battle with. In the 30 years (eek!) since, they’ve added another 874.

I’m aged out of the games at this point, but I find always find it fun to check out how the new class of critters are being designed. Some I dig, others I find weird. But overall it still bums me out they moved away from Ken Sugimori’s watercolor illustrations so quickly.

Watercolor gives a beautiful built-in fluidity and texture. Of the three Squirtles shown here, two are watercolors by Ken, and the last one is the more modern digital drawing. You can tell they’re going for the same kind of shading, but the digital one’s missing the texture to it. Edges feel sharp, even when they’re patted.

I suspect a major reason they moved away from watercolor, is how difficult it clearly was to capture accurately. Only three years ago, someone came across an archive of high quality scans that weren’t as blown out.

Watercolors are gentle, subtle, and get obliterated by the bright light of most scanners. I get the logic behind moving away, but the preference remains.

All the way in 2025, I’m watching a pile of goofs drive a bus for a straight week for Desert Bus for Hope.

Desert Bus for Hope is one of the internet’s oldest charity streams – going strong 20 years! They raise funds for Child’s Play, an organization that provides therapeutic games and tech to sick kids.

It’s hosted by Loading Ready Run, one of the internet’s OG nerd comedy troupes. I’ve tuned in a bunch over it’s 20-year run, but it took til last year for me to finally go “wait, I can actually contribute to this.”

I’ve also been meaning to learn how to do large paintings for awhile. Work on a four foot canvas and you have more space for detail. The kinda work you can really stick your nose in. This seemed like a perfect excuse to figure it out!

After years of yearning for the big watercolor paper roll, 44.5 inches x 10 yards of goodness, I finally own one. First challenge… how do you cut that? Bad solution: circular cutter, large cutting board, and a lot of paper weights. I at least had the foresight to give myself some margins to cut off later to make it actually the right size.

Paper cut, pencils ready, I drew up my sleeves and cracked open my trusty Versus guide book for reference. 151 critters later, we have a map.

If you’d like to own it, there’s one chance to! Desert Bus! Monday! Oct 26! Round noon. Good luck, trainer.

…and that’s a chunk of the LONG answer to how I got into cartography. Not the whole picture, but a few significant nudges.

I was tepid on Pokemon by ‘02, and mostly aged out by ‘06. I’ve played a few other entries, but the fix isn’t the same. Yet, the franchise remains imprinted on me. Lodged squarely next to my mental multiplication tables is a grid of what Pokemon types are super effective against each other.

While part of me would have liked to keep the map, I’m just happy it exists.

A serious kudos to Ken Sugimori’s work.

A salute to Casey and the small team that once made up Versus.

A little love letter to the notebook dreams,

& a detail-rich treat that a kid, desperately positioning his gameboy against the setting sun to get the last few moments of gameplay in, would obsess over.

-D.M., picked Squirtle every time
October, 22nd 2026

P.S. My biggest regret of the map was that I couldn’t justify shoehorning “Casey’s Team” anywhere into it. Here they are, in all their glory: