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.

[[ drawings of those classes ]]

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 basement pouring over 35 years worth of phonebooks to assemble a dataset to work with. The system works.

[[ phone books ]]

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 dear to me.

Now, 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 full on 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 own 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, yet another California guidebook publishing firm put out their guide. And it incidentally became a masterclass in the powers of good design.

Take all the covers. The

A core part of the games is walking through tall grass to find pokemon. Who 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.

The other core to these games is combat. All throughout you’re encountering unskippable NPC’s that challenge you to a battle, and knowing what they’re packing is a major advantage.

With adult eyes, I all the more appreciate how much personality both these guides have. The bylines on both books are tight. At the end of the Versus guide, they provide some “suggested teams”, a combination of Pokemon the player could assemble for a well-rounded party. The last one is Casey’s team, and it’s just one long joke. I don’t think I ever clocked as a kid, in spite of the hours spent on it, that Casey Loe was the head editor and designer of the whole book.

Couldn’t tell you how many hours I spent in this 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.

[[ early pokemon illustrations ]]

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 you built-in fluidity and texture.

BLAHBLAHBLAH

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.

My map is imperfect too – a few of the mon’s I wish I had done a better job on. There’s a few red speckles in the negative space. The size is

BLAHBLAHBLAH

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 few times 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 been meaning to work out how to do large paintings for awhile. You have more space for detail, you can really stick your nose in it, and people like big art. 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!

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

I was tepid on Pokemon by ‘02, and fully aged out by ‘06. I’ve played a few other entries, but alas, the fix isn’t the same, and that’s fine.

Even giving up the original of it, I’m just happy the design exists. A little love letter to all the notebook dreams, a serious thank you note to Ken Sugimori’s work, and a salute to Casey and everyone else at Versus.

So, you won! Congratulations! You’re the new POKEMON LEAGE champion!

You’ve grown up so much since you first left with SQUIRTLE! You have come of age!

You understand that your victory was not just your own doing!

The bond you share with your POKEMON is marvelous!

-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 into it. To make amends, here they are: