The Mokees

I could say that the Mokees began in 2011, since that was when the first page was created, but that would be a bit of a falsehood. Nah, see, the Mokees was something special to me, back in the day. It was my first truly original sort of creation, something I tended to doodle on the margins of my school papers in elementary school. They're basically little stick figure guys that I made back in, like... 2004? 2005? I was super young, was the point.

I envisioned the Mokees as being a sort of... NeoPet, Club Penguin-esque thing. You'd, in theory, start with a Normal Mokee and then be able to convert it into different types of Mokees, ranging from basic elemental ones to much goofier ones like "Magnet Mokee" or "Antenna Mokee". You'd then take one into a virtual world and explore around with it, and interact with others. What can I say, elementary school Ulti had some lofty aspirations.

Obviously, none of those concepts ever came to pass, but by the time I got online, I still remembered and liked my Mokees. So, once I had been drawing with Inkscape, my vector art program, for a few years... well, I felt like I had enough skill as an artist to see if I could make the Mokees come to life in some fashion. Thus, I drew up about 35 of them (from what I recall), and when satisfied, I contemplated what I might be able to do with them. Seeing as I was knee-deep in Kirby Adventure at that point, the answer was obvious: let's see if I can make them into a comic!

What resulted from that, and what's on display here, is the few pages I wound up writing out for these guys. I had no real worldbuilding anymore, very little setup, virtually no idea of characterization or anything, it was all entirely just a blank slate. How good was I at introducing the Mokees to a world that kept thinking I was typo'ing the word 'monkeys'? Probably not very good, but let's see for ourselves.




Well, we're off to a fantastic start, huh? Fourth wall breaks and lolsorandom humor, amazing. I really would've hoped that I'd have been a more competent writer back in 2011, but alas.

So, you can see the general vibes of how the Mokees work through this, at least. The Normal Mokee is the baseline for which other Mokees were crafted. Fire is a Normal Mokee but with fire on its head, Water got arms and droplet-shaped eyes, Lightning got bolt-shaped arms and diamond eyes, and Plant has leaf feet and a Pikmin stem. Really, though, you can see how these were all originally just pencil doodles by a kid bored at school. Charming in their own right... but yeah, they do still leave something to be desired.












I think it was pretty clear by this point that I really didn't know what I was doing or how to tell a story with these guys. I think part of the problem, looking back, is that all of the personalities I had developed for the characters were not just too shallow, but copy-and-pasted from other characters I had been writing at the time. I see a lot of my Yoshi & Kirby and Kirby Adventure archetypes in these Mokees, and it doesn't feel very focused on my part. I neglected to define what made these guys... well, ANYTHING, really.

What also hurts is the complete lack of definition in terms of, like... what these Mokees mean to each other. Are they all friends? Acquaintances? I mentioned through the narrator that the Plant Mokee and the Flower Mokee being friends, and that Lightning Mokee has friends, but it really wasn't enough. I think it really shows that I was used to working with character and world set-ups that were already pre-existing. Mario, Kirby, Pokémon, those are things that I could already expect people to know going into the comics, and could then throw in just my own twists and introduce those parts myself. Here, I had to introduce EVERYTHING, and I stumbled, hard.


The Mokees' pages had a lot of small hiatuses, most of which I tended to ignore after this point, but this one apparently was worthy enough of a fourth-wall break. Really, it just was more evidence that I was biting off more than I could chew with these Mokee comics.
















So, this whole process with Spirit Mokee (who looks like a worm) and the dreamscape at least gave me an excuse to write-off a bit of the haphazard introduction of everything, and the random vibes a lot of the comic had up to this point. It was too little, too late, though, because now there was a severe lack of worldbuilding and engagement, 16 pages in. The characters on their own weren't enough of a hook, and without a plot to go off of, the mystery angle of everything just didn't accomplish much. It's another case where a lack of planning was what did this comic in, even if it lasted more than some of the earlier Misc links. I just... didn't have an idea of what I wanted to do with it, so it floundered until being unceremoniously cancelled.






Aaaand that's a wrap. I didn't do anything else with the Mokees from here. I don't even remember what this 'Jyl' was, or if I had some sort of robot invasion planned. It's not like I had a world to go off of here, I only had very basic character designs for a bunch of these creatures. Heck, I never even established whether these guys were individuals, or species, in this comic. It was a messy experiment, but still, it's fun to look back on it and see how far I've come. It's why I love preserving my own history like this.