Pre-Champ 3-1 (Imitator)

Happy Pokemon Day, folks~ Here's a new strip of Preschool Champion page to celebrate. Really glad to get to this one, too. ^_^ Lance getting bullied in Preschool on his first day has him reluctant to go back and he's clearly gotten the wind out of his sails (this is typical for kids his "age", it's called School Refusal). Fortunately while Clair is still trying to learn just how to act like a big sister figure she's doing her best and that means hiring someone professional to help him out of his funk. Clair was a ton of fun in writing this page; really like the idea that she's out of her depth trying to care for her cousin and she's trying to fight her own Tsundere tendencies but she really does do her best. Lots of great gags with her in this page, especially her berating Lance for "sitting around in his underwear" while marching around in boxers. But yeah, heck with her; Duplica is here! We knew from the second we made this a full series we wanted her to show up, so great to get her off that bucket list early. I really love the idea that she's using her skills as an entertainer to perk up regressed people depressed about what happened. So she's on the case to perk our little protag right back up~ Duplica is a kinda-sorta-not-really show exclusive character (she may just be the show's version of the Copycat in the games; Copycat's drawn to look like her in the Trading Card Game), and is another indicator that this series is borrowing heavily from both the games and the anime. Another nod with that I really like is that Lance's nursery has a Gold Magikarp; in the anime Lance is the one who catches the Red Gyarados at Lake Rage instead of Gold. Apparently he also caught it here, and while he's not going to use it on his team since it's regressed, he's still taking special care of it. The weird thing is I think Gold still exists in the Preschool Champion continuity (Lance's win/loss ratio from a few pages ago factored in when Gold defeated him) so I'm not sure how that played out in this timeline. I genuinely don't know if him, Kris, Lyra, or Silver will show up in this comic (might be cute to see Silver be friendly to Lance after the events of HG/SS), so I'm not sure we'll ever find out. Nnn. Jeez, didn't mean to write a book here in the comments. TLDR; Duplica is awesome. Made up her last name on the basis that "Duplica Imitica" is fun to say.