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As I'm sure you can see, this page is an homage to Calvin and Hobbes, the greatest of all newspaper comics. Aside from the characters, I attempted to imitate several of Bill Watterson's techniques in the art and lettering. The page layout follows the structure of a classic Sunday comic instead of my usual "infinite canvas" approach.
Within my Nuzlocke comic, Calvin first appeared back on page 8 as a stand-in for Youngster Calvin (the first opponent in the game after the rival). He and his unusually tall Zigzagoon were originally intended as a throwaway reference, but I ended up reusing the characters several times in the Slateport storyline. The joke was running thin by then, so I gave it a rest. However, looking back more recently, I had the feeling that I hadn't quite done them justice. So I decided to take one more try at it.
I didn't want to simply trace panels or poses from an existing Calvin and Hobbes strip. Instead I wanted to create something that felt like a new, previously unpublished Sunday comic. So what I did was first spend time practicing by copying the characters and art from numerous different strips until I had a feel for the construction. Then I started fresh and drew my own page with minimal references. I did have to go back a few times to check certain details, but nothing on the page was directly copied.
Despite the small number of panels, this page took quite a while to complete. Nonetheless, it was a very enjoyable experiment and I learned a lot in the process. I made a new custom brush for the linework, since none of ProCreate's built-in tools had the right mix of jagged roughness and inky weight. Compared to my usual process, I found that I had to be very deliberate with the compositions and the line work to capture the right feel of expressive minimalism. I can only imagine the skill required to do one of these pages every week on top of six regular daily comics.