The Blue Ink Reviews: Archie’s Mega Man #23 – Sons of Light
“Beware The Ides of March!” -William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
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I know, it’s a Hellishly overused quote meant to give us forewarning of a tyrant’s downfall, but something about it seems just so damn appropriate here. It’s March, after all, getting into the middle of the month, and we kick off the last issue before the Worlds Collide crossover event with the arrival of our favorite guy in red (until Zero), the lovable, whistling jump-in-at-the-last-minute-and-save-you deuteragonist, Proto Man! Of course, he thinks of himself as Break Man at this point, but you can bet that’ll change.
And just look at this cover! This glorious, glorious red and pink hued cover! Unf! It just screams for your attention, doesn’t it? We’ve seen the world through a blue lens for too long; now at last, it’s time to start seeing red.
We start off with a spot of good news: It’s Mega Man’s birthday. Congratulations, yon Blue Bomber, you’re a year older and already you’ve survived two Robot Rebellions, a pair of scrapes with anti-robot terrorists, and a malware attack. You gotta be feeling good about yourself, right?
Well, true to form, Rock’s rather embarrassed by it all. Like a good paladin-styled hero, he’s always quick to try and blunt the praise and keep the focus on the people he protects. This time around, he’s not gonna get off so easy. The mayor, who in breaking the old fat man elected official trope, is a youngish fella with a pseudo-hipster vocabulary and a pair of unattractive sunglasses.
He’s thrown all his support behind Mega Man, kind of like the mayor did in that Ghostbusters video game… the best one they did relatively recently for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii? Well, it seems that he’ll be renaming the city Mega City (ooh, original) and giving our hero the key to the city. Yawn.
I think it’s time to change the beat.
Soooo, that happened. It seems we have Dr. Wily in a terrycloth robe, apparently nakers underneath. Aww, and he’s drinking coffee out of a skull-shaped mug, how cute. He’s watching the morning news with more than a faint trace of irritation, in spite of glowing in obvious contented bliss and dear lord Blues is behind him and now somebody is going to want to write slash fanfiction about them, I just know it…
*clears throat* Anyhow. Dr. Wily sees a unique opportunity as the cameras roll and show Mega Man, Blues’ “replacement,” yukking it up for the press. Having Mega Man talk is one thing, but then Dr. Light gets interviewed, and starts talking about how proud he is of his son, and you can feel the rage in Break Man’s stance. He’s about ready to tear somebody’s head off, and all he needs is a gentle push. Wily pushes that button, and Break Man disappears in a “bwoo-wip” of red teleportation light. And then Wily cackles, because with Blues out of his hair keeping Mega Man occupied, he can get to work on his scheme he’s planned with his new buddy, “Ivo…”
Okay, spoiler alert. This is the direct link to the crossover event. Ivo refers to one Dr. Ivo Robotnik, the big bad from the world of Sonic The Hedgehog. You may be thinking, okay, but isn’t he called Eggman? Look, I’m old school here. He was always Dr. Robotnik to me, Sonic always ate chili dogs, and Uncle Chuck came up with the roboticizer to try and prolong the lives of Mobians, only to have his failed experiment turned into a weapon during the coup. So when people call Robotnik “Eggman,” I cringe. He’s Ivo Robotnik. Or Ro-butt-nik. And if you’ve gone your entire fandom only considering Dr. Robotnik as Eggman, then you completely miss this subtle clue that bad stuff is’a coming.
(Actually, he’s still Dr. Ivo Robotnik– “Eggman” is just a nickname, not unlike how we have Rock being called “Mega Man” and Blues being called “Break Man” here, among others. The difference is that while Eggman didn’t come up with it, he decided to own it. — Ed.)
Okay, let’s flash over to the soon to be renamed Mega City…
We meet Bomb Man, Guts Man, and Cut Man who suddenly find themselves desperately searching for a present for Mega Man’s birthday. It’s an enjoyable little jaunt. Hats? No. Fireworks? No. Food processor? Hardly. How about a puppy? No, he’s got Rush and then you have territorial issues. With only five minutes to spare, they settle on the tried and true solution. Gift card!
Come on, who didn’t smile there?
Anyhow, we get to the ceremony, and the mayor blabs on as mayors like to do when they have a captive audience, and then he hands over the key… only to have it shot out of his hand by a well-aimed plasma burst. Mega Man follows the trajectory of the shot up into the air, and sights a figure with a long yellow scarf whipping wildly in the cityscape breeze. And he’s whistling. Four tones. Five notes.
Yes, Dr. Light, who else could whistle that melody? The sheer look of disbelief, mixed with a touch of horror that the artists gave my favorite robotologist here is phenomenal. We get the above angle shot, his eyes are super expressive, and he stood up so quickly that he even knocked his chair back.
Of course, the lost son of Light doesn’t stop there. Ignoring Mega Man’s pleas for order, he blasts a hole through the giant topiary statue of Mega Man and sends the Treeborg-forged art piece collapsing to the ground. Enter Cut Man and his two buddies! Sadly, Elec Man and the rest of the Sunshine Seven aren’t around for the festivities, which isn’t all that surprising: Ice Man’s up north still, Time Man and Oil Man have their own places to be, and Elec Man’s probably powering a small city at this point. Still, just those three is plenty of backup to help clear out the civilians and minimize damage.
With his buddies on patrol, Mega Man hops aboard Rush and flies up to confront his red mystery attacker. And this is where it gets fun.
A benefit to comics is that they can display in two pages what it might take a writer three to describe with words. Suffice to say that Break Man leads Mega Man and Rush on a merry chase around Mega City, dodging or blocking every one of the Blue Bomber’s shots, then turns around and counterattacks with efficient and brutal blows, hitting Rush hard and causing them to crash land. Thrown off his bestest buddeh, Mega Man runs away from a still-shooting Break Man and starts to get Rush prepped for an emergency teleport to the lab. And then Break Man has to go and shoot him in the back.
The vehemence of Mega Man, his desire to take care of his little robotic buddy causes Break Man to hesitate. He wavers, wondering if this “Mega Man” who replaced him is really all the villainous things that Wily’s been feeding him. But the moment passes, and Guts Man and his two non-elemental buddies show up to party hardy.
Sadly, our angry and temporarily transformed Blues is all sorts of ticked off, and it takes him all of maybe ten seconds to incapacitate the lot of them. He gets Guts Man to crush Cut Man into the roof of the building they’re standing on, he disarms (literally, dis-arms) Bomb Man with a pair of captured Rolling Cutters, and to really up the ante on how badass he is, he then scoops up a couple of Hyper Bombs and throws them lacrosse style into Guts Man’s face! Seriously! How come Mega Man doesn’t have moves like that?! We’ll get to the answer in the second chunk of this review.
Mega Man finishes up with the necessary fix and sends Rush back to base, turns around to join the fight, and discovers that the fight’s already over. Ow.
Time for the final staredown. Brother against brother! A true freaking House of Light civil war, like nothing the Ruby-Spears cartoon ever dreamed of. Blues starts off with a little shield-bashing action, Mega Man retreats and fires a flurry of blows, Blues blocks it with his favorite plasma-deflective Proto Shield, and then after some more scuffling and another retreat, they finish it off. Mega fires another flurry of blasts which do nothing, and Break Man fires the full on plasma supershot for the victory. Knocked flat on his back, his energy reserves well and shot, Mega Man makes one final plea. Destroy him, fine; just don’t destroy the thing that makes him “Him,” because that would hurt his father.
In that moment of wonderful flashbacks, Blues remembers all the good things about their father. Sure, he still has the pain and anger from being “replaced” and betrayed, but… here’s another robot, his brother, no less, making a request that shatters the bloodlust inside of him completely. He deactivates his Proto Buster, and starts to turn away.
“Enough of this,” he seems to silently tell us. He’s done. And isn’t that just like Break Man: He deals a few hits, he takes a few hits, and then he ups and leaves. Well, this isn’t Mega Man 3, and it’s definitely not Magnet Man’s bizarre stage with the memorable music. Mega Man, damaged, manages to get up and grab a hold of Break Man’s scarf, pulling him back with the notion of unmasking his crazy attacker.
And then everything goes white.
Cue the crossover.
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We like our hypothetical match-ups. Back when MTV still liked to show a few music videos once in a blue moon, they had Celebrity Deathmatch. When I first started out writing fanfiction to sharpen my fangs, I was a member of the now-dead Nintendoland website, where they’d have match-ups between two Nintendo or video game icons and then somebody would write up a fight about it. Think about GameFAQs’ “Who would win?” contests, but with a bit of prose tossed in for variety. Among the many so-called deathmatches, there were a handful dedicated to Mega Man, and I do recall there was one where Mega Man and Proto Man faced off somehow…
Needless to say, Issue 23 gave us another look into this battle between brothers we always like to talk about. Sure, if you knew where to look, and if you wished reaaaal hard, you could fight Proto Man in Mega Man 7 for the honor of claiming his Proto Shield for yourself.
But that fight does get stale after a while, because Proto Man was required, by the conventions of Mega Man games and the level of AI programming they could pull off back in 1994/1995, to have a pattern. I figured, after handing his butt to him for the third playthrough in a row, that the real Slim Shady, er Proto Man, was a few notches tougher than Capcom’s only canon example of such a duel presented us with.
And boy, did this comic come through with flying colors. He wasn’t even Weapons Copy-ing anybody, and still he dropped three Robot Masters in the time it took Mega Man to evac his dog. Not only that, he correctly used their weaknesses against them! Well, Rolling Cutter on Bomb Man is questionable, as his weakness was Fire Storm in the original; it was indeed Rolling Cutter in the PSP remake, but that’s a niggling detail we gloss over because it was awesome!
God, defeating Guts Man lacrosse style? It’s about time that prep-school sport got some street cred again, especially after the sexual harassment fallout some years back. He grabbed Cut Man’s Rolling Cutters before they hit the ground and hacked off Bomb Man’s arms quicker than you could say “BOMB!” And who doesn’t love making bad guys take each other out? That was the highlight of the early stages of the TMNT arcade game (the actual arcade game, not the NES release), because when you rescued April, you got to fight both Bebop and Rocksteady, and if you did it right, you could make them run into each other (and even take each other out).
Some warriors can handle themselves in a battle. Then there is the rare breed who can do more… who actually control the flow of the conflict. And in this issue, running on his atomic energy generator and looking to break off a big old piece of revenge, Blues showed that his experience vastly dwarfs anything that Mega Man ever thought of going up against before.
Mega Man may be a year old at this point in the comic, he may have taken down whole heaps of trouble, but Blues is a scrapper. A Lancer, in the truest sense of the trope. Mega Man has to play the paladin. He tries to talk his problems out first. He hesitates from dealing mortal blows. He stays his hand. He takes hits he shouldn’t, just to make sure that collateral damage is decreased.
Break Man operates under no such restrictions. The sheer amount of butt-whooping that the writers and artists from the Archie team granted him was phenomenal, and right in line with the rage he’s feeling. We rarely get to see Proto Man at work in the games. Oh, sure, he’ll show up every now and then and drop off a cryptic word of advice, or maybe he’ll leave you an E-Tank or an Energy Balancer if you find a secret room, and he’ll definitely pop in to unmask a fake Proto Man for the scam it is when the need calls for it, buuuuut… have we ever seen him well and truly fight? I discount his appearances in Mega Man and Bass, because all he does there is fire off a couple of all-or-nothing shots and then retreat to lick his wounds. The best answer we can come up with is, “no, we don’t really know what he’s capable of.”
(Well, there were the arcade games, but those can be disputed in the comments below. –Ed.)
And now we do. There’s a reason that Capcom never really had Proto Man fight Mega Man with everything he had in him: It’d damn near be a massacre, if Mega Man didn’t give it everything he had. And I mean, the everything he has at the end of a game, when he’s plowing through Skull Fortress number whatever and he’s good and pissed and tired and cranky and he just wants to go home and why isn’t Wily doing something more constructive with his time, like learning needlepoint?!
If Mega Man hesitates, if he doesn’t throw everything he has into the fight, Proto Man comes out on top. Think of Proto Man’s level of skill as “where Mega Man needs to be all the time.” Unfortunately, Mega lets some of his skills lapse between Robot Rebellions, kind of like students forgetting things over summer break, which is why he gets banged around so much. So long as Break Man remains an enemy, Mega Man won’t get much sleep at all until he remembers how to kick butt with the best of ‘em and supersedes his mysterious and yet-unidentified brother.
Small wonder we prefer Blues as an on-again, off-again ally; he makes a terrifyingly capable foe.
For the Blue Ink.
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When he isn’t writing “The Blue Ink” reviews for The Mega Man Network, Erico (The Super Bard) spends his days keeping track of the “Legacy of Metal” fanon, dabbling in cooking and tea-brewing, and exploring the human condition from his Iowa stomping grounds.
The views expressed here reflect the views of the authors alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Mega Man Network.
Tags: Archie, comic, Mega Man, Mega Man Classic, The Blue Ink
Filed under: Reviews
Wow, I didn’t even know the issue was out! Great review as always.
About your whole Robotnik/Eggman rant, Archie Robotnik and Archie Eggman are two separate people it involves parallel universes.
wow didnt know its released now,
anyways, whats the problem and they all look a little chubby? too much energy cans?
Who else noticed that the Mayor was actually the Mayor character from the game Rockman Gold Empire? Blew my mind when I saw him.
Haha. I so relate to the Eggman/Robotnik issue. I have no qualms calling him Eggman, but there will always be a part of me that calls him Robotnik. I will always remember that Saturday morning cartoon, and everything old school about Sonic. That’s why I feel sorry for kids nowadays; they may have the best this generation has to offer, but they’ll never go through the awesomeness of the old school stuff. Generally of course.
Anyway, this is a Mega Man review, so to it: another wonderful review as always. I love your insights on the Rock/Blues fight. It’s spot on. XD
Another great review! I gotta start picking up the comics, though I should probably wait until the issues are combined again. I’m still missing a lot of action, regardless. I have to say, I think they nailed the character of Proto Man in this comic.
That part about Egg-..uh… Robotnik? It’s sad that you cringe at people calling him Eggman, but that was the original name for the character. Not only that, but everything else mentioned(aside from the chili dogs and the Robotnik name) isn’t even canon with the video games, which would be the true story, overall. I mean, the comics do things different, which is what really matters here, I guess, considering that they are both Archie Comics.
Bob: But Eggman used to be Robotnik from another dimension, so they’re still by and large interchangeable.
A fellow Trope watcher! Kudos.
These stories are short, but this one was really short! Anyone notice?
@EngineR2
Check out Sonic Adventure 2/Sonic Battle for “Gerald ROBOTNIK”, Eggman’s grandfather.
And for the chili dogs, see Sonic Generations, though I know the jokes were rewritten and not translated for the English crowd (with awful jokes, too, same with Colors). The 3D CG scenes were not altered.
Maybe I should’ve said “except for the chili dogs and the Robotnik name”, and not aside. My fault. Anyway, chili dogs as Sonic’s favorite food became canon with the video games starting with the Japanese Sonic Advance 3, where it was stated in the manual. That was the first, not Sonic Generations.
Maria, Gerald, Ivo, I knew about that. As you know, the territories got an even trade, as far as the naming goes. The US and UK got Eggman as a nickname, while Japan received Robotnik as a surname.
Everything else mentioned was made up by US writers not part of the SEGA staff(Uncle Chuck, roboticizer, etc.).
I’m sorry to say I’m one of the people for whom the name “Eggman” makes me cringe as well.
The reason has to do with Sonic’s fall as a video game star. Sure he’s great in Wreck-It Ralph and I’m super psyched for the looming Worlds Collide crossover, but those roles are also bittersweet because Sonic works in any medium but video games at this point. I haven’t seen a great Sonic game since Sonic 3 and Knuckles was released nearly two decades ago. Yeah, I’ve played Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations, but honestly, they were about as good as the two Sonic Adventures, a pair of games that, while worthy of the franchise, were riddled with glitches and bad design decisions. The games were supposed to get better after that, not worse! I think a big reason people love Colors and Generations is because it’s been SO LONG since a good Sonic game came out that it’s left the fans starving. They’re gobbling up an OK meal and not realizing that they could be having something worlds better.
On top of that, Sonic 4 was, for all intents and purposes, Sega’s last chance to get the classic formula right, and they failed. What’s worse is that they chose to fail, copying and pasting the bad physics from Sonic Rush and pinning a homing attack to it instead of giving the Sega kids of old what they really wanted. They actually admitted to that in developer interviews.
“Eggman” is a bad name because it’s a reminder of all that pain. In Sonic Adventure, the first game to use the name “Eggman”, we had no idea that the seeds it planted (scripted loops and speed sequences, over-reliance on the homing attack, fishing and other weak gimmicks, awful camera controls, etc.) would result in one of the greatest falls from grace ever seen.
“Eggman” is a reminder that there’s no reason to look forward to new Sonic games anymore. “Robotnik” harkens back to a brighter time, when Sonic could go toe-to-toe with a red fat guy with a mustache and be expected to match or exceed him in game quality.
Dangit, this issue was NOT on the shelves during my comic run this week… I’ll have to call another shop to see if they got it in.
This issue looks amazing. I am so glad to see ProtoMan enter the story! I have to buy this asap!
@Ry-Guy
I think the issue is supposed to come out on the 13th, just like last month’s issue did.
@CK20XX
If they did that, they would’ve had a good game, Sonic Rush was pretty freakin’ fantastic, as NOMUK’s 92% can attest to, and it already had a homing attack.
@HeatPhoenix
Oh, no-no-no-no. Sonic Rush fooled me into thinking it was great at first; the boost system did indeed feel fun to use. But the game’s copious bottomless pits snapped me out of that trance, enabling me to see it for what it really was. It’s definitely one of those games that is nowhere near as good as people would have you believe.
Modern Sonic games (starting with the catalyst for them all: Sonic Advance 2) all have the same problem. They use gimmicks like the Homing Attack and Boosting as crutches to prop up shoddy gameplay and physics engines. As long as you keep boosting to the end, you’ll be none the wiser, but if you slow down to explore or admire the levels, you’ll stumble upon the games’ dark sides. It’s a shame too because the most recent Sonic games have been displaying admirable creativity. The Wisp system in Sonic Colors was fantastic; it just should have been in a better game than that.
Boosting in particular feels like a replacement for the normal rolling attack and Spin Dash, except it’s worse because its use is limited by a meter. It would be fine as an additional move, perhaps, but having it replace Sonic’s normal moves is like Mario being strapped to F.L.U.D.D. in Super Mario Sunshine, which a lot of players didn’t like either.
CK20XX: I liked Rush Adventure better, myself; seemed to have fewer bottomless pits, which is why I liked it more.
And Sunshine is a Mario game I want to love, but can’t. Not as it is… I’d love to see them release a tweaked remake.
@LBD
I wanted to like Rush Adventure better, and I sorta did in the end, thanks partly to fewer cheap deaths and less fake difficulty. It ultimately disappointed me though. The focus on material collection could have been used to create rich, expansive levels ala Sonic 3 and Knuckles with lots to see, do, and discover hidden in them, but instead it’s the same simple boost-to-the-end fare. That’s nice for a while, but it proves tragic in retrospect, since the engine basically admits that it cannot make a nice game without nerfing the difficulty.
I don’t want to use homing attacks across chains of enemies or boost to the end as if I’m playing a Special Zone from the Genesis era. That’s dull. I want a momentum-based platformer like the old classics. I want something that’s as tight as… oh, say… almost any classic Mega Man game. Mega Man never forgot his basics even though there was an 11-year gap between 8 and 9, while Sonic did. Nowadays the only games that have gotten the classic Sonic gameplay “right” are fan-made games, like Freedom Planet or The Fancy Pants Adventure.
@CK20XX
Aren’t you just trying to find faults with the newer games by comparing in constitution to the old ones even though they’re not really all that similar anymore? Like trying to compare Modern Sonic to Sonic 3&K or Rush to Sonic Adventure 1. What does that get you? They’re different games and boosting actually solves a lot of problems that made Sonic 1 beyond the halfway point nigh unplayable, same goes for 2 and 3&K (which is one of my favorites… but not a very fast game, it’s pretty much Mario with loops and spinning).
And about the Sunshine thing, people might not like change but Sunshine is in no way a bad game. Seriously, what flaws do you feel that game have, and if it’s FLUDD, it adds an entire new dimension to the platforming physics and mechanics, did you want a Super Mario 64 2?
Eh… actually no, I’m not trying to find faults for the sake of finding faults. But I hope you’ll forgive me for writing a whole essay to explain why.
The reason people still compare modern Sonic games to the old Genesis classics is because that was when Sonic games were as good as or better than Mario games. That’s not true anymore though. Modern Sonic games tend to just be “good enough” for the masses, and Sonic 4 wasn’t even as good as the comparatively basic New Super Mario Bros. series, or even Mega Man 9.
Some people don’t mind that. I get that. But other people like me care, because all it seems to do is doom Sonic to a future of mediocrity like what Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon ended up enduring. There’s no reason to choose a Sonic game over dozens of better games that exist.
In particular, the Homing Attack and Boosting have especially drawn my ire because they just seem fundamentally flawed. All they do is help the game to play itself. Ultimately the Homing Attack just covers up how the game doesn’t have levels designed well enough to allow you to backtrack and try sections again. Besides, can you imagine how well that would be received in other games? What if Mega Man automatically aimed at every enemy he encountered, or if Mario homed in on enemy heads whenever he jumped? People would consider that an outrage! Why does Sonic get a free pass there when his games used to control so tightly that a Homing Attack would have been a hindrance rather than a help? Heck, even in modern Sonic games (Sonic 4 especially), it is really easy to accidentally double-tap the jump button when you’re doing precision platforming, and if there’s nothing to home in on, you get an aerial boost instead, so that stupid move has gotten me killed almost as much as any other hazard. That’s bad game design.
Meanwhile, Boosting just covers up the games’ linearity. In Sonic Rush, it also kept you from discovering that the Spin Dash was nerfed and the physics were non-existent, but mostly it just reduces normal levels to Special Zones from Sonic 2. Remember those, how you had to run down a half-pipe, collect rings, dodge hazards, and fail over and over again as you memorized the level layout? The Special Zones got away with that trial-and-error gameplay because they were optional, and your reward for completing all of them was the ability to break the difficulty curve over your knee. Everywhere else though, that’s bad game design. There are sections where boosting is a safe, sensible, and fun thing to do, but a game consisting entirely of such sections is bland, while trying to spice up those sections with enemies and hazards just leads to fake difficulty and frustration. I have died many, many times in such sections simply because the stupid game wouldn’t show me what the heck I was running towards or give me enough time to react.
What a lot of people don’t seem to understand either is that Sonic games, ironically, aren’t supposed to be fast. They aren’t supposed to be all speed all the time. No platformer is; a good platformer gives you time to think and plan your actions instead of forcing you on and on. Sonic is supposed to be a hedgehog for a good reason too; curling into a ball and barreling down slopes as a protected buzzsaw was how he used to reach his highest velocities. Half the time this marble chute-style gameplay was used as a reward system and the game would treat you to high-speed sections after finishing its tricky areas. In this way, Sonic 1 balanced the rush of speed with the perils of platforming, holding player interest even when the zones forced you to slow down or die. Sonic 2 improved upon this by adding the Spin Dash, which is like the boost pads in modern Sonic games except it allows you to choose when and how you want to use it, and Sonic 3 learned from the much-hated Labyrinth Zone by making water sections shorter and more evenly paced. It’s for these reasons and more that the Genesis trilogy (and its quirky cousin, Sonic CD) is still widely considered the gold standard for the franchise.
You’d think recapturing that would be so simple, but Sega just doesn’t want to do it. Modern Sonic is good enough, and the fanbase is so broken by now that it ensures that someone out there will keep liking and buying Sonic games enough to turn a profit, regardless of their quality. Even Sonic 2006, the most offensively bad game in the series, became a platinum hit on Xbox.
You are right about Super Mario Sunshine though. It’s not bad by any stretch of the imagination. Though F.L.U.D.D. did indeed leave a bad taste in peoples’ mouths, I didn’t find it that offensive, and I think it could work in modern Mario games as another power-up like the Fire Flower. What really burned me though… was the story. It had a great setup, with a liquid Mario framing the real Mario for vandalizing a tropical resort, and Peach wasn’t even able to save Mario by exerting her royal authority… and then that plot quickly snapped back into a Bowser-kidnaps-Peach story. That was really lame how Nintendo yanked the rug out from under me like that, and it frankly robbed me of the will to play. Fortunately, Super Mario Galaxy learned from that grievous error and was a masterpiece through and through.
@Eggman and Robotnik nonsense
Boo on people trapped by nostalgia.
Are you also amongst those who cringe when Mega Man is not like the cartoon?
I liked the details on “Break Man”‘s little helmet, to say the least.. Well played archie, well played.
Dagnabbit! Is this all there is! Really? That’s all I hear. Robotnik this. Eggman that? If I wanted to read that endless loop I’d be on the Soniv Stadium. Tell me there’s more to LIFE!*chuckling*
No, I’m here uncharacteristically to talk about Protoman! The bot who turned my fandom of Megaman around and has made me dump my money for the past 2 years!
I looked forward to issue #23 because of my liking of Blues. But in no way did it go as I thought it would.
First off, Breakman committed an act of terrorism and whistled before he did. He has never been destructive. Issue #18 shows him saving lives and I feel there’s a contradiction in the writer’s portrayal. If wrecking Mega’s hedge was endangering lives he would not do it. Period. And he certainly wouldn’t make his mark; his grand gesture, (the whistle) doing so.
Second, this review caught my attention as to Wily may have been “feeding” Blues that Mega was evil. This was never defined. As I told my sister, Wily complaining about Breakman’s “moralistic” questions was a good fotenote -But until they give an example of what was asked and how Wily answered it makes the flow really off center and shows the writer does not actually have a true merit for Wily being the monster he is. There’s still time to develop it, but no good villain is left with the question “why do I see myself as a force of good” unanswered.
Protoman never overtly tried to destroy Mega in the games. Being Breakman in the games was Blue’s way of paying his debt to Wily and understanding both his and Mega’s limits. I also take it he never looked to Wily for direction and let Mega’s reaction determine who was truly the force of good. Protoman does not react on impulse. He sticks to the background and does not intervene unless pushed to do so. (Can that actually be denied?)
I could go on. I usually try to let people talk amongst themselves and I’m not very overt when speaking my mind. I try to be like Protoman, in a sense, always reserved. However it IS important to me to understand just what others truly look at when they see this character being portrayed in this way. You could say “well, this isn’t the games, it’s a different continuity.” To that I’ll just say, “then it’s not the Protoman I’ve come to know”
To say this comic disappoints me is reading to much into things. I’m not pleased, but I don’t let that ruin my day nor do I get angry. As it is I started reading these comics to get more insight on the franchise. However, it’s like I tell my sister, “you can’t trust a guy who’s written for Archie babies.” *chuckle* But that’s just me.