Retronauts - 578: Mega Man Comics

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

Nadia talks about Archie's late Mega Man comic series with her husband and fellow author David Oxford, as well as former series writer (and current Sonic Comic writer) Ian Flynn. Archie Megaman was gone too soon. Is there any hope for a Mega-revival? Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This episode of Retronauts is brought to you by Notion and Patreon. This week on Retronauts, Super Comic Robot, do-do-do-do, Megaman. Hello, Robots and Robets, and welcome to this week's episode of veterans hosted by myself, Nadia Oxford. Oh, gosh, golly, I guarantee this is going to be a great episode because I am talking about my favorite thing, which is Mega Man, with two of my favorite people, one of whom is my husband, David Oxford, who is back with us. He has been a guest before. Hi, David. Say hi, even though I went through a lot of trouble pulling you out of like the next room for this. So be grateful.

Mega hi. Mega high. As for the real Blue Man of the moment, we have, oh gosh, this is exciting. Ian Flynn, the writer behind Archie's late Mega Man comic print run and there is something else he does, some schmuck with quills, a bionic the sledge dog or something. Ian, why don't you explain that to us all? Mr. Needle Mouse is such an obscure property. I think we're really here for the true star, and that is Mega Man. I agree.

You know what? This is already going in the direction I wanted to go in because we are definitely here. to talk about Mega Man. I've been on a real comic book kick over at Retronauts, and there's no getting off this train now. You're all stuck with me. We've explored other game-related topics in the past, including the Valiant Comics and the Nintendo Power Comics.

Any familiar with any of those, you know, what is your comic book slash comic book video game history? We always had comics in the house growing up, and it was a hodgepodge of various things, you know, an Archie book here, a Thundercats book there, you know, get along gang. I don't know if they had that up. I had, I actually had a Mortimer Moose figurine.

There we go. There we go. I distinctly remember this, this terrible memory because I brought it to kindergarten, like junior kindergarten, which is Ontario is kind of like preschool, but the government pays for it. And you go and you're like four. So I had this little figurine and I was very small and shy and some kids stole it from me. And the teacher got mad and I got in trouble and she took it away and I cried and my dad has her asking me. It was a very harrowing moment for myself. And then it chewed that moose to pieces because I had a chewing problem. Sorry to interrupt.

Please go on about your comic history. Well, I mean, how does one follow up with massicated Mortimer Moose? I read comics all the time, was big into X-Men in the 90s, and then got into the Sonic comics because that was right when the media blitz for Sonic was happening. You know, the two Saturday morning cartoons, the Archie Comic tie-in. the games were coming out. He was inescapable. And, you know, fell in love with the Sonic books, stuck with that through all of high school. And then coming out of that in university, it's like, I like to write.

I like Sonic. I like the comic. Why don't I just break into the business and write for the Sonic comic? How hard can it be? Just like that. How good he had. And after four years, I actually got my lucky break. And I've been writing on Sonic's coat.

tales for almost 20 years now. They're very pointy. You have to watch those quills. They are. And he runs so fast. Yeah, I could see. I can see that any case. But through Sonic, a lot of doors have opened up for me.

As you mentioned, I worked on the 55-issue run of Mega Man under Archie Comics. I did the Sonic Mega Man crossovers, both of them. Got to write for Sonic Boom, got to consult on Sonic Prime. I'm working on the Sonic Games now and other related media and did some Minecraft stuff, worked on Mario and Zelda kind of adjacently. There's a couple other projects I don't think I can talk about yet, but it's still video game related. So basically, if you take a video game and you want me to write about it in some other format, I do that. That is what I do. You do transformations.

It's an odd specification, but hey, it works out. You even did a cookbook, yes? Yes, yes, the Sonic the Hitchuck cookbook, which it's more than just, you know, here's Sonic-themed food, like another lazy thing. Chili dogs. All the way down. Each and every entry is done from a character's point of view. And it's just chock full of in jokes and little references.

And, you know, it's made to be loved by Sonic fans and you can cook with it. you can put it on the on the element and turn on the element and oh absolutely flip eggs do not flip eggs with a book do not bake this book please hey you and i are both humongous fans of what's it called that's how much i love it i remember the name um odens sphere like i remember we've talked about it several times now that needs a cookbook oh god yes just the copy itself would be gorgeous to look at oh my goodness oh vanillaware i i am huge about vanilla wear you are too too, I know. David, I'm going to make you huge about Vanillaware next opportunity I get. Why don't you, I mean, I didn't remember if I had you on those episodes, David, but why don't you talk a little bit about your past with the Nintendo comics and whatnot? Because I know you have one. Oh, gosh, yeah. I mean, I've always kind of been into comic books, but it was a while before I was actually really into, say,

comic book, comic books, your superheroes and that stuff. Uh-huh. I started with, like, Transformers and Ninja Turtles. I went on to Sonic. It was like the late 90s before. Like, I'd been watching the X-Men cartoon and Spider-Man cartoons, but I hadn't really looked at their actual comic book adventures until sometime in the late 90s, like near 2000 even.

But, yeah, the Nintendo comic system from Valiant. I checked that out. I was a big fan of the Mario Comics and Star Fox from Nintendo Power. Sonic the Hedgehog. I was there, Issue Zero. pretty much all the way to the end. To the end. I guess to the present day would be more accurate.

The end of Archie and the beginning of IDW and up to current IDW to be very specific. Yeah. And of course, one of my favorites has been Mega Man in manga form and comic form and slightly lesser comic form. But we might get into that later. Yeah. I was actually, the whole reason I made. this episode because like I said, I want to talk comics, but I want to really kind of narrow it down to Mega Man because his, like his game career, his comic career has been fraught with troubles

and some great times as well. And Ian, I was actually going to ask you, if you ever got to read the 2003 comic Mega Man comic that Dreamwave did for about four issues and kind of lopped off face of the earth? I didn't read it when originally came out. I did receive a trade version. right that came out as well as a gift i think did you guys give that to me do we give it david do you remember i don't think so i only remember having the one copy and i think we still have that yeah yeah maybe it was a maybe it was a gift from someone at a convention because i have received some lovely things from fans and shows but yeah i i do remember glancing through that it's been a long time, but it was fascinating from my position to look at how somebody else, you know,

picked up the franchise with, from my understanding, little to no understanding of it going in. Right. And doing their take on it, you know, trying to interpret it for a broader, you know, American audience. How do you take just like a cursory understanding of Mega Man and make it accessible to your regular comic market. And there was some neat ideas in there.

There's stuff I could see, you know, a product of its time and other stuff where it's like, maybe do a little bit of research. You do a little research. I mean, this is, I guess this, this might have been like before the days of Google and Wikipedia's and stuff where you could readily learn everything. But. Yeah. Those Patrick's Pazianti covers, though. I mean, come on.

I mean, that made it all worth it. You're right about, you know, not having the research available to us. Because I can't remember the name of the author right off the top of my head, but he was the kind of guy who would do the books he would find at the grocery store and caps about, like, you know, Cyclops and the X-Men rescues a kitten or, you know, beast gets crazy or something like that, you know, the stuff for little kids. And I always got the impression of the Megman comic was very inoffensive because he was just kind of writing from a template almost.

Like you have, you know how with, especially in the 80s and 90s when people kind of needed to have an episode to fill in, you know, the time. I didn't really have the time to really write up something that was really interesting and good. So here's a lesson on racism and you've seen the same lesson in like, you know, 10 other cartoons before. It was kind of like that. Like I just was not interested in the whole, you know, centi angle of or Megam's a superhero. You go to school. He's a robot. Why is he going to school?

Because it's easier to write. Everyone's been to school. They can write about the school experience. It was just a little bit lazy. Brian Augustine was the writer's name. That's right. Thank you. Yeah.

I don't want to like talk shit about him, but a paycheck is a paycheck, but that was really a paycheck. I think he also had a pretty good run with the Flash, but I haven't really read that. So you had a very basic centi plot. Superkid has to go to school because I wrote a whole bunch of question marks here on the notes. You have some airhead chick who falls forth his nice bland personality. There are bullies who don't actually act like real bullies. Lunchroom robots go crazy and sling mashed hitos everywhere because comedy, I suppose. It was just not a very, like, how do I explain this?

It was more for children than for everyone. Like, I'm not here to say Mega Man Comic has to have, like, blood and guts and go. I'd really prefer if I didn't actually. Like, actually, Ian, your tone was perfect pretty much. So, yeah, that was not my favorite part of Mega Man's existence. I have to admit. I think that it kind of picked up, I mean, there were only four issues of it. And I think it really picked up in the back end once, like, you know, Dr. Like gets kidnapped and Wiley is revealed.

And I mean, he shows up earlier, but, you know, revealed as the villain. And then you get Patrick Spassianti, uh, doing the, am I pronouncing that right, Ian? Yep. Okay. We've got him illustrating the entire fourth issue, which was great. I've actually got one of the pages from that. Yeah. Yeah.

And, uh, yeah, just, well, out on a high note at the very least. And it started to feel like Mega Man by that point. Too little too late. But they also had that X crossover at the back end that, well, I honestly had hoped to pick up on that. I made a pitch, but Dreamwave was circling the drain by that point. So that never got to go anywhere. They sure were.

If I'm not mistaken, isn't that what kind of got the comic canceled in the first place? I don't know how the sales were, but I don't think Dreamwave was in a good place. Uh, yeah, I'm not sure, like, which was the cause and which was the effect there, but, uh, neither helped the other much, that's for sure. This episode of Retronauts is sponsored by Notion. But Notion is more than just a sponsor. It helps power the show. With so many people sharing Retronaut's lead mic these days, we need all the help we can get for organizing topics,

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easy to use Notion AI today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show, Notion.com slash retro. Okay, so we all know that Dreamwave kind of effed up. They went down the drain. They drew Optimist Prime Weird and stuff like that. So they're gone there in the past. We're going to talk about the more modern take on Mega Man Comics, the Archie University Archie First, I guess.

Oh, God help me. So, Ian, we're going to ask you a few questions. That's going to kind of spark, hopefully, conversation amongst us. And at the end, I'm going to issue a fun challenge. And it's going to be like a comic writing challenge. And I'm curious to see your answers. Okay. Yeah, I know.

Doesn't that sound fantastic? First question, this is a very easy yes or no question to start you off. Does Capcom own, like, the characters that you made, like Quake Woman and so on? As far as I know, yeah. As far as my understanding of the contracts are everything was created for the Mega Man license. So any of the original material agents, Rose and Krantz, no, no, no, stern. Right. Yeah.

The federal agents, Quakewoman, Dr. Lilinda, all of them, they should be firmly within Capcom's grasp to do whatever they want with. Right. I've actually been really impressed at how, like, popular Quakewoman is not just in general, but especially in, like, Japan and Korea, apparently. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I've seen a lot of great fan art. Do you, oh, go ahead, David? I was just going to say, I tried to tag him whenever I see something and I don't notice him in the, uh, likes on Twitter.

It's like, ooh, quake woman. I got to send this to you. And I mean, major, most props go to Aaliyah Baker for that one, because she's worked really, really hard to create a robot master that fit classic. Right. And there was a lot of discourse about it when she came out, but because there is such a wide range of what counts as classic characters in their designs, like you look at Mega Man 1 and 2 and you compare it to like Mega Man 8. Some of these guys look like friggin Maverick bosses when you get into it. Yeah, yeah. And then there's some, you know, NPCs in the X era that look like they could pass for classic.

And there's a lot of bleed over on what would count one way or the other. but I just think it's a solid design, and she's got a compelling angle to her character that fits within the themes of classic. So I am very glad she resonated. I'm not terribly surprised. We put a lot of work into her to make her that work, but I'm glad she stuck the landing. Did both you write her personality and all that? Did you collaborate on her storyline, her personality, her quirks, her everything that kind of went down in the comic? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, Lee and I went back and forth for hours on how to approach this, how to do this right, how to make it work in so many different ways. And you made it work. Both of you made it work. I think, as you were saying, that's probably the reason she's so popular. I mean, people love characters with even a smidgen of story in series that aren't really known for having stories. And Capcom is definitely, sorry, Mega Man is definitely like. high up on that list. So when you have a character like Quakewoman who has like

what's the where I'm looking for, just like existential crises as well as PTSD, it's a she's different. Like Mega Man's kind of presented as the perfect hero, but of course in your universe, he doesn't really have any sort of perfection going on either. David, what were you going to say?

I was just going to say that I was really rooting for Quake Woman to get into Mega Man X-Dive and I'm a little sad that it did not happen. yeah if anywhere would have been there but you know there was a lot writing on quake woman because you know not only was this an original character being added to the licensed book yeah you know right there we wanted her to feel like a natural edition but she was also like the first female

robot master's side from splash woman which would get a lot of attention in that right and the archie sonic books which were running concurrently at the time were kind of known for their gigantic extended cast of comic exclusive characters. Right. Some of which were not necessarily in theme, arguably so. And we didn't want that parallel to be drawn. Oh, you know, Archie Sonic has all these crazy different characters. Now they're going to add a whole bunch of character bloat to Mega Man.

It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah, yeah. Anything new we add, we wanted to enrich the Mega Man universe. explore an area that the base material doesn't already do to add to it, not to distract from it. That actually kind of segues into another question I had for you, which is you did not really have a huge Mega Man background coming into the comic, right? Right. I am kind of notoriously bad at video games, and Mega Man is unforgiving. It can be a real bear. It really can. I knew of the series, you know, I watched the old Ruby Spears cartoon, was very confused why he was so different in Captain Inn, but, you know, I didn't understand licensing and parameters at the time.

So I had an understanding of Mega Man, but I was not as, you know, well versed as a hardcore fan. So when the property came along and editor Paul Kaminsky said, you know, Capcom wants to do it, you've done so well with Sonic, do you want this? I'm like, yes, I want this. I know this, that this is a golden goblet that I must clutch close, but I also need to do this right.

Right. And so, you know, deep dive into the week. He's tip of the head to Mega Man knowledge base. Thank you very much. Did a lot of read-up on Dr. What was it? Is it Dr. Wright's lavatory? Dr. Wright's lavatory.

The Reploid Research Lavatory. story. There we go. Watching, you know, long plays of games, you know, on YouTube, you pull up, oh, no, this is a speed run. This is not going to tell me anything. I need to watch somebody fail as much as I would. And just, you know, trying to get into all the minutia, find all the quirky Japanese stuff like guts, man, likes karaoke. You'll never find that in any of the, you know, vintage US material. So absolutely not. That's great, though. How do we incorporate that? And just tried to become.

one with the Mega Man. The Reploid Research Laboratory, actually, that was, is maintained by a good friend of David and I serve about 20, who also helped us on our Megamatic's Robot Master Field Guide and the Megamacanaths fabric hunter field guide. So yeah, shout

us to him. He's been at his thing for as long as I've been on the internet, pretty much, which is like looking at 95, 96. And the only reason I know the amount of Mega Man canon that I really needed to start a fanfic career and then a writing career is because people like him were bringing in like whatever they could to the West, which was not a whole lot

at the time, but they worked really hard. And I find it actually interesting that your entry point because the fact that you didn't have that Mega Man, you know, the useless startup knowledge that David and I have, that kind of clears your head. Once you have nothing, you can work with anything. And I found that kind of interesting with, say, I think your, your representation of Protoman was cool. Like, what was it? He's arguably the character love, everyone loves most in Mega Man. What was it like kind of coming at him as a new person and like seeing, oh, okay, this character is special, like, or did you think he was special or anything like that? Oh, sure. I mean, Blues is the Green Ranger of Mega Man. He is the cool older brother. He is that archetype. And he is what the game is presented. was already just fine-tuned. I didn't really have to do much.

I was just extrapolating on a perfect foundation. And it's all there within the construction. You have Mega Man, who is good and pure and blue. And you understand him straight up because he just does good things. And that's fine. That's comforting. That's accessible. But then you have Blues, the Spurned Brother.

He's red. he has a different approach to things he has that badass whistle intro he is everything nice about megaman but made cool yes and because he has that you know bit of friction within the happy family of dr light and rock and roll and they're all just this big happy little family nothing can go wrong here it's a disney movie but oh here's the third brother off to the side he doesn't get along with them but it's not because of anything really like evil or untoward. It's just misunderstanding. So there's that bang of tragedy. It's got just enough edge to make him cooler than the base hero without throwing it all under the bus. I know that I would have had a great time riding him. Just, were you confused at all by like the Breakman interloper?

Like to this day, I'm not even sure what Brickman's all about. That, again, I had the benefit of. of the games already have been, you know, out through, I think 10 was just coming out. Yeah. When the comic was going. So so much had already been played and explored and dissected and theorized that I could approach it from a high level vantage point and take it all in as one. So, yeah, Breakman was kind of a weird one-off. I don't know if they were thinking of anything grander when they first introduced him.

but I could look at it as not just here's the weird breakman. Here is all of Blues's arc. We know he starts here. We know he ends here. Breakman is a point in it. What is the context of that point in his story? And how do we make that work? And, you know, seeing what games we had and what we could do with it and how to flesh out those ankles was just really a blessing.

It was great. It's actually funny to think one of the best places for lower dumps in the Mega Man universe are the fighting games that nobody has played. The endings are just like, oh, hey. maybe Dr. Wiley's working on Zero. Ooh, hey, everyone, here's Dr. Wiley working on Zero. It's really blatant. And you also get like, I think that was like the first time I got any kind of deep dive into pro-demand's mind because I had no idea about the nuclear core that's probably going to melt down.

And that's another kind of fun layer of tragedy because what if he melt down next to his brother and inadvertently, inadvertently kills him, you know? Yeah, I could picture myself if I'm a grand old time with that. And once you get to a certain point, then the terror sinks in because while there isn't a solid bridge between Classic and X, we do know one leads into the other. And there is a little bit of elements from Classic that carry over into X. And the long con for all this was for us to go from Classic to X. even if X got its own book and was running as a sister series

there was that connection and I wanted to make sure that we could do things in classic that reflected in X without screwing up the timeline that is established. Tier, tier. Like one example, I guess,

would be when you had that, I wouldn't call it a crossover, but the stories kind of overlapped with that big Wiley machine and it was discovered in X's time. that was one of the more frustrating arcs. Because Paul, editor Paul Kininski,

you know, Capcom gave us the green light to play with the X material. Because at first it was just classic. That's all we had Xist. Yeah. And then they gave us X as well. And so he wanted a crossover. And I said,

okay, yes, X is great. But Paul, this is baked into the story. There is no tangible crossover between the two. X and Rock do not meet. There is a mystery hundred years between the two.

Yes. And we're being extremely faithful to this canon and that is being received very well. So how do we do a crossover in a couple of franchises that don't cross over? And I remember I was coordinating with Alia a lot on this and it might have been her idea to come up with the Wiley Walker as a robot that is fought in class. is buried and then is a menace again in X so that we have that, you know, bridging device without actually making the two meet. And we threw that out the window when we got to World Unite because, I mean, that's just a big fun, make all the toys, fight each other.

But we were going to do a reality reboot at the end of that anyway. So it's like, fine, just play with it, have fun with the idea. And then we don't have to worry about the mess later because we're just going to hit the button. I really did like that story arc and how it came together, though one of my favorite parts was the image where I think it was X and Dr. Kane and they're like kind of excavating or something and you see like a cracked classic Mega Man helmet down in the rubble below. And that was just like, that's the kind of thing that leaves an impression on you when you've been a friend for a long time. Especially single just looks so perfectly faithful, like in a kind of official capacity that's just like, oh, wow, what happened here? Yeah, anything to do with mixing the original series in X is, I don't know what Capcom's stance on it is these days, but it was really cool back then, I have to admit, like with Megaman X5, I have to just kind of see those connections, not just between Mega, Mega, Man and Dr. Wiley, but between Zero and Dr. Wiley. because that's, oh, man, that whole, the whole Maverick Zero thing was just, like, exploited and ruined and could have been done so much better.

And there's a retronauts for another day, just me ranting about how Zero's been miswritten. Here is a question from David, actually. He says, your Sonic work and your Mega Man work feel very different, with Mega Man feeling more adherent to adapting the games. Can he describe the difference in your approaches and if doing one influenced your work on the other, even to the the current day. They were completely different beasts because Sonic had a much more, I would say, focused media blitz. Like, as I mentioned earlier, you had the two cartoons, you had the comic, you had the games. And with the comic, with the Archie Sonic comic, it took cues from both cartoon series and the games and did its own thing and ran for so much longer.

right like from the end of the genesis era to the dreamcast era which was like four or five years there was no other sonic media really being produced in the west and the archie sonic comics carried that banner and just did their own thing for better or for worse and it became its own little microcosm it was its own beast so that when i came on to it it had already been running for what 15 years or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And you also had the fanfic community, which was really, really fertile at that point as well.

So when I came on to Archie Sonic, I was coming on to a legacy book, multiple editors, multiple writers, multiple changes in licensing direction. That's right. The Archie Sonic stuff started, it was handled by Sega of America.

And in that day and age, children. There wasn't an idea of a global brand. You had the brand for the Western market and the brand for the Eastern market and near the Twain shall meet. But come the globalization of the brand with the Dreamcast and Sonic Adventure back in 99, everything became the Japanese style. All the old American lore was more or less chucked and you had to adhere to the Japanese-driven narrative, which was largely inaccessible to the West up to that point. And that had already been a bit of a seismic shift in the Archie Sonic, which was still maintaining the old Western lore while incorporating the new Eastern lore and making it their own

thing. So when I came on board, this melting pot was a simmerin. It was all sorts of stuff. It was quite the gumbo of narrative. So Mega Man, however, never had that consistency. You'd have a cartoon here, you'd have a comic attempt there, games were sporadic, and it branched off into a million different franchise angles with X and dash and zero and what have you. So when I came to Mega Man the comic for Archie, Mega Man Classic was, for all intents and purposes,

done at that point because again like nine and ten i think we're just coming out or hadn't quite come out when archie sonic uh archie megaman started they they've been out for a couple of years had they okay but it was still they were still kind of new in their own right it was oh look classic megamans back we haven't had this in forever yeah and even still you would had everything from megaman one up to eight established for a long time and the various other little spinoffs and tying things. So the story was written. It was established. The fandom was familiar with it inside and out. So coming to that, I wasn't so much picking up a legacy book and continuing with my square to the crazy quilt. I was looking at

what had already been established and was just doing my adaptation of what was already there. the roadmap had been laid out for me. Right. It was just a matter of, okay, how do we fill in the gaps between games? How do we tie things together a little more tightly because that's what they weren't thinking of back in the 80s? No. They didn't know what color Mega Man was. They were like, he's kind of greenish on my broken ass TV.

So he's going to be kind of greenish in this cartoon. Why does it sound like a smoker? Everyone sounds like a smoker. It's the 80s kid. Mega, mega. And then we get stuff like, like, cats. Capcom was exceedingly flexible with approvals in that era. I have worked with Capcom before, and they're pretty good with approvals.

And even though I started to tighten up on things towards the end of the comic run, they are still by far the most flexible of any licensure I have ever worked with. So the level of creative freedom we had with that title was insane. like the fact that they we were allowed to adapt super adventure rock man yes and make it a core plot beat still blows my mind that was great but again i wouldn't have been able to do that if megaman were still growing and evolving and changing classic was done more or less so i was able to look at it at the macro level and parse it down and understand it that way So, yeah, completely different approaches to completely different properties with histories and standings. So even with the Archie reboot and the new IDW thing, the fact that Sonic is still ongoing on a regular basis that basically lends a different perspective, I guess. Yeah, the Archie Sonic reboot was a nasty not to untie. Because we wanted, the book had such a legacy and such an ardent fan base that we knew we couldn't just wholesale reboot because there'd be riots.

There would be pitchforks and fire in the streets. But we were also, you know, really painted into a corner with what we could use in terms of older material. So how do you make something that is accessible to the casual Sonic game fan who will be picking up this book because they've heard. it's a fresh reboot and it's a fresh start but also make it palatable to those who are going to miss that 20 years of lore that's just been tossed out the window it was not an easy balancing act i think we did the best with what we did had um and given the turnaround time i'm rather proud of what the team was able to accomplish but it was it was a challenge whereas idw Sonic is part of the greater Sonic brand now.

Like Archie Sonic was its own thing. It was the weird red-headed stepchild. IDW Sonic is modern Sonic. It is part of the greater brand. It is scrutinized differently. And it has a different working relationship with second and the licensing. So it itself is also a very different beast. You know,

I don't know. a kind of out of the blue question for you that just formed in my mind, God help you. I know you didn't, you're not very good at Mega Mac games, but you still play them, of course, right? Like, I'm sure you played them. Lots. Do you ever, this is something I used to do a lot. Do you ever kind of go through the games and kind of come up with a story as you play, like the visual storytelling in the game? Like, for example, a popular AMV has a Mega Man going through Dustman stage, which is a robot junkyard and having these, terrible, existentially regret set to one of the best OCE remixes of all time. I have to admit, I never kind of thought of Dustman that way, even though he's like my favorite robot master. But that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Like, do you ever do anything like that? I have not been able to be successful enough with Mega Man to have that luxury. Your head is just full of swears.

Yeah, like, let me put it this way. When Mega Man 11's demo came out, I couldn't beat it on easy mode. Okay. That's how abysmally atrocious I am at Mega Man. Sitting back and watching somebody else play it competently, it's like, ah, okay. Now I can, like with Mega Man, shoot, which one is Gemini Man? That's three. Three?

That's my baby. When you get to his stage and there's all the weird like bubbles and like tadpole eggs and whatever floating around. Damn those things. Like if I were playing it straight, I would be busy trying to navigate the stage and I'm think about it. Watching it, I'm like, what is this? Right. Where are we? What is the context for this stage? What is the theme? Why is Gemini Man here? How does this make any sense? You still use the visual storytelling of the games to kind of come up with your stories. Absolutely. Absolutely. Because, you know, Mega Man is more than just Blue Man go shoot bad robot.

It's the journey. It's, you know, he's a hitman. He's going out into the world to take out these other robots. And part of that is the journey, you know, getting there. Right. And, you know, doing Bowelman stage means something wildly different than doing Shade Man stage. Right. Oh, Shade Man stage is so freaking awesome. I love Shade Man. Personally, like, the reason I like writing for young adult stuff like that is because I'll admit, I kind of like to write the darker, edgier stuff.

but with something like the young adult or comic genre you have to you have to censor yourself a bit so you can't go absolutely crazy like I kind of am so tired of like edgy power rangers and stuff like that I just I'm struggling to get through Castlevania to be honest with you just because

nobody stops saying the F word for five seconds don't get me wrong I'm fucking filtered than a two peckered goat something I just picked up from Borders Gate 3 but you got to stop sometimes you got to stop so that people recover for a moment and think you're good and then come right out again. You can't just kind of barrage me over and over again, and that's my complaint.

Yeah, so I'm jealous, you got you right for Mega Man. That's, I think that's what I'm getting at here. Well, Mega Man, too, you know, to be true to the franchise, you have to play within its rules. And Mega Man, classic is fun. It's bright. It's colorful. It's bubbly. It deals with some bigger ideas in the core game, not just where we went with the comic.

but it's always cheerful and hopeful in the end. It is. Yeah, hopeful. There's always a brightness in there. And I feel like some folks kind of overhype the darkness of X. I mean, there is some blinding neon throughout that series. It is just as candy colored. But there is that darker undercurrent. And classic doesn't have that.

So while we were approaching some. of these more somber ideas throughout, there was always this kind of looming idea of this is classic. You can't take it to the dark side because that's not what classic is. Mega man can shoot out of his hand, but he can't hold a gun and shoot out of the gun. There always has to be room to walk it back so that they can go on a picnic on a sunny day and you're not worried about them having flashbacks. It's hope. That's what it is. It's hopeful. It's fun. It's accessible. And I think that's part of what makes classic so endearing is that you can come to it at any point and feel comfortable with, you know, whatever doom is on the horizon.

For sure. Yeah. If you had had the chance, would you have liked to cross over a Mega Man with any other property that's not Sonic? Sure. I mean, that's the fun of any of these. Fantasy things is seeing how they fit together. You know, what are the themes that you can wind between the two? What are characters that would get to work together well or not work together well? I actually, since Rockman Dive kind of put the idea in my head, I would love to play a Megman X Monster Hunter crossover. That would just be radical men. I just, it'd be so cool that it can't even find the words to express how cool that would be.

But yeah, that would be my dream crossover. But I'm not really huge, huge, huge new crossovers. like the kids today who are all like universe that and verse that and Marvel, Disney, whatever. But yeah, it's a, I don't know, you like say Skies of Arcadia, Mega Men's Skies of Arcadia. Oh, that's Mega Men Legends. Let me try something else. What about you, David? Oh, gosh.

Like you just point out, it would depend on the series. Like Skies of Arcadia with Legends, for example. As far as classic, honestly, I think. the most enticing idea would be if Mega Man was able to meet his, how do I put this? Progenitor, Astro Boy.

Hmm, that'd be cool. I like that a lot. That would be a neat crossover, I think. Isn't there a poster, official poster of them shaking hands that came out quite recently or something like that? I think there was some sort of a Capcom Tazuka art exhibit

or something going on. I forget if that was a part of it, but if there's ever going to be an official one, that's where it would be. Kind of a semi-related question then, Ian. What other Mega Man series would you want to do that's not X or classic? Like, would you like to do, I don't know if you're a huge Battle Network fan, but the kids really love Battle Network.

Battle Network, what little I experienced of it, was fun and engaging and certainly neat. Yeah. But because it wasn't part of, the core timeline, I never did as much of a deep dive on it as the others. Like when I was working on the comic, it was like, okay, here's classic, and we know that goes into X, and we know that goes into zero, and that goes into ZX, and that will eventually lead to dash, and there's that through line. I need to understand all of Mega Man to make this work

in the long con, because totally, I'm going to have this for 30 years. There's, there's going to be no bumps in the road. And then it's like, okay, here's the battle network. It's its own thing. That's fantastic. I cannot keep up with all that Lord. No. So going back to it fresh, sure. That would be neat. I wrote a quick timeline guide on US Gamer RIP back in the day about how one of the characters, Andrew, if he follow his story, which he tells you in Mega Man Zero, you can kind of put together what happened in the timeline of Mega Man. And it's, I mean, not everything, of course, but kind of got a general idea of what went on

because he fell in love with a human and was a teacher and this and that. And he just has a really interesting perspective that is the only hint of any sort of longevity between the, any sort of connection between the series that you're going to get very strange, very interesting. Mm-hmm. Do you think there's any chance at all that IDW will revive the comic? I mean, please. I can't say it's impossible, but I don't know. Right. On the one hand, I, from my understanding, IDW and Archie have a good working relationship as companies.

And were IDW to pick up the license, you would have a large library of material that you could put straight to trade real fast. Yeah. And I have a good working relationship with IDW. I work well with their team. I would just love to hit the ground running and pick up where we left off. and finally get to Mega Man 4. That's what I was building towards that was the Mountain Peak. That pissed me off.

What a place to end. Oh, man. But at the same time, it's been how many years since Mega 55? 2015 is when, like, the December. So it's been eight years, I believe. So I would understand why IDW and Capcom wouldn't want to revive a, old dead book. Right. It'd be a reset probably.

To pick up in the middle of a major storyline to go forward. They would probably want to start something fresh somewhere. So, which I understand truly. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. It hurts to say it out loud, but I get it. Whatever it would take to save it, the idea, I suppose. Like the nightmare scenario is that IDW gets it and it's classic. but it's a fresh start yeah and it's like here Ian tell it again it's like but we did it right the first time yeah we did it we shot it eight times and we did it is done now if we were in that scenario you know the monkeys paul curls and here's classic again but start from scratch i definitely would not take the uh what's what i'm looking decompressed approach that we did with archie sonic that was built very much

much for the four-issue trades at the time. And it was built with the assumption that it would have the same kind of staying power as Sonic, which, by all rights, it largely did. Uh-huh. Without getting into too much behind the curtain talk, we thought we had time to really tease things out and take our time. I thought I had to do the Twilight Zone guy. It's not fair.

If we were to do it again, I would take a more aggressive approach to explore things a little faster, or maybe take the EREGA approach and say, okay, classic happened. Now we're just going to play with all the toys post 11. That would be awesome. Maybe. I don't know. That's the kind of approach I would like to see. Or I would have loved to see what you're going to do with four. So if you could like, you know, just summarize, okay, one, two, three.

And this is for, this is where the story gets interesting, arguably. I don't know. Working with that might be cool. But I know no one here is a wizard. Just comic wishes. Comic wishes. I was going to ask if you think it would be viable, like, okay, if you're starting again from square one, but you're following the same template and trying to get back to that same point, do you think that maybe like kind of telling an abridged version of the stuff that's gone on in the Archie comic? Like, because you said it would be like, wouldn't be as decompressed.

Do you think something like that would be viable and then the two would just kind of converge at Mega Man 4? Maybe. So either way, you could pick it up. Maybe. The thing is, like, when we started off IDW Sonic, we had a issue a week for issue blitz that was specifically designed to bring readers up to speed on what Sonic was. Here's the Prince of the cast. Here's the tone of the world. Here are the stakes.

They're each individual stories. So you can pick them up separately, but they're all building towards a final goal. It was kind of a crazy construction, but that's kind of the spirit of what you're asking for Mega Man. With Mega Man, however, I feel like to cover all those points, it would be more like a clip show. Right. And that's not good comic reading. That's like your free comic book, Dead. here's what you missed.

Come back next month and pick up the real book. And we already did like two clip show time travel stories. Doing a third kind of feels like you're really pushing that envelope. Is there a story that you really wanted to tell? Like in you were other than the Megamad 4 story, of course, like say around the X series, like that you're really kind of saving up for. Oh, got X in and of itself. I wanted all that

Give me all the chocolate But out of everything in X I think what I wanted the most was X4 Ah Oh I've been so good The build up to it To establish Repliforce To establish the

Two competing attempts to regulate Reploid society And then to look into the tragedy of it Which is ultimately a battle of ego. Yes. It's two organizations, yeah, both,

two groups, both alike and dignity here. Fittal loins, indeed. If either side could just swallow their pride and talk to the other, Sigma's plan would have fallen apart, but both organizations were built on these lofty ideals that were in direct opposition to each other, so there was no room to, back down.

Right. And that's the tragedy of it, is they're both trying to do what's right, but are going about it the wrong way. And that plays directly into Sigma's hands. And that, I feel like, is the most interesting use of his corruptive power. Right. Turning everyone into Mavericks, making them violent or bending them to his will, that's fine and like your evil wizard zombie type of thing.

But to do it on a philosophical level. where there is no magic evil code that just rewrite you to do bad. That it's the heroes making the mistake, but you understand why. That I feel is just so compelling. I have to admit, I'm going to reveal how utterly snobbish I am right now by saying, when I wrote fan fiction's way back in the day and I wrote Sigma, I based him on Iago from Othello. and just the kind of like the back talker, the backstabber, the kind of person who could put terrible images in your head and make you believe the worst of another person.

I liked writing him as a more like kind of psychological attacker versus a physical attacker. And Sigma in particular, I caught I wish we could have really got into your start. It's just a goddamn why. Just because he was built to be the hero of all Reploid. He was supposed to be the pinnacle. And to, I really wanted to get into his head and show how this idea of, I am the best of my kind meant to protect everyone and how that twisted to, I am the best of my kind and we are being held back by these lesser beings. By these humans. And while I wasn't super wild about some of the revisions in the Mavercounter X remake.

I did like the shift so that Sigma's fixation was on X more than zero. It made X feel like the protagonist again. Right. Yeah, for sure. And his fixation on X being the true pinnacle of what the reploids want to be. Because the reploids are all Kirkland brand X when you get down. Dr. Kane's like, I can almost get this right, but it ain't good enough. Ship it.

And Sigma is the pinnacle of the book. Footlegs when you get down to it. Yeah. And he recognizes X as that true potential. He is alive. He is that one step beyond. And he desperately wants that for himself. And at the same time, he wants X to take the next step as well, because you can be so

much more than these fleshy little meat bags. Why do you protect them? Let's work together to make our kind better. Also, I'm a ghost now. And I'm going to mostly be a ghost for the duration of this series. Do you, did you, or do you read or look at Iwo Moto's Rockman X manga at all? I have not. No. Now, that's very interesting because, again, going back to my horrid fanfic background,

I was hugely inspired by Iwo Moto's stuff. couldn't read most of it. I did get a couple translations, the early 2000s, man. But just looking at the way he draws Mega Man X and Zero and how much emotion he puts into it is just like, it's not just one of the best pieces of Mega Man media, but also just some of the best like adaptation media I've ever read because he just really puts his everything into it. He still does. He still writes all the time about Mega Man on his Twitter account. Now, the reason I ask you this is because it ties into our cool challenge. that we're going to kind of issue here. So Iwamoto also wrote a Megaman novel. He summarized Rockman X through a novel form. That's really, I really do recommend to read that because you'll absolutely love it. It has been translated. Half of translation is pretty good.

The other half's very rough. I don't know if anyone's going to go back and fix that. But it's not so bad that you can't tell what's going on. And the reason I bring this up is because when Megamon X, sorry, Rockman X goes up against the Mavericks. there's like always some quirk to them always some background story something that always makes them like you know really unique and interesting and for launch octopus slash octopold his whole thing is he's an artist and if he played Mega Man Maverc Hunter X you probably know that right you remember that launch octopus was all like oh my god look at my cool works right oh god it's been so long but yeah he's not that important basically he's an artist and in the novel the he makes this is so stupid he makes Mega Man X walk through a display based on

here it comes the seven deadly sins now now I heard you grunt you're grunt of I want to get my hands on this thing and destroy it I feel that energy Ian

I understand this in my heart because I felt the exact same way now in the novel it's all kind of very basic I have to admit I don't know if it's a translation I don't know if it's a source material

but it's all like oh he goes to the wrath room and there's rebel fights fighting each other It's not really, it doesn't make you think. It doesn't make you think. And I love Eumoto. I respect him. But it's like, oh, he goes into the lust room and there's like a reploid with a nice body in there.

Like, what is that? That doesn't mean anything. Now, Ian, let's say that you have like, okay, all the room that you want. You can do this like, you can do this as a comic or a story. But let's say you do it as a comic. Like, what would you do? Like, how do you represent those sins? That's what I want to know, especially lust.

Don't shake it out on lust. Don't forget. It has to be like PG. that's where the challenge comes in all right so you don't have to do all the things just anything off the top of your head like you know to go for it well forget launch octopus this is now going to be presided over by a new maverick leader infernal dante there we go now we're talking with gas so to speak oh what are the classic seven days so gluttony gluttony means nothing to reploids because they don't necessarily have to to eat. It was addressed in the story, though. I will tell you that much was probably interesting because energy crystals, which are kind of, to me, I also thought they were a new thing. Like, they're needed to power reploids, but that's always been the case, apparently. Like, it was just in Japan. Like, it was known. And here, it wasn't known. So there is an instance where X goes into a

room and it's full of energy crystals. It doesn't mean anything, but your version is probably better whatever you're going to come up with. What does it say, if they don't have to eat, nobody told double, but I mean, I interpret it as they can eat because they are made to be simulacrums of humans. Yeah. That anything they ingest can contribute to their energy processing systems, but the inner gen is what gets them moving. Right. But the whole thing that gluttony isn't needing to eat.

It is the indulgence of eating to take in for just the sake of consumption. Yes. so it wouldn't necessarily be food or energy but power you know x needs the arsenal he needs the tools to fight his one-man war against the maverick hunters that have been turned against him this is civil war his world is imploding he would need everything he can get to protect people so instead of a room full of energy crystals i'm imagining just like this complete arsenal he could modify himself forever and walk out as, you know, God only knows, some kind of abomination. That sure, he could nuke Sigma, but there's always that one more tweak, that one more optimization, that one more bit of software.

He could continue to improve himself and just take in more and stop being X. Yeah. That would be the threat of gluttony. That's awesome. The part of the thing is, like, X is supposed to represent limitless potential. So I suppose you can find that aspect with the gluttony. It's like, would there ever be an end? Exactly.

And that's why it's a trap room. It's, you know, the man in black has left this for you, gunslinger. I get that reference. Let's see. Pride. Pride's an easy one. You were just mentioning, uh, yeah, reploid, Repliforce and hunters just like not talking to each other. I think if replicers are guilty of any sin.

Pride and is represented by zero. We're working in this context of it's kind of a trap room in early in Sigma's rebellion. Good point. Yeah. Yeah. So this is, we're pre-replophores. Sigma in a way is pride. Mm-hmm. You know, pride in himself, pride in his construction, pride in his people. But I feel like that's a big thing to drop into the pride room.

Hi, I'm pride. How you doing? Today I'm not Sigma. I'm pride. And I guess it's too early to call out like, Like, X or what was the other X knockoff? X-Kai. There we go. He was from an alternate X2. Those are all too early. But something along the lines of another version of X, because there is that pride to be had there.

He is the template for all Reploid kind. Right. There is great pride to be had there. He could be the leader. Why is he not leading the rebellion? Why is it Sigma? When he is the superior construction. He could take control of all this.

He could lead the Reploid Revolution because it would be his. It should be his. Why has he not claimed his destiny? And he's like, no, I like people. And he walks out the room. Yeah, I like people. He walks through the door and then there's just a pit there. Why is there a kid, Icarus reference in here?

Not what comes after pride. Oh, the fall. Aha. I see what you're doing there. Wrath would be, I guess, a unwinnable hostage situation or shoot, maybe even some kind of Sigma doppelganger, because there's a lot to be angry about. Yeah. The whole point was to build a better society, and now it's being torn apart, and he doesn't

want to fight anyone. He doesn't want to hurt anyone, and you're forcing his hand. The whole reason he put the buster on was to protect others. You are making him go against everything he stands for. So if you want him to be violent, fine, he'll be violent. He'll put it into it. He'll shoot every one of you. No, he's not.

No, he's not. This is just a trap room. There are not innocents involved. These are not fully functioning reploids. These are just like mechanoloids. He can get through this. He doesn't have to fire a single shot. He will get through this on his own terms peacefully.

he will circumvent wrath. Nice. That's kind of different from what I was thinking for it, which would basically be the climax of Dave Sigma, just playing in front of him on a loop. Hmm. I can never remember what the seven percent of least. I always say anger.

Pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. Now, greed is, it's kind of an extension of gluttony, but it's more monetary. It's material goods. Right. And you could also argue that that. room full of endless arsenal kind of falls under that but it's not really the same i guess because it's not for his personal gain it's for consumption in that regard so i don't know if he could be tempted by anything remotely greed like here's all the zinny in the world maybe he'll build your own

moon colony you know we'll buy you australia you can live with the humans there what's this might Who drop us here? I would think that maybe there's a chance he could pick up a bad habit from humans about hoarding things that make him feel good. There you go. Here's all this memorabilia from the classic era, you know, a time where you came from, but you don't have. We'll give you all these antiques. You can curate it. My idea on that one, it's definitely a far forward kind of, I guess, foreshad.

You could say, maybe not do it exactly, but I think probably the best representation of greed, like, you know, for X would be Neo Arcadia. Hmm. That's a good point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would have to be done as like kind of a vision of the future or something. Like, what's this fuzzy image? What am I looking at? They've done it before.

You could have it all. You could have control over what everyone thinks. You could have peace because everything belongs to you. You could be the savior of all mankind. And next is like, I'll never fall for that somewhere in the far future, zero goes, of all the ridiculous ideas before me today, this is just the stupidest. Sloth is a replication, is a replica of his original capsule. And the option to just go to sleep, you cannot fix this crisis. It's too big for you.

You don't even want to fight anyway. This is not only a danger to your body. It is destroying your poor little digital soul. Just go to sleep. And when you wake up, it'll all be over. You don't have to lift a finger. Let the problem solve itself. Right.

If humanity can overcome this, they'll wake you up. If the Mavericks take over, they'll wake you up. You'll be fine. You don't have to do anything. You're so tired of this fight already. Just lay back and take a nap for the next thousand years. Yeah, that's a good one That's a little more interesting

version of what I had in mind Which was basically just playing into his Like, you know, reluctance to fight I was going to play into him just like sitting on the couch and eating corn chips Because everyone does it. Human or Reploid What are the two we miss in? Lust and

Envy. Envy is zero. Ooh. Oh, yeah, for sure. Like the whole start of X is, you know, the fact that he can't beat vile, and zero comes in and one shots everything. Zero is the cool one. He's got the saber.

He's got the cooler color scheme. He's got the hair. He's a green ranger than other green ranger. Exactly. And it's, you know, the bar that he wants to reach. So I guess within the room of envy, it would be some replica of zero because goodness knows, we never will see that ever again. never telling x that either a he can't reach that point so he might as well give up you know i know

this is what you want but look at you little baby boy no my baby boy or you know i can fast track you to this we can be equals if we serve sigma you know you can be the cool one i'll even paint your red if you want you can be corvette x i'm just picturing x out there with like a real sloppy paint job. Why did you at least tape my face before you? Sorry. I'm just imagining X waving away the paint. And he's like, nope, I got this.

And they just change his colors. I got your color. Power. And Zero is like, wait, what did you have that would let you turn into that particular color scheme? And X is like, uh, nothing. Lest is a, all right, this is when we need to kind of dissect because we know that there is emotional desire within the reploids.

We see that between Iris and Zero. Yes. They can have emotional ties between their own kind. And you've got characters like Therum, which are definitely designed with something in mind. They're designed for a purpose. Yeah. But there is the question of do Reploids feel lust? Is there a sexual attraction?

because they don't reproduce sexually. Part of sexual attraction is that base desire to reproduce to get all the interlocking gears interlocking and exchange the genetic information. And with Reploid, you have the digital DNA, but you basically upload that into a shell for the next of kin. You literally build your next kid. And I don't see that primal drive being there.

So it's no one sat down and explained it except maybe the only the biggest hint we have is again mega man zero where you have reploids falling in love with humans and vice versa and they live together. So it's got to be something going on. That's the emotional side again. And lust is not necessarily emotional. It's I mean, all the seven deadly sins are a degree of unrestrained consumption. Mm-hmm. self-destructive intake, where moderation is normally the key. And lust just doesn't exist because there isn't that carnal desire within the reploid. So what is an equivalent to what reploids want? And I guess that becomes an even bigger question of what is it that reploids want? Yeah. This is definitely the hardest one to get around.

And thus I would, here's what I would do. This is more about not just the evils of less, but also to destroy X's total faith in mankind. He would go into a room and there would be, you know, just a handful of reploys hanging out there, a female reploid, a male reploid, maybe a non-conforming reploid, you know, just different genders represented. And they're all clearly abused in some way, used, you know, beat up. and one of the reploids, a female most likely, says, oh, Mega Man X, we have such stories to tell you, and that would be it. If it helps at all, Wikipedia says that lust is a psychological force producing intense desire for something or circumstance while already having a significant amount of the desired object, and it can be lust for sexuality, money, or power, so I don't know if that helps. I mean, then we're getting into, you know, it's gluttony.

And it's greed again. It's the base desire for having more than what you already have. Whatever we can come up with, it would be a lot better than a pretty lady. A, I'm a pretty sexy lady. Yeah, just saying, you know, X is tempted by robo titties. Just, it's, that's the easy way out. It really is. Exactly.

Hard mode. You can't use zero. I was going to say, like, it's pretty clear he already wants zero's robo titty. So, I mean, don't we all. A ladybot doesn't mean anything. So that's one, I guess that's one for you to think on. I cannot deconstruct that one on the fly, I'm afraid. You had Trump three.

Six out of seven ain't bad, though. No, you did really well. Like, you had some great ideas there. I love sloth. Dear God, do I feel sloth? Except I won't wake up in a thousand years. I'll wake up like in eight hours and be like,

oh, all my problems are still here. Shit. You'll wake up and you'll be like, okay, why is everything underwater? What's digging? I also like the, I also like the gluttony one. That's a really good idea.

Like, not just like gluttony for food. Obviously, they can't work, but like gluttony for that power kind of ties into envy as well. So good job. Um, hey, Capcom, look, Ian wrote a fantastic story and we helped. So why don't you like, you know, maybe hire him and make that comic. Somebody, please. I won't make it an X to exist as a comic again. I think enough time is passed. And it's so inconsequential. I can say it. But I was actually on board to do the next classic game. Years before 11 was even known about. Wow.

Well, and I got as far as one conference call to talk about, you know, the scope of the project, the expectations, what would contracts look like. And then I think a month later, there was a major internal shuffle with Capcom and it completely dissolved. And that's the last I heard from him. I'm sorry. The basic core idea of it would have been the end of the classic era. like not necessarily the cataclysm right i'm i'm not a big fan of the catacly no i don't i don't really follow the classic but the end of rock and roll's journey the end of blues's journey the end of bass's journey and you know setting up okay this is where classic raps

x is from pretty much at this point on yeah and uh yeah didn't happen i don't know i've always set odds with the idea of classic actually ending because it's you know it's basically like effectively they're Mario, they're Sonic and it's like you know we kind of know what happens later but you know I see it

it's more like you know okay maybe you could do something like Batman Beyond Return of the Joker where you're kind of like you know looking forward at it but then like the stories still go on as they want with you know cart racing and soccer games and whatever else they want to do on the side but

incidentally i was just thinking speaking of x as we've been doing a lot um what do you think if idw did a x book and then came back and picked up the archie megaman comic like you know later like after that was established do you think that would be a more viable proposition i think so yeah because you know what we did with x in the archie verse was so light that we could retread that ground again without it feeling like we're spinning our wheels and then launch into X proper. Like what we had in Archie X,

that's such a weird thing to say out loud. It wouldn't be... I'm picturing Archie in Mega and X armor. Gee, Reggie, why are you defecting to Sigma? Shut up, carrot top. Would Reggie be vile? God. I mean, there he is.

There wouldn't be any, like, essential reading from that era. We could start into X at the beginning or even before the rebellion, you know, just to set the stage a bit and then go from there and then tie it back without too much must or fuss, I think. Yeah, it can be done. I want to see it done. And then maybe reintroduced classic after some trades have been printed or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like hit the ground running with it. X, because it can stand alone.

Yeah. Seed of the trades with Classic and then, oh, hey, now the classics all back out there. Here's Mega Man 4. Here's Cossack story. I'm moving toward that. Right.

Oh, thank you. Yeah. So, hey, I guess maybe we have a plan if anybody's listening to it. And yeah, we actually do have a lot of people listening. People like the show. People like Retronauts. And this has been a really, really

great episode, but I'm afraid we have to wrap it up. So thank you so, so much, Ian, for joining us on this paper Megaband episode. Did you have fun? Oh, absolutely. You guys are lovely to chat with, and Mega Man's a great topic. So easy, peasy. Oh, we had a great time. I am your host, Nadia Oxford.

Please support Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com for slash Retronauts. Support us at the $3 level to get episodes a week early and ad-free. Support us at the $5 level for two exclusive podcasts a month. Subscribe at the magical Nintendo $64 level for a chance. Is that the topic of a reptronaut episode of your own once every six months? Now, Ian, where can we find you these days? You can find my website, bumbleking.com. That's Bumble like the B, King like the reigning monarch.

That has my full portfolio, a number of online shop options, including signed comics. And links to the Bumblecast, which is my own podcast, where we do Q&A sessions, every episode. You can ask me anything that you want. We have prioritized cues so that you can pay to get to the head of the line as best you can, or whole episodes dedicated to your questions, just you, or shoot, even guest spots, kind of like what I'm doing here. So head over to bumblecast.com. That's bumblecast with a K or bumbleking.com. And you'll find other links to my personal Patreon, where I have the odd bit of personal writing when I actually have time to do that. my two original comics,

Drogoon and the Nine Lives of Claus McGee, and all the other things that I can't think of right now. Because I put you on the spot, but that's okay. We know where to find you. We know where to go if we, sorry, when we have Ian write the next Mega Man comic. So

there you go. There's where he is. And what about you, David? Where can we find you? I know, but these people don't. Well, let's see. I'm on Twitter at LBD underscore Night Train, NY-T-E-T-R-A-Y-N. and also at the M.M. Network, that's the Mega Man Network's Twitter.

And you can find me on other social media, although I'm not doing much with them yet, but same names, minus the underscore on Blue Sky. And I'm also updating the MMnetwork.com pretty frequently, including some Mega Man world fiction of my own, which I've got a big thing poised to drop on December 17th, the 30th anniversary of Megamon X. So I hope people will be checking that out. And you should check it out.

As for me, you can find me at the Axe of Blood God podcast. We cover RPG's old and new, eastern and western. Please support us at patreon.com for slash BloodGlybodod pod. That is also where I host Charlene Dropouts with Victor Hunter and sometimes Eric Van Allen and Mike Williams. We talk all about Final Fantasy 14. And yeah, until next time. Now you know what happens when Mega Man gets equipped with a red-hand

teenager that owns a shitty jalopy. I'm going to be able to be.