So I picked up Megatokyo, Volume 3 yesterday at Hastings. For those of you somehow not in the know, Megatokyo is one of the most popular webcomics around. Its fanbase can be pretty rabid, but so can its detractors.
I know a lot of people have complained that Megatokyo has gone downhill since one of the co-creators, Largo (aka Rodney Caston), left the project and Piro (aka Fred Gallagher) took complete control. The tug between their two world views--Largo's bizarre, blow-everything-up-that-moves-while-speaking-l33t attitude and Piro's wishy-washy, shoujo-manga-esque approach to life--provided an interesting dichotomy that gave the early strips life, energy, and a sense of completeness. Piro has tried to keep some of the Largo element in the comic since then (after all, the Largo character is still in the comic, though he seems different from before), but the tonal shift in the comic is obvious: Piro is turning it into a comic about relationships, essentially.
Which is fine, really. The tonal shift was pretty gradual, and Piro makes an effort to throw some funny in there every once in awhile. But I think Eric Burns over at Websnark had a point: Piro's pacing is awful. And it's not just that there are filler days almost as often as there are new comics. No, even when new comics pop up, the story doesn't seem to go anywhere.
Which is to say that I was surprised by the fact that the story actually seemed to move in the printed version, where you have a couple of chapters collected together all at once and without the filler in between strips. There was plot and character development, things happened, and the story gelled in a way it's never really done online.
All of which leads me to believe that Megatokyo is, really, a strip or story better suited to the printed book format rather than the page-a-day internet format. You can't notice the plot movement when you take it one strip at a time. But altogether, with nothing in between to break up the flow of the comic--it works. Quite well.
So I'll stick it out with Megatokyo, I think. Seeing the improvement brought about by the printed version gives me a bit more faith in Piro's abilities as a storyteller. I may miss the days of Largo playing Mortal Kombat to get into Japan, but the story we have now is still pretty interesting.
~chuck
Song of the Moment: Minus 5, "Days of Wine and Booze"
Saturday, February 19, 2005
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2 comments:
Troubled Times...and really any serious comic on the web...is really the same way. It's almost impossible to keep the interest of people that are used to reading the same thing in a 25 page a month comic book as opposed to a 52 page (or whatever, based on update frequency...I'm just using TT as an example) webcomic. That's like 1/6th the amount of story progression.
But the thing is, Megatokyo is supposed to update three times a week, not once. I can accept that yeah, given that he's only getting 24-27 updates per month, tops, he's still taking about half of those as "Dead Piro Days." I see Eric Burns' point, really--The plot could move a little faster. Now, gathered together in a collection, things do seem to progress and occur, and the pacing is much better. You almost wonder if it wouldn't be better for Piro to go a more traditional manga route and release in batches--a section at a time, as it were, like once a month, then release a couple of chapters in a collection every so often. But hey, I'm still reading and still buying his books, so he must be doing something right, y'know?
Besides, Ping manages to have things happen updating only once a week.
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