Comments on: MegaTokyo Wars

By: TheBigN

TheBigN — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 13:18:00 +0000

I’m still reading Megatokyo but not focusing quite as much on it as before. It’s definitely become something to me where I can’t read it a page at a time, though there are still people who can and do while passionately discussing it. I don’t think it’s a failure like Hinano does, but I do think it’s a fine balance, and many times, it feels like Fred shouldn’t release one strip at a time. Certainly when I read a chunk of them at once, everything makes sense, though you could consider each single strip as a one-shot that ties into everything else. But pacing chunk-wise compared to single-pages differs in this case, and I’m not sure it’s a good thing.

Otherwise, I still find it an enjoyable read and a good one, but not a great one. And there is progress, unlike other stuff out there. :P

By: Misha

Misha — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 04:37:00 +0000

I originally tried reading Megatokyo a few years ago and found it impenetrable, for a variety of reasons, but I revisited it a couple of months ago and spent the next few days merrily reading through the past several years of archived comics until I was current. I realize this is something of an unpopular opinion with a number of blogosphere commentators, but I really like the comic, even with its glacial pace… which, admittedly, wasn’t as much of a problem when reading through seven years’ worth of accumulated storyline. Having caught up to current, however, the dribble of page-at-a-time, once-or-twice-a-week story advancement is problematic.

All of which is basically a long-winded way of saying that I agree with you, CCY.

By: Jarlath

Jarlath — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 04:22:00 +0000

It’s not a webcomic – it’s a manga which has releases to the web FIRST, which then get collected; sorta like if you were reading your weekly or monthly manga magazine’s stories, a page at a time, every two or three days.

Penny Arcade is a webcomic – the storylines are fairly self-contained, when they exist, and the joke or the payoff comes through pretty quickly.

Megatokyo’s story, on the other hand, progresses in chapters; you can’t just jump into the middle of the storyline and ‘get it’, any more than you could probably jump into AMG or some other manga mid-chapter and be able to follow the plot, and outside of enjoying the art… well, you’d have to go back to the beginning of the chapter to at least follow along with what’s happening, and only really enjoy it by having followed the series for a few volumes, by which point you know the characters, how things got to the way they are, and why Keiichi can’t ever seem to get past the hand-holding stage.

I enjoy Megatokyo – I have since the beginning (starting about a week after it first got posted), and have been collecting the books since his first publishing attempt through Iron Cat, then through Dark Horse, and now through CPM. It’s very much in the mode of a manga, which means it’s pretty inaccessible to a new reader unless they start from the beginning of that chapter, or maybe the first hundred or so strips.

By: dm

dm — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 03:07:00 +0000

I think you’re quite right — and I think Fred Gallagher realizes it, too. I read an interview with him a while back where he said that the next project he’s hopes to do is a webcomic, but a straight graphic novel.

For quite a while now the series has been paced for its graphic novel form. I follow the webcomic quite closely, but have come to eagerly anticipate the published books because it helps to read a huge chunk of the series at one time. He still manages to provoke a smile, sometimes a belly-laugh, on each page of the web-comic, but it’s really told as a continuous story now.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 02:19:00 +0000

I think I agree with you. I’ve been reading MT not long after it started (2000) and while I think the earlier parts when it started shifting into a full-blown drama were often quite good and even emotionally affecting at times, I think it’s lost its sense of balance in recent years. MT continued to be interesting because it had slightly more emotional realism than your average romance manga, but now it’s just too convoluted and too angsty for its own good. I think the story really needs a definite ending to head toward.

By: Hinano

Hinano — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 00:20:00 +0000

You know what, I don’t really get it either.

The problem is taking a webcomic and then trying to make it fit into a manga story line while simultaneously keeping the webcomic fans entertained = ultimate failure.