She/Her|INTJ|Aquarius/Gemini Rising/Libra Moon|31|United States X is the best and must be protected at all costs. Fite me. Header by teatea (who's sadly deactivated). :( Blog is SFW and X-centric. Enjoy your stay!
Now on to the Timelines issue. More below the cut.
Why do Reploids need beds? Why is X's room so messy? Usually in the games, they rest in stasis pods. No explanation for this, which is a shame cuz it could've been some good world building about Reploids trying to emulate human behavior and customs.
I absolutely HATE the bottom panel. Why do the generic Reploids look like recolors of X? Look, I know there's that one quote from SENSEI in the Official Complete Works regarding the generic Reploids at the end of X5:
"The Reploids that appear in the ending are X's followers, so I made their body designs very simple. As I was drawing them, I wondered if X looked like this when he was at their level. My simple designs became quite popular among the staff, where the most common comment was, 'I love how they look like cheap knock-offs!' (laughs)" (Suetsugu)
But even then, they still looked unique from X. X5 isn't the only case. You see this in Command Mission, X7, X6, and MHX. Hell, even Archie had unique designs of their own. There's literally no excuse for this, and the fact that Dan tried justifying it as "palette swaps of X" is lazy and disingenuous at best. Especially when he tauts himself as this "big Megaman history and lore guy". Read the transcripts in ShadowRockZX's interviews to see exactly what I mean.
This is exactly interesting. Too bad it doesn't last long (like two pages).
Aside from X looking weird as hell, this is good lore expansion. But again, it's interrupted in favor of retelling the exact events in play-by-play style of X1.
Chill Penguin going Maverick cuz he's bored and not because he hates X for being "high and mighty" is so damn lazy. His characterization sucks here, and is the exact problem I highlighted earlier about Dan wanting this to be based on MHX, yet doing his own thing and taking elements from X1.
X's face is so weird in the third panel. Ugh. I'm so put off by this art. Thank God they replaced the artist for the rest of the issues. Though that isn't saying much when we get to issue #2. You'll see what I mean.
Yeah, that's it for now. I don't know how this book out sold the other Timelines issues, especially since Ian Flynn is a much better writer than Dan Arseneault (he wrote the Zero Timelines issue).
Alright. I decided to bite the bullet and actually try to do a review of the Udon comics, starting with issue #0 as that's the first one in the reading order. I'm not gonna point out obvious Easter eggs as they're just that; obvious.
This is a pretty solid start. The Dr. Light panels are the strongest as far as storytelling goes.
Same with Dr. Cain, but before anything of substance can be fleshed out further, we get interrupted by a mission.
Two issues here: using Vile's cringey Japanese name and "Sigma’s 19th Elite Unit". Don't know if that's a typo or not as Dan never addressed it, but Maverick Hunter units only go up to 17, which is the Elite Unit.
Here's perhaps the most egregious page. Slave name? Since when does a selfish and destructive character like Vile care about Reploid oppression? Why use him as a mouthpiece? It could work with a different character, but I would ditch the whole "slave name" thing as that's a common trope in Western comics/media by white male writers to use non-human characters as allegories for real-life marginalized groups.
This was a cheap way for the writer to try to X-Men his way into a video game about sentient robots. Vile is just coming off as Temu Magneto, and as someone who loves the character (especially after MHX and X8), this really pissed me off. Also, X looks really uncanny here.
Again, the problem with this comic is that Dan claims to be taking ideas from MHX, but then goes and turns Vile into Sigma’s lapdog. You can't have it both ways, my guy. Either the "story" is based on MHX or the original SNES game. This is how you confuse the casuals you claim you're trying to appeal to.
Yeah, this issue is one of the worst, and the art by Edwin Huang doesn't help. X looks weird in a lot of the panels. And don't get me started on those cursed covers for Timelines that were revealed when the comics were announced. The coloring is also off putting.
She is “out-fanfictioned” because, as the strip specifically calls out, she is a girl and a jet. Setting aside for the moment whether “fanfictiony” is an insult or not, why is being a woman more fanfictiony? What makes being a woman a trope? Aren’t girls, like, 51% of us? Is there more than one dude Autobot jet? Yes? Do we do comics about how we roll our eyes at new dude Autobot jets? No? Then why is a lady jet something we single out?
You draw enough TF commissions you see these details in fan characters a lot. Girl-seeker, badass loner, ninjabot with sword… or some combination.
Windblade is none of those. Zero.
She’s not a seeker. She’s got friends. She’s not a ninja.
(Also, as if there were any doubt that you were using “fanfictiony” as an insult, your bit here clears that up.)
And for the record, no, I don’t recall having been asked to draw a Transformers fancharacter for probably half a decade. Plenty of canonical ones, sure. The closest I’ve gotten is “Optimus Prime as a Green Lantern.” But being asked to draw ladyseeker ninja loners is not a trend I can vouch for.
Also David, not sure why you are having fun insulting me. The one time I’ve met you (maybe twice?) you seemed very polite.
I’m not really having that much fun. I would have been super ecstatic to see a comic from you celebrating a new female character, rather than playing into how our society mocks and denigrates them merely for existing. I am WEARY of this. And I am pushing back against it because it’s stupid and it’s damaging and I don’t want to see any more of it. The best thing I can say about it is that maybe you didn’t think through the implications of what you were saying very well and, in the service of making an easy joke, have regurgitated the script culture has given us regarding how women characters are strongly suggested to be viewed.
tl;dr: This strip made me very very angry. Walky smash.
I went digging and couldn't turn up anything, substantial or otherwise, about Matt Moylan. I need to know how low to place my expectations for my second favorite mega men, because it sounds like "pretty damn low"
Matt Moylan is the Director of Publishing over at Udon. He's been there for ages. He's also a total reactionary.
To give full context, this is gonna get a little long.
Moylan is perhaps best known for the Transformers fancomic Lil Formers, which was popular in the '00s. This isn't super important here, but allow me to go on a tangent because it's where a lot of people know the guy from, and it's mildly more entertaining than just screencapping his tweets. The comic was basically just an excuse for him to draw a bunch of chibi Transformers that people would then use in forum signatures and whatnot. Sometimes he would attach his cranky old geewunner opinions and complain about art style changes or new female characters in the dialogue, if he wasn't just making a generic joke about Wheelie being annoying or Seaspray having a silly voice or whatever.
Comedy gold, I know.
Lil Formers was well known within the fandom. Geewunners and kids who didn't know any better and just liked the chibi Transformers (guilty) loved it. Other fans grew more annoyed by Moylan's schtick. As far back as 2009 TFWiki contributor David Willis mocked it in a strip from his own webcomic, Shortpacked:
His wiki page on TFWiki also recounts a bizarre old bit of fandom drama. Moylan had previously worked for the defunct comic publisher Dreamwave, who published the Transformers comics in the early '00s, and in 2006 he went on popular Transformers forum TFW2005 to make several claims about behind the scenes conflicts and unfulfilled story plans. Most bizarre was a claim that Autobot Sunstreaker was supposed to be gay in the Dreamwave comics, which was written off as a childish attempt to rile up the fandom. His claims were all vehemently disputed by the Dreamwave writers he was shit talking, who would also accuse Moylan of anonymously slandering them and sending them threatening emails. Swell guy!
Anyway, hopefully this isn't surprising to literally anyone who's been on a forum in the last decade, but this nerd who won't shut up about the Good Ol' Days of the '80s is now a reactionary conservative who complains about how they're making everything "woke." And unfortunately he's no longer just some guy drawing dumb little one-panel comics about Transformers, he's now overseeing all of the output at Capcom's go-to comic and art book publisher in North America.
Here's some of his tweets to illustrate what he's like these days.
Yes, that's a reply to Mark "Grummz" Kern. He's also chatted up accounts like Libs of Tiktok and Comicsgate ringleader Ethan Van Sciver. Also note the reply in which he tries to tell Greg Weisman himself that Gargoyles had "not an ounce of woke." This guy's brain is fucking cooked.
Here's a take he posted about The Boys, too, just because it's really fucking funny to me:
After I and several other people posted about his behavior over on Bluesky and expressed disinterest in buying anything from Udon (such as the new Mega Man comics), he deleted his Twitter for like a week. He's since restored it, the tweets in question now long gone. Clearly it wasn't a good look for him to be making statements about his employer's values like this, sometimes in the same breath as announcements about new comics. That being said, he's issued no actual apology for his statements, and Udon hasn't acknowledged it at all. There's no reason to believe he's had a change of heart. They're just gonna pretend he never said any of this. And as of a few days ago, he's been announced as the writer for the one-shot Mega Man ZX comic that Udon is putting out later this year. Yaaaayyyy
I know there are a lot of cool people working on stuff for Udon, but Moylan being in a position of power there means I have zero interest in giving that company money. When your Director of Publishing is over on Twitter trying to court an audience of reactionary nerds and proudly proclaiming that Udon is "anti-woke, anti-DEI," and then you go to their website and the first image you see is this...
...Look, I love huge boobs as much as the next bisexual furry pervert, but this particular image in conjunction with his tweets paints a pretty clear picture of what sort of values Moylan is pushing at Udon. He wants to cater to nerds who will buy softcore Street Fighter hentai thinking it'll own the libs.
So hey, if he doesn't want my dirty woke money, fine by me. I'm not touching anything Udon publishes as long as Matt Moylan still works there.
I was planning to make a post about it here, but then I got this ask on main, so that works too. Anyway, here's why I have no intention of discussing Udon's upcoming Mega Man comics on this blog.
I swore I posted this, but I guess not. Pangea in the style of Megaman X8.
She is an energy generator but has a flaw that causes spontaneous overheating from time to time.
The bottom drawings are a couple of meme redraws, the girl Pangea is holding is Shadow, who belongs to ShadowFudo!
Some doodle headshots done on my Samsung tablet. Pangea, Mia and Myth are my ocs, all the other ocs belong to friends!
Artemis belongs to Artsy_Azure
Counter belongs to Cocomocoa
Elysian belongs to SuperEllysan
Shadow belongs to ShadowFudo
Scilla belongs to Samanico
These are some fun ship art gifts I made for my dear friends!
Counter belongs to Cocomocoa
Artemis belongs to Artsy_Azure17
Elysian belongs to SuperEllysan
Scilla belongs to Samanico
Shadow belongs to ShadowFudo
A humanized version of X I did back in December. It’s nothing extraordinary, but I’m happy with the hairstyle I gave him. Now I have my own version of helmetless X. Lol
With the announcement of Megaman 11, I’ve been in a real robot-y mood lately. I mean, yeah, I’ve been working on Booster on-stream with everybody, but I wanted to design another robot so here we go. Similar to how Booster was a not-Turbo Man/Quick Man, I guess this is a not-Junk Man/Dust Man?
The droid known only as “Faulte 6″ was originally a prototype for…something. Whatever it was, she was considered a failure and ended up being scrapped and discarded. The deactivation didn’t stick, however, and she ended up coming back just a couple months later, alone and without a purpose or function to fulfill aside from “survive”. She went to work right away, starting to assemble a full body for herself out of other similarly-discarded parts and scraps–hardly anything professional, but it made do.
She’s long since come to terms with what happened to her, and now simply makes do with what she has. Even with the raw deal she was given, she holds no ill will against humans, because such is the cycle of life–time goes on, technology improves, things fail or break down, and then get replaced. Even humans themselves are discarded when they fail at their work, or couple up and make their own replacements. It only makes sense to keep going afterwards
Now she walks the world as a wandering fisherwoman, collecting and selling different types of fish from all over the world so that she can get material to repair herself with, or barter for scrapped tech and broken things so that she can further integrate them into herself.
Occasionally, however, she can be found in a junkyard, finding other similarly-discarded machines and repairing them to give them a new life, so that they may live for just a little bit longer before deciding when it’s time to stop.
That’s a lot of writing for a character design I’m never ever ever going to end up ever drawing again ever. Just this one by itself took way too damn long to do, and I had to use copious amounts of references.
(Head nicked completely shamelessly from Sama-Nico, because everything I tried ended up looking bad)
