It's time for another super-long rant! XD Can't you feel the excitement in the air? ...Yeah, me neither.

I've heard lots of talk about Megatokyo over the past year or so, and it's all been mixed messages. For one thing, Megatokyo has TONS of rabid fans that swear by its existence and think it's the greatest thing ever to come to manga since Inuyasha. On the other hand, there are people that say it's quite terrible, and not at all deserving of its reputation. That's not to mention the rumors that Fred Gallagher is a prick for screwing over the original team (of his friends) that worked with him and taking all of the goods for himself once a publishing deal came around.

Since I knew nothing of either case, I decided it was time to set the rumors aside, and find out for myself. So, I've spent the last several weeks reading through ALL of Megatokyo...yes, all 600+ pages of it. After reading through the entire story, I can at last make a conclusion based on my own observations, with rumors of Fred's character ignored as much as humanly possible.

And I would have to heartily agree with those that believe it's quite terrible.

In fact, I think it's terrible in almost any area you look at. In case you don't believe me, I'll illustrate why:

Art:
I'll tackle the art aspect first. To be honest, the art really isn't that great. At the most, it's OKAY. There's nothing technically wrong with it, per se. But there are quite a few things that make me not like it.
- First of all, I dislike the character designs. Perhaps that's not really something that can be changed, since it's just Fred's style. The character designs all look very much the same; I especially have trouble keeping apart the female characters (which is accentuated by the fact that, even after reading all about them, I can't remember any names except Ping and Erika.) In his style, Fred downplays the eyes and the hands, which (ironically enough) are the two most important parts of a human used to convey emotion. With so little venue being allowed for emotion (unless their eyes are wide with fear/shock/surprise) the characters usually either look annoyed or bored to tears. And it makes me feel the same way.
- The pencil sketch look. In some ways, I do like the pencil sketch look. It makes the drawings feel very in-the-rough and homey. It also makes the drawings feel very unfinished. What I cannot for the life of me understand is why ANYONE would consider this art good for print (in reference to the published books). First off, scanned pencils look like complete crap in print. Second of all, it's twice as expensive to print greyscale as it is black and white. Why go to the extra trouble and budget to print something that doesn't look terribly good to begin with?
- In coordination with that: RULERS. Maybe Fred has a phobia of rulers or something, but the only time I see a straight edge is on the panel borders. What, picking up a ruler and taking the time to draw a darn STRAIGHT LINE is just too difficult?
- And with all that put together, it just doesn't make sense that Fred falls behind schedule constantly (more on that later) because of art. It's not like he's taking the time to tone or ink or even use a frickin' RULER to draw. Where is all this time and effort going? Does Fred end up doing the work of editors, promotion agents and suchforth as well as writing and drawing? Because if he thinks that drawing one PENCILED page a day is considered professional, he's sadly mistaken.

Characters
Now characters. There's quite a lot of them, and it's not so easy to tell them apart, considering that many of them look alike. Largo naturally was my favorite character first off, except he stopped being funny as soon as real-life "Largo" stopped working with the comic. Now he goes on and on and on and on about zombies and 3vil and b33r and ph34r and things that rhyme with those words, and it just got old after hearing it all the time. But Largo I would still prefer to Piro, who drives me up the wall. I have no clue why the guy has so many fangirls...he's like a fanboy version of Shinji Ikari. No matter what happens it's whine this, bemoan that, poor poor dorky me. That, and the whole fascination with underage girls thing, while sometimes funny or quirky in characters, just comes off creepy here. And people COSPLAY as him, for chrissakes. As a character, he annoys the living crap out of me. As a main character, that's not necessarily a good sign. And the goth girl...whatever her name was...never did impress/scare me.
I don't dislike all of the characters, however. Seraphim is great (Asmodeus is pretty cool too), and you can't help but love Boo. And Junpei continues to amuse me, even if he has gotten more serious as the comic goes on. Dom and Ed were also quite hilarious, until Ed got a sex change/hyrbrid/thing, and now he just creeps me out to no end. In any case, I'd much rather read a comic about what they're doing than listen to Piro whine and mope anymore.

Story
Oh boy, here we go. Well, it's pretty darn obvious that Fred intended for Megatokyo to follow along the lines of Piro's dating sim fantasy/romantic comedy shoujo, and he certainly took it there once he started going solo. Now, there's nothing wrong with shoujo in general. The vast majority of anime and manga I like probably falls under the category of shoujo. It's just that Fred is trying to incorporate the type of tongue-in-cheek humor of the early comics into a story that takes itself too seriously, and it doesn't work. As a result, I'm never quite sure what's supposed to be a joke or not.
But all that is really secondary to the real problem with the story. The real problem is that it takes frickin' FOREVER for anything to happen. And once something's happened, you realize it's the exact same thing that happened a month ago. Largo fought zombies. Piro was depressed. Half the girls in Tokyo found out they liked Piro. Stuff blew up. I've never seen a webcomic that took so long to say so little. I was reading the comic straight through, and even *I* forgot stuff that happened (such as Seraphim getting hit over the head with a box? It was practically a month's worth of strips before that was ever mentioned again.) I can't even imagine what a headache someone would get reading the comic on a day-to-day basis.
All that, and Fred needs to learn the subtle art of setup. I'm not sure how much of MT he has planned out, but as a reader, I feel like he's just making this up as he goes (and purposefully dragging it out as long as he can...) So Erika was a voice actress that mysteriously disappeared? Sure, we'll mention it right before it becomes relevant, but never before. In reading MT, I felt like plot points would spring out of the shadows upon me like ninjas. Like the Endgames subplot...where the hell did all THAT come from? And why didn't what I guess was supposed to be foreshadowing of it (with pages of the characters in their Endgames forms, including Piro as one of his girlfriends...) And as opposed to wrapping things up, they just made things more complex. I completely understand that many manga take tons of books in order to tell the story. But I would like SOMETHING to be resolved 600 strips in. Otherwise, how should I expect anything will be resolved?

Schedule
Now, I completely and totally understand the hassles of running a webcomic. It's like an extra part-time job where you don't get paid, yet are expected to adhere to the wishes of rabid fans. It's really intimidating. And then there are days where the art just isn't coming, and you have to step back and draw a little something for fun. All artists do that. It's completely understandable.
Fred does it a LOT. Just out of curiosity, I went back and counted all the Dead Piro Days and Shirt Guy Dom days spread throughout MT. There's a little under 100 of them in total...and that's not even counting days of fanart, tributes, or little one-shots that don't have much to do with anything except a game came out, or a con happened. 100 out of 600+ means approximately ONE out of every SIX comics is just filler.
Again, if this were a webcomic that wasn't supposed to be making money, I wouldn't expect much from it. But he's supposed to be making a living off of comics now...it's supposedly his PROFESSION. I don't know about anyone else, but I if I were an editor, I would fire an employee that couldn't complete one out of every six projects given to him. Yes, we know you're tired. Yes, we know that there are many things to take care of, bills to pay, houses to clean, etc. Yes, we know you get sick or artists' block or just plain tired and fed up with life. None of those things are fun to deal with. But I stop caring when it happens on a weekly basis. And when things like that happen, most serious webcomic artists draw pages *ahead of schedule*. This helps them be able to update on time even when they either know they will be absent for a period of time, or just in case something like sickness does come up unexpectedly. While perhaps Fred is doing that a bit more recently, the back issues still have a bit too much filler to be considered professional. Especially when he's not even taking the time to tone, ink or use a ruler. Hell, most manga-ka in Japan have to pencil *dozens* of pages a day in order to make deadlines. I'm sorry, but a sketch a day, while nice in of itself, doesn't come off to me as worthy of heaps of praise.

Funny
And finally, the humor aspect. I love funny stuff to death. I can forgive anyone and anything if it's funny. I may even forgive Bush if I didn't think he was so darn serious all the time. Fans always went on and on about how hilarious Megatokyo is. I went in expecting it to be quite hilarious in that aspect. And perhaps I would've liked Megatokyo more if it *was* hilarious.
The problem is, it just...wasn't. Now, it definitely wasn't un-funny. I got quite a few smiles and chuckles out of the comics. For example, I thought the fight between Boo and Asmodeus was very funny. But there was nothing that brought tears of laughter to my eyes like Josh's extremely crappily-drawn Cutewendy did. (Heck, even the ink and binding on OPR-kun's copy was complete and utter crap and I *still* thought it was hilarious.) I didn't find anything immensely quotable such as the eternally reusable quotes from Homestar Runner and Neurotically Yours (yes, I know they're not webcomics; bear with me...)
People have mentioned that the original comics of Megatokyo (during the four-panel days) were what was really really funny, before Largo left and Piro started going solo. Well, I felt they were funny, but not hilarious. It was the same kind of funny you'd get from any other two-gamer-guys style webcomic. Or perhaps Megatokyo came first and all the other webcomics copied the two-gamer-guys gimmick? I don't really know.
The bottom line is that Megatokyo was amusing, but not amusing enough to save it from the rest of itself.

And there you have it: an extremely long explanation as to why Megatokyo sucks. Yes, I know a good chunk of that is opinion. But another chunk of it isn't. To Megatokyo fans...come on. You can do better than that. And so can Fred. I guess in the end people will like what they like...what they like. But I for the life of me can't understand why.

Anyways, I now be done with this post (which was drafted like a week ago) Which means it's either to answering email or packing. Or sleep. Sleep is sounding better and better right now.

Operator status: Not at work, but it was busy as hell today. XP

Maya PLE comprehension status: 24% ...And they found themselves on the vast, sprawling internet!...

Macromedia Studio comprehension status: 47% No time to work with stuff because of the moving crap. Curses!

Website reconstruction status: 62% Maybe add a half a percent to that? Basically been working on graphics for the Lunargyros section.

Drawing: See above. Might have some time tomorrow at work and on Turkey Day to do more work on website graphics and pages. ^^

Writing: Also see above as far as the Van Helsing script is concerned. Now that the screenplay is done (yay yay hooray!) I'll have more time to work on it. XD