Megatokyo

by Fred Gallagher
Read: Continuously, reread May 2009
Rating: Brills

Get sucked in: http://www.megatokyo.com/

If you’ve been reading webcomics for any period of time and haven’t come across Megatokyo you’re not surfing the right comics. Ever seen the Sad Girl In Snow trope? This is where it was born.

Megatokyo is a lot of things, on a lot of layers. On the surface it’s a comic about games and Tokyo and fanboys and a fantasy scenario that you’d think only fanboy gamers who drool over Tokyo would want to read. There’s also some love and schoolgirl crap thrown in there, too.

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Megatokyo is about those things, yes.  But on much deeper levels. It’s about the fantasies people create when they fail to live fully. It’s about the people whose careers are based around fulfilling those fantasies, to a degree. It’s about the line between real life and fantasy and when it blurs. It’s about the games people play. It’s about doubt and fear and the desire to be loved, and to love. It’s about embracing your strengths. It’s satire. It’s literary truth.

And it’s about giant Rent-a-Zillas and regularly sheduled zombie attacks.

My god, how can you not love all that?!

It all starts to… well, not innocently. Largo goes on a bender at E3 (the big industry convention where technology and game companies used to put their upcoming products on display, now discontinued), and Piro puts them on a plane to Japan because getting Largo out of the country seems like a good idea. They spend all their money on anime and games (and the infamous COOL THING) and bankrupt themselves within 24 hours. They strand themselves in Tokyo. With no money and no one willing to loan it to them, they have to try to earn the money themselves (or wait for Largo to cause enough destruction to be deported). Sound like a weak premise? It is, a bit. That’s Chapter Zero for you. Not fantastic, more gag-a-day, not terribly good. But hang in there, we’re getting to the good bits.

This is not the Tokyo of the real world. It’s Tokyo, but… M3g4 [Mega]. This is the Tokyo anime and games and TV would have you think is real. It seems to function on the age-old cry of frustration… “How many times can a giant lizard destroy this city, anyway?!” Well, the Tokyo Police Cataclysm Division have your answer. You have to apply for a permit with a limited time frame, and THEN your monster can go stomping around wreaking havoc, followed by the TPCD’s clean-up crew, who will reconstruct buildings in record time. Tokyo marches on.

There are so many tropes included, blown apart, and parodied in here, it’s hilarious. Piro is a fanboy who loves dating sims and shoujo manga, so, yes, there are schoolgirls and Magical Girls. Largo is a hardcore gamer who likes to blow shit up. Beware of zombies.

Then you get to the darker stuff. Turns out that in this Tokyo they recognize the extreme power of celebrity. The obsessiveness that characterizes fans can be destructive, or it can keep the economy thriving, so there are people who work to harness these powers. Of course, Piro and Largo land right on top of a former idol (pop star/voice actress) who abandoned the scene at the height of her popularity, and another who is about to explode onto the scene. Very dangerous.

It’s really hard to sum this thing up without writing a treatise nearly as long as Megatokyo itself. There are at least half a dozen arcs going on at once. It may be a bit daunting to enter all this, but it’s well worth the effort.

Fred’s art is done in pencil, with digital clean-up. (Or it was, he’s drawing via CGI with pencil tools now.) It makes for a sketchy look that is deceptively disordered. Around halfway through this reread I realized how incredibly well done everything is.

Funny, touching, intriguing. Unique, certainly. Megatokyo is one of those projects I wholly wish I had the money to buy outright. Someday I will. If only because I’m too impatient to wait for every page load.