Archie Megaman Comic - Holy Shit!, ...a four-color Blue Bomber once more?

Maybe they'll show us in a future issue?

Also, this makes me happy.

Aww, it's nice to see the comic having a chance to be appreciated in Japan. The man in that picture sure looks excited.

They probably bushwacked 'em, like Tails.

Again, I'm not as familiar with the Sonic characters, but their collective secret weakness is probably Bass walking into their house and punching them in the face. It's not like anyone has been able to verify that theory until now. That's just the kind of unexpected eye-opening interactions this crossover has the unique opportunity to explore.

Though unrelated to the Mega Man comic, I wonder if the crossover will be a vehicle for a soft reboot of Sonic the Hedgehog. Not out of a desire to raise interest, but because of the lawsuit former Sonic and Knuckles the Echidna writer, Ken Penders filed against the company over the use of "his" characters. (Notably almost every Echidna in the series and more than a few others. None of those characters were mentioned by name in recent issues.)

So it seems that the Genesis Wave just largely rewrote the history of both worlds, giving us a convenient new status quo in which Bass is already active and Protoman is already past his villainous Break Man phase. Wily also apparently lost some of his Robot Masters in the transition (he said he had to rebuild them even though all the RMs up to MM3 were already active at the start of the issue.) so it's not clear what other effects the Wave had on the story leading up to this. It's a bit of a cop-out since it lets them bring in Bass without any introduction, and just put the Break Man identity mystery effectively on hold since now it's fairly certain reality will be reset by the end, as if it never happened.

I'm a bit disappointed with the abrupt break in continuity, but I can also appreciate that this crossover is instead making itself a nicely self-contained escapade. Flynn's just going to cram everything we could want into 12 issues in a way that we won't have to worry about the consequences, and that's actually probably the best way you could go about a crossover like this. Instead of getting bogged down in the running plots of each book (especially for MM, which is still in a formulative stage), we can just put it all aside and do a crossover.

I mean, they COULD have just delayed the crossover while the younger series built up to a comfortable status quo of its own, but how long would that take? Four years and counting? And maybe the writer's boss said right from the start that forgetting about continuity was the way to go, but the writer was pretty sure he could wrap up the forming series' one little storyline in a month or two and then it would be off to the races, but of course it didn't work out quite as planned. Meanwhile, the other series has advanced so much in the interim it's now set 15 years later than when the crossover was originally going to take place, so its scenes have to be re-written almost from scratch anyway...

...yeah, I might not be talking about the comic any more...

Covers for parts 11 and 12 (last one has spoilers).

I was kinda iffy about the use of the Genesis Wave, but maybe it was for the best, all things considered.

Part 11's variant cover is adorable.

Why? What's up with it?

Methinks Wily might have received a glimpse of the future because of the Genesis Wave. The upside is that the effects of the wave are temporary and will go back to the status quo when the crossover is done and people will probably have hazy memories of the event. The same thing happened in Sonic #225-230 were Robotnik temporarily "rewrote" reality to resemble that of the Sega Genesis games.

Sonic and Megaman are shown in their Super forms (Mega's is a recoloured Super Adaptor). Admittedly not sure how big a spoiler it is as we don't know about the circumstances that led to them using the Chaos Emeralds.

I wouldn't classify that as a spoiler. In a Sonic crossover we'd HAVE to get Super Megaman at the end of it all. Anyone with a lick of sense and most without could see it coming.

Anyhow, I understand how the Genesis Wave works, but why is it iffy? Seems like just the way to get ALL of Wily's Masters in the series so early in the timeline.

I think it is way for Archie, Sega, and Capcom to make the crossover non-canon.

The iffy-ness is what I was talking about. By re-writing history, they take away any significance the event has as part of the series. It doesn't follow from what came before and it won't have any effect on what comes after. It is effectively out of continuity. There are upsides to that, but it's also a bit of a cop-out.

Well, I can't see how they could possibly do it otherwise without totally ruining the MM series just for the crossover's sake. I mean going from MM2 to post MM10 is lame. No RM will get a chance to shine like that.

What Raijin said, pretty much. With all the compromise talk back when WWC was first announced, I was thinking the crossover would be started less abruptly than "oh crap someone's futzing around with the space time continuum".

#28's cover, introducing the next major arc "Blackout: The Curse of Ra Moon", which presumably is an adaptation of SAR. Looks like they're picking up where #23 left off, as Proto Man is still Break Man.

Something tells me this arc will be one of the darker, more serious ones.

It'll be nice to finally be done with Superadventure .... so they can move on to MM3!

Got the latest issue. Tails Man was dealt with pretty easily. And Tails himself is pretty adept at using Dr. Light's computers. I mean, wow. Was he always so tech savy?

I guess I've stumbled on a gripw with the crossover. Things are comign a bit too easily. I guess it has to, to a certain extent, but it's pretty odd at how easily Dr. Light and Tails managed to figure out how to generate that portal and the aformentioned point about Tails Man being de roboticised so easily.

The computer thing I'm not sure how to explain, but with the instant-derobotization, something in Megaman's VWS may have destabilized it or something. I'm guessing it'll be elaborated on before long.

Thing is, Tails was roboticized easily to begin with, so I foresaw the "Roboticized Masters" thread ending as abruptly and uncerimoniously as it began. That's the whole reason I pushed to post the latest epilogue so soon. I knew the relevance of "Shadow" Man was going to be a little blink-and-you-miss-it.

Conversely, I'm actually surprised it took until Part 4 to get through MM & Sonic's obligatory misunderstanding-fight-before-teaming-up thing. I would have pegged that for a single issue, but the first act has had a lot of stuff crammed into it to allow for the main attraction to have slower pacing.

Still, I'm starting to wonder if it's really worth getting the Sonic parts, considering the plot progression in those two parts could be summed up as "MM and Sonic move their fight from Sonic's world to Mega Man's".

They were roboicised easily to begin with, true, but even so I didn't expect it to be handled quite as easily as "MM tries to absorb their powers and - WTF? - they turn back to normal!" I figured SOMEONE had to analise them and actually come up with a de-roboticizer or something.

I do hope it's explained in better detail later. It's just waaaaaay too easy. Not that RM fights weren't summarily dealt with before.

The fight between MM and Sonic did take a while, but there's a lot to establish. I don't mind the pacing too much.

Took another look at that issue; Sonic hitting Tailsman "did something new", according to Megaman. So it was probably coming into contact with people from both dimensions that restored Tails; it was mentioned earlier that going from one place to the other without elements from both worlds was difficult.

One thing I took away from today's issue was that Copy Robot does not seem to be treated with anywhere near the nuance of the Megamix version. Naturally, they're not going to get into his inner turmoil and motivations when he's just one of many baddies to be battled throughout the story, but just his personality speaks volumes about how empty a mirror image he is. It makes me wonder what it'll be like when characters like Copy Rock, Bass, the Genesis Unit, etc. are re-introduced later on when the real timeline catches up. Maybe when there's time to dedicate a whole story to them, they'll get more interesting characterizations.

At least MegaWater's lack of confidence was a trait from his official background that comes through nicely at the end. I'm pretty sure Flynn has his copy of the Robot Master Field Guide open at all times when writing the characters it applies to.

Well, this is a different beast than Megamix. In Megamix the copy had personality. But in Megaman Powered Up he really didn't. He was just a trash talkin' jerk (and there were more than one too). This seems to follow that. It's probably for the best; Ariga gave us a great Copy Rockman story. There's tons of other characters in the lore, let's see some of them.

Although it really bugs me that they consistently draw him wrong. He's supposed to have a triangle on his helmet instead of a square. There's not a lot of good reference for him, but they could check that up. And he should shoot green bullets, not blue.

I was sad to hear the Genesis Unit is completely destroyed in whatever passes for the Wily Wars in the comics. Hopefully it doesn't really play out that way.

Hated the art this issue. Seems to work great for Sonic characters, but MM looks all wrong!

Drawing humans was never one of Tracey Yardley!'s strengths.

Don't have the issue, but I saw the preview pages, and the humanoid characters looked okay to me. Not sure why Copy-Mega's consistently drawn without a triangular solar panel, though.

I wasn't crazy about the art in this issue either. Sonic and Tails look fine, but honestly, I winced a bit when I first saw Mega and Proto. It's not necessarily bad, but I'm used to the smooth lines and colors of the style of previous issues.