FGC #701 Mega Man 9

Listen up, children, an old is going to tell you why sprite comics existed in the early 21st Century, and why they will never return.

Travel with me back to the year 1994. The Super Nintendo had just been released in America three years prior, and 1993 had given us Mega Man X. Now, with the NES retiring into that great Wario’s Woods in the sky, we received Mega Man 6. That was the finale of the official “retro” Mega Man titles, and we would not see those familiar, 8-bit sprites again. Mega Man V (the roman numeral denotes we are talking about the Gameboy game) also released in 1994. So, the same year Donkey Kong returned to his Country, if your parents were cool with you draining their coffers, you could conceivably have immediate access to Mega Man, Mega Man 2, Mega Man 3, Mega Man 4, Mega Man 5, Mega Man 6, Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge, Mega Man II, Mega Man III, Mega Man IV, Mega Man V, and Mega Man X. From a scientific perspective, 1994 was an amazing year to be a Mega Man fan.

But if you were an American fan of these twelve games (reminder: twelve may not seem like a large number, but it took Kingdom Hearts seventeen years to hit thirteen games), and wanted to see Mega Man in other media, you had exactly one option, and it was this:

Alright, I know I’m using a deliberately bad example of “Mega Man” here, but I cannot say no to those baby blues.

Ruby Spears Mega Man was its own kind of crazy. By the standard of children’s animated programming of the 90’s, you could not call it outright bad. It was no Batman or Gargoyles, but it was more watchable than Bobby’s World or Skysurfer Strike Force. Hell, even allowing for nostalgia, it might be on the same level as Fox Kids X-Men. Yes, it was often bonkers with nonsense like de-evolving cave robots or Lion People, but is that any worse than watching that episode where Wolverine drifts into an Inuit village for the 10,000,000th time? Ruby Spears Mega Man was ridiculous, but it was an entertaining half hour of ridiculousness.

But while Ruby Spears Mega Man was entertaining, it was never Mega Man. There are Mega Man characters running around, and there are rough approximations of their appropriate character relationships, but anything below the surface is mistaken or outright wrong. Proto Man is Mega Man’s independent brother, but here he is distinctly working for the nefarious Dr. Wily. There was an entire Mega Man game about how Proto Man did not work for Wily! The Robot Masters slotted into generic cartoon tropes, and not the personalities that were established through game manuals or stage designs. Wood Man should have more mechanical road runners. And Roll was upgraded to some weird mix of action girl and housemaid that used a vacuum-arm to attack. Like all the “changes” from the games, it was something that could be justified if you squint (she was technically a housekeeping robot), but, in practice, she was effectively a wholly separate character from her original incarnation. And that was the crux of the problem: nothing in Mega Man felt very much like Mega Man.

This show was made by a team of people that had never struggled against a mechanical dragon in their lives. Bastards.

And the worst part of it? This was the best Mega Man available, because over in Captain N: The Game Master…

Recognize this image? That’s because I used it way back in 2016 for Mega Man’s Soccer, true believer!

They couldn’t even get his color right. And that was a mere pebble preceding the avalanche of issues within that show. If you ever want to scare a millennial, remind them of that time Alucard appeared with a bat-skateboard…

Now, here in 2025, we can look back at this nonsense and laugh. But at the turn of the millennium, this was all we had. There were videogames, and they had memorable characters with passable plots (they’re making a The Legend of Zelda movie. Tell me the plot to that is going to be better than “passable”), but you could not hope to see that replicated in any other medium. If Mario was going to have a cartoon, he was going to recycle stories from random fables as the be-overalled main character. If Sonic was going to have a cartoon, he was either going to be a gritty freedom fighter with a team of cyborg woodland animals, or a Tex Avery character. And, again, it was not like any of this “associated media” was bad, they just never explored the worlds where we had spent collective weeks with these characters. My generation would have traded an actual appearance of Star World or Scrap Brain Zone for every single “excuuuuuse me, princess,” ever mumbled.

So now we move forward from 1994 to 2000. After an entire childhood of shows where Link inexplicably became a sarcastic teen, we were teenagers ourselves, and this little slice of Heaven appeared:

The very first comic of Bob and George from bobandgeorge.com.

Bob and George is a webcomic. By 2000, webcomics were firmly established as a medium. There were already webcomic success stories like Penny Arcade, MegaTokyo, and a healthy 17% of KeenSpot. At this point, it wasn’t like Penny Arcade was hosting PAX or appearing on the nightly news (“Local man on internet has a Pac-Man shirt! Film at 11!”), but if you were down with the culture, you knew Gabe and Tycho. And, in this same medium where we were gifted delightful drawings of John Romero and his luxurious locks, we got…

This one was a completely random pick from later in the series. Any jokes about Mr. X are good stuff.

This thing. Is this a Mega Man fan comic? This is supposed to be a placeholder, right? For when the real comic gets here? You keep saying that, author David Anez. I know the comic started on April Fool’s Day, but are you ever going to get to the real stuff? Like, two dudes sitting on a couch, and just talking about Mega Man? Or something about brothers with superpowers? Something like that? When are we going to get to the fireworks factory?!

But the surprise to all of us was that the “placeholder” worked. An overwhelming segment of the audience derided Bob and George for being a measly sprite comic and “stealing” from Capcom to make something about as original as Fighter’s History. But what was startling was that the same people deriding Bob and George kept reading Bob and George. It was lazy and derivative, but it was also good. And as Bob and George started to wade into the “real” Mega Man stories, Anez revealed something that an entire generation had been begging for: the writer had actually played Mega Man.

Bob and George was not breathless Nintendo Power coverage of “the Blue Bomber”. Bob and George was not a cartoon where Mega Man hands gifts out to celebrate Christmas, or teaches us the value of being hearing impaired. Bob and George certainly was not a “Play it Loud” advertisement where a beloved videogame mascot exploded. Bob and George was just Mega Man by someone who understood Mega Man: the characters, the games, and even the fandom that surrounded it. Keiji Inafune, steward of the franchise, might be confused if you asked him about “the apocalypse” that must have occurred before Mega Man X, but there was certainly an entire message board of millennials that had worked out exactly how a Prototype Zero had ravaged the little metal boy. And BobandGeorge.com was where this was all going down. It was a silly sprite comic, and it encouraged an entire online community almost as an afterthought. It was social media before social media (and with significantly fewer nazis).

But while we are talking about the rising fandom of Mega Man, we do need to acknowledge that Mega Man is one of the best subjects for a sprite comic. Mega Man 7 was supposedly slapped together within a few months, but the sprites involved are expressive beyond what you would expect from a slapdash effort. And the poses! Mega Man can walk, talk, and hold his arms out horizontally! What more could you ever need? Couple this with active appearances of nearly the entire Mega Man cast (sorry, Tango, but you have to stay with Punk back in the Gameboy universe), and it is not hard to imagine someone utilizing those sprites to create over 2,500 comics. Seven years’ worth of content molded out of one videogame that could be completed inside of two hours ain’t bad.

(Yes, I know sprites from other games were used, too. Mega Man 7 was just the most prominent source. Of course I read those 2,500 comics, silly.)

In a way, nothing Anez did here was all that original. The “art” was just sprite rips, the characters were two-dimensional (get it!?), and the stories were literally videogame excuse plots. Even things that were invented for the comic itself, like Roll being a hypercompetent woman that is exasperated by her universally male peers, just made her Leela of Futurama fame (and, yes, that was the only female allowed in comedy at the time, but still!). However, simple archetypes were exactly the source of the popularity of Bob and George: everybody understood Mega Man. The NES was ubiquitous in households in the 80’s, and now that all those “Nintendo kids” were in college, they were happy to see their little blue buddy again. This wasn’t fan art, this wasn’t some modern reimagining, this was that exact sprite that helped you get through third grade (knowledge of Metal Man was essential to the curriculum), and here he is making jokes and being a goofball. Nerds ate these ‘bots up, but even the old high school quarterback could enjoy the juvenile little comic about Mega Man. It was universal! And all this was at the exact right time in web history when you could have an independent website, but it wouldn’t get “wanged” by too many visitors popping onto the site at once. This was the perfect epoch for a brigade of random people to get excited about Needle Man’s first comics appearance!

At a time when sharing links primed a generation, this was Mega Man “on model” in both visuals and storytelling. If you had to make a “sitcom” out of 8-bit videogames, you literally could not do better than Bob and George.

… Wait, no. You apparently could do better. You could make an entire career out of comics if you transformed other 8-bit sprites into a sitcom by drawing angry eyes on exactly one sprite…

8-Bit Theater by Brian Clevinger. You can still find the comic at his site, Nuklear Power.

And while we have a number of sprite comics from 2000-2005 that were widely shared and viewed, the greatest capper for that era revealed itself to be 2008’s Mega Man 9.

Mega Man 9 was the return of “classic” Mega Man for the first time since Mega Man 8 (or maybe Mega Man & Bass… Look! Sometimes Capcom forgets that game exists, and so do I!). While we certainly had Mega Man games in the meanwhile, it had been ten years since we saw an adventure with the original boy in blue. And even when we did see Mega Man out and severing Spring Man, every Mega Man game since Mega Man 7 had graduated in graphics with new hardware. Bob and George certainly appreciated the sprites of Mega Man 7, but its audience longed for the age of distinctly Mega Man 2. So here’s Mega Man 2-2! Original sprites, no charging Mega Buster, no slide: just rapid-fire pellets and the occasional Robot Master download. Rush managed to sneak in there, but other than the pooch, Mega Man 9 could have picked up right after the Blue Bomber bubble leaded Wily Alien into oblivion.

After all those featured webcomics and tv shows, I figured the game of the day should get one big picture.

But this was not a game that completely ignored years of Mega innovations. It was clear from the nuances of this world that this was not the Mega Man of 20 years prior. For instance, Robot Masters would suffer detrimental effects from their weakness weapons, which had only started appearing in the Mega Man franchise as of Mega Man 7 (or Mega Man X, if you want to include the whole of that universe). Similarly, a “shop” for exchanging screws for powerups materialized, granting Mega Man options that had previously only been available in the Gameboy titles. And some bad habits migrated along, too. Mega Man Zero and later Mega Man X titles had gotten into the habit of relying on “spike traps” for challenges, and Jewel Man’s stage certainly seems to continue that tradition. Then again, was that any worse than the Quick Man lasers of Mega Man 2?

But perhaps that was the crux of Mega Man 9. Even with modern innovations, it did not take much to think this game was just what you remembered. Particularly for people who had not played through a variation on Mega Man Legacy Collection every other month (ha ha, what weirdos), Mega Man 9 was exactly the same as its ancestors. For the generation that loved Bob and George goofing on Fire Man, here was Mega Man 9. Just how you remember. Just how you like it.

And then it never happened again.

Well, alright, it literally happened again when we got Mega Man 10 two years later. But after that? Whether it was because of Inafune’s falling out with Capcom, Mega Man “Classic” sales were not up to par, or some combination of both, we did not see this iteration of the series continue. When Mega Man 11 was released in 2018, it followed the tradition of Mega Man 7/8, and relied on new gimmicks and a complete graphical overhaul. The message was clear: “Old” Mega Man was not coming back again, and that same year’s Mega Man: Fully Charged confirmed that Rock’s caretakers were not interested in looking to the past.

And it was not just Capcom! Despite Mega Man 9 being well-received by fans, you can count on one hand the number of games that utilize “retro graphics”. Sure, you might see a cameo of an 8-bit sprite in a boss rush or a “classic” filter that simulates the good ol’ days, but actual games where a recognizable sprite is the star? We have Super Mario Maker, where the “retro” is an option, and F-Zero 99 utilizing the SNES graphics, and… that’s it. Whether it is technologically annoying to reproduce or it has been determined to be unappealing to the modern masses is immaterial, the end result is the same: those sprites are dead, buried, and never coming back. Cameos are possible, but a whole game? Forget about it. Hell, the Final Fantasy franchise is downright allergic to admitting that the original version of Final Fantasy ever existed.

And this is why sprite comics are never coming back. The age of webcomics has come and gone, and the factors that made sprite comics so substantially popular no longer exist in this current age of the internet. The universality of an entire generation recognizing that Mega Man has moved on to mortgages and children of their own (grandchildren are possible). And, yes, you will occasionally see a “sprite comic” (or animation!) go viral with Sans Undertale or Pizza Tower or alike, but there is a significant gap between “a viral post” and seven continuous years of Mega Man comics. If you wanted to replicate the universality of the webcomics of the early 21st century today, it wouldn’t be with Mega Man. You would have to use… let’s check the math on this… dang… rips from The Witcher 3 or Bloodborne. Hey! Maybe that explains why Nightmare Kart is so popular! Regardless, what once made webcomics so popular is outright gone now. You are never going to see a modern sprite comic with popularity on Bob and George’s level for the same reason nobody identifies Captain America 4 as a “talky”.

So, Virginia, that’s why sprite comics had to go live at a farm upstate, where they are happy and playing with all the other outdated mediums. Mega Man 9 is there, too, child, and they’re all having a ball and chasing cows or whatever dead… I mean… happily retired things do. It’s nice there. They are not coming back. Because it’s too fun.

FGC #701 Mega Man 9

• System: Wii exclusive to start, then Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. Now it is available on modern consoles through the Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 on Playstation 4, Xbox One, PC, and Switch. You can finally own Mega Man 9 physically!
• Number of players: Here’s a tip, Capcom, just go ahead and make a multiplayer Mega Man with the original sprites. It worked for Castlevania! Sorta! In the meanwhile, this is single player.
• Favorite Mini Boss: There are too many mini bosses! If I never see that clock-flower-thing ever again, it will be too soon! But I will allow the gigantic, flaming dragon another guest spot somewhere. I have a weakness for any creature that produces fireballs that inexplicably wear shades.
• Favorite Robot Master: The difficulty of Mega Man 9 is all over the place. Splash Woman is a (soggy) cakewalk, while practically everything about tackling Tornado Man is a gauntlet of weather-based misery. Hornet Man seems to sit right in the middle, with a recognizable boss pattern, some neat traps in his stage, and whatever is going on with those cactus missiles. So the bees get my honey.
• Is the Yellow Devil still terrible? Well, they are the Twin Devils now, and, yes, they are still terrible. I hate a boss that can only be attacked exactly once in the middle of a pattern, and Twin Devils does nothing to alleviate the anxiety of waiting for that half-second opportunity to launch a black hole bomb. I am not exaggerating that just imagining facing the Twin Devils again is a reason I will play through all the Robot Masters, and then quit. Wily can keep his castle.
• But about that castle: If nothing else, this Wily Castle does have the “shoot to move horizontally in zero gravity” section, and that is an amazing example of wringing some innovation out of decades-old gameplay. I smile just remembering that “elevator” section exists at all.
• Goggle Bob Fact: This was the first videogame I ever purchased entirely digitally with absolutely no physical edition or “feely” accompaniment. I had to! For Mega Man! Also, for whatever, reason, I can distinctly remember that Plug Man was the first stage I tackled. It is not a great starting stage, as it contains my most hated enemy, disappearing blocks. But there was an e-tank in there, so it’s not all bad.
• Downloadable Content: I was an early (instant) adopter of Mega Man 9, so I still think of the “extra” modes as DLC that was released approximately decades later (it was a little over a month). Fake Man’s Special Stage needs some goddamned checkpoints to be anything but stressful, but Endless Mode is a real treat for anyone that loves Mega Man’ing through as many Mega stages as possible. And as an added bonus, I could claim it is the first time I ever enjoyed a rogue-like. It would be a hideous misuse of the term/genre, but I could still claim it!
• Did you know? There is an entire section of the Splash Woman stage that is lifted wholesale from the Wave Man stage of Mega Man 5. Why this specific area was recycled when the rest of the game is (mostly) original is almost as big of a question as why Wave Man of all stages? And why not the “speeder bike” section?
• Would I play again: Yes. It’s classic Mega Man. Of course I am going to go back to this delightful sprite again.

What’s next? Random ROB has chosen… EN-Eins Perfektewelt. I… uh… have no idea what that is. Something perfect? I don’t know, so I guess we’ll find out. Please look forward to it!

That’s how you rotate a sprite