The Unoriginal Comic

Green/Orange are the best colors, so clearly his author megaman is the best megaman!

NOW we are getting in the interesting part of The Pixelated Window of the Past : The crap.

No, really.

As I said previously, when someone does something good, others follow trying to do the same thing. And then you'll find the bad and the ugly, which are often FAR more numerous than the good ones, but fortunately and thankfully also don't last too long because... it's not good. Sometimes the author will realize it on his own, sometimes others will give it subtle or less-subtle messages that will bring it down. And sometimes it'll keep going because the author still thinks that at least one person out there must find it funny.

Today, I'll talk about Megaman Interference.

It only lasted 5 strips, but the sheer amount of bad here made me want to see how far one can go down the rabbit hole. I'll be upfront here. In 5 strips he managed to hit just about ALL of the Rules. It's quite a feat, if someone had tried to do it on purpose they probably would have trouble. He did it so effortlessly that it deserves a medal. Since it's a small archive, let's link each of them and take them separately.


Rule #1, check, no point to making this comic.
Rule #3, check, it's pretty much straight out of B&G, so Rule #A and #C while at it.
Rule #4, check, balloons are terribly placed here.
Rule #5, it might not be trying to get pity (yet) but it's hitting itself here.
Rule #6, proportions are skewed.

Other things of note, characters don't touch the ground. Ever. They just float.
You also don't see it here, you'd need to visit the actual page, but there's some juicy text over there too. Under the title he wrote "My first comic, my first megaman comic, my first comic that has a retextured sprites, and my first comic that I think will be good. Read it and be a fan!"
I'm still looking for the funny. Maybe next strip?


At least he's using PNG. Oh hey, he's touching ground on one of them. No consistence though. And still haphazard placement of text bubbles, so much that I have troubles understanding in which order to read them. Really, it should always be obvious at a glance, not having to read it 4 times and try different orders until it make sense.

Not even gonna bother with the recoloring for the author here, barf!

And the text, oh my god. This is worst than self-inflicted humor, this is the right side of the brain telling the left side how stupid it is, but still going with it anyway. At least no poop jokes.


This isn't getting any better. The pacing is all broken up, that huge PAUSE makes practically no sense, Protoman is out of scale for no apparent reason in the second panel, and the 'enters with Roll' is the worst thing I've ever seen, and he couldn't figure out how to do any sort of scale to fit all 4 characters in a single panel so he squished them horizontally. Holy freaking god help me.

Bubble placement is is so terrible that you wonder if he wasn't trying to write it right to left like a manga, but no, he just sucks at placing things. I'm not even sure he knows how to horizontally flip the characters at this point, he just copy-paste them in without thinking about how it would flow.

Roll said probably the only sensible thing in this entire strip up to now. You're not the only one lost, Roll.

Go away 'Jace'.


Why is there a white background in that single bubble? Ugh. This is a waste of a  strip, still nothing funny either. "Sometimes this comic is lonely"... it took you 5 SECONDS of blissful silence from your retarded author to already miss him? Megaman really is an idiot.


The 'conclusion' to MM Interference. The only conclusion here is don't make sprite comics if you have no talent at all. Even copy-pasting sprites together was beyond the ability of this boy (he must be about 10 years old).

Again the bubbles are in any random order, there's even a bubble to the right that I think belongs to Dr. Light, don't ask me what that black blob was supposed to be.

And then look at the banner, at some point he decided 'this banner's color needs to change', so used the paint bucket tool, and didn't even bother filling the INSIDE of the letters.

And after 5 comics, I haven't seen a single 'retextured' sprite. Maybe he meant recolored. That's not really showing his intelligence though. The only smart thing here was stopping after five. Thank god.

Read up on previous week's PWP if you missed it.

This one is probably not as popular because it didn't use any copyrighted materials.

None. What. So. Ever.

It was all very influenced by NES games though, you can see similarities in characters styles and looks, or in the games they visit throughout the story.

But more than that, Kidd Radd also had a very distinct and unique presentation. Rather than relying on a panel system, it used a rudimentary HTML code combined with layered GIF pictures to make something that would be similar in essence to what can be done with Flash animations. You would move between panels by pressing the 'next' button, and most of the panels were animated. Sometimes simple loops, sometimes much more complex.

It had a very short run compared to Bob & George and 8-Bit Theater, a mere 2 and a half year. But it was a great run. The author had a plan, and stuck to it from beginning to end. Deviated maybe a few times for guest weeks or otherwise, but the story ended and he never looked back on it. Much to our sadness as viewers, because no other webcomic ever came close to this style.


Unfortunatly it's also impossible to reproduce in screenshots alone the visuals of Kid Radd, so I'd rather direct you to reading through the archives instead, or downloading the zip to look at your leisure. You can find it here.

Kid Radd visited several games that were heavily influenced but never directly ripped from any single game. For example, they eventually visit a game called MoFo, which borrows the artistic style of Earthbound.


Plenty of humor, amazing writing to make you FEEL the characters in the more tense moments, all heading to a great ending, we wish we could have more. It knew how to build the suspense and tension perfectly with its visuals.

What about the rules? There was none of the rules to break here, it was all pure creativity and uniqueness, while being a blast to the past of video games of old. A highly suggested read for any Sprite Comic lover.

Be ready for next week... when we start checking out the bad. Oh boy.

Best dad simulator ever.

Another Pixelated Window of the Past. Last week was Bob & George, this week probably one that beats it on several levels.

Another big player in popularizing the subgenre, 8-Bit Theater probably surpasses Bob & George on that side. The writing is more than excellent, and the art improves miles between the first and last strips.


Unlike Bob & George, 8-Bit Theater was no accident. The original plan was to visit several games, like Metroid and River City Ransom. But due to the high popularity of Final Fantasy, it ended up being the only game ever used, although not exclusively either. Some side strips were made which parody other genres, games or movies at times, and sometimes visited by characters not belonging to Final Fantasy (the first) either, such as classes from Final Fantasy III.

8-Bit Theater is an entire retelling of the Final Fantasy story, where the 6 playable classes are portrayed as archetypes, exaggerated and caricatured to the extreme. Their names are literally their class for one thing. And all of them active by their own motives, and most of the time they are not of the purest intentions either, not what you'd think of Warriors of Light.

Spanning 1225 episodes over the course of over 9 years, the writing is the strong point of the series. There is a lot of text. Sometimes entire comics are simply bantering between the characters. The art obviously was simple, based on 8-bit spritework, but also underwent many custom work over the length of the comic, giving it it's own identity. It moves between the two styles of sprites that were in the game, the smaller overworld sprites and the taller and more detailed battle sprites.

More detailed being very subjective considering the limits of the original game were mostly kept intact. Which was 3 colors per character for their palettes.


The individual strips also had lots of uniqueness to it. It never adhered to any precise format in panel size or position. Arbitrary and even artistic, it was emulating what physical comics, like Marvel or DC, would do by juggling panel size depending on what was wanted at the time. Lots of liberties was taken with them as a result, all for the better even.

Let's talk about our Rules. It's quite simple, no rules were broken whatsoever. There was an appearance or two of the author, but those were placed as interludes. Never directly influenced the story, that's not how this strip's dynamic worked. No need to speak about B&G references here either, obviously, but everything else was followed to a T. In fact, the Rules could have been created from 8-Bit Theater and it'd be all for the best.


Not as huge of a run as B&G's 2000 strips, but still a VERY long read, and quite the enjoyable one as well. It breaks everything from Final Fantasy in the best possible way, and even has a fake out ending midway through just to throw you off. The internet exploded when they thought it to be the actual ending of the comic. That's how strong the people thought about it.

If B&G is referenced when talking about Megaman, almost every other sprite comic references 8-Bit Theater, mostly Final Fantasy, but the quirky characters and amazing writing left a strong impact, one that may never be equaled again.

Next week, another of my favorite, an excellent pick too, I hope you like it.