Megas XLR came out last Saturday (May 1, 2004) on the Cartoon Network. At its heart, it’s a goofy Giant Robot Show. And a buddy comedy. And a fish-out-of-water story.

The basic premise is that the distant future, the Glorft, an advanced alien race, has come to invade the Earth, and have managed to do so with amazing success. Commander Kiva, an ace mecha pilot, has stolen the Glorft’s prototye weapon, the M.E.G.A.S, and retrofitted it for use in mankind’s struggle. She intends to send the rebuilt M.E.G.A.S back in time to a point two years prior, where it can be used in a crucial battle to repel the Glorft. However, mischance ensues, the temporal vortex used to send the M.E.G.A.S back goes haywire and sends the M.E.G.A.S, Commander Kiva, and the Glorft flagship back to 2004, and present-day New Jersey.

The cast of Megas XLR

Coop, your average motorhead, fast-food-eating, videogaming slacker, finds the abandoned M.E.G.A.S in a junkyard, buys it for two dollars and subsequently pimps it out (painting on eight-balls and speed-flames), and replaces its missing head-unit with what appears to be a Ford Mustang (or similarly-shaped American muscle car). All is well until Kiva arrives, followed closely by the Glorft.

Now, that rather basic encapsulation of the plot doesn’t do justice to this show’s humour, which ranges from the subtly understated to the outright in-your-face variety (come on, how could you not laugh at the sight of a giant robot performing a backbreaker suplex on a processed cheese monster?).

A large chunk of the show’s humour dynamic comes from the character interplay between laconically cocky Coop, his slacker buddy and comedic foil Jamie, and the fish-out-of-water Kiva (another in a long line of agressive redheaded mecha pilots). David Deluise (Dom’s kid) does a great job as Coop, but mad props go to Steven Blum’s (Spike from Cowboy Bebop, and Roger Smith from Big O) rendition of Jamie, and Wendee Lee’s rounds out the cast by going back to her Asuka roots as Kiva.

The show’s creators, Jody Schaffer and George Kristic have stated that Megas XLR is pretty much a “guy’s show”, and it pays homage to their influences. For example, Coop’s m@d l33t sk1775 with the Megas are borne from his deep immersion in video games and this is reflected the fact that the controls of the Megas are comprised of joysticks, a PS2 gamepad, what appears to be a classic black-and-white Gameboy, and some version of a DDR pad.

The Megas’ controls

The show is similarly peppered with anime references: in the first episode alone, the Megas busts loose with a Yamato Wave Motion Gun blast.

Wave Motion Gun: Armed!

and in the start of the second episode, we find the boys sunning themselves on the Megas, while the Autobot Matrix of Leadership is displayed prominently in the background.

Light our darkest hour

The show’s real genius is in the weird details. I mean, how can you not love a show where the Megas is entered into a custom car competition, where it competes in such categories as Speaker Volume, Transformation, Truck Pulling and Flame Exhaust?

One downside of this show seems to be it’s lack of a strong plot, though this may be because only two episodes have aired so far. Another mild annoyance is the naming conventions used. Glorft? Warmaster Gorrath? Ugh. Sounds like a bad D&D session, really.

My bigger beef is with the villains of this series. I’m really getting tired of the humour from comedic villains being sourced in their ineffectualness. Having Warmaster Gorrath stumble about on screen is like watching Cobra Commander without the deranged charm, or Starscream without his impotent bluster.

I’m still undecided about some of the sound effects; I’m fairly sure the cheeze-factor is intentional, but something about it annoys me terribly.

But, as I said before, it’s only two episodes in, and they’ve covered a lot of good ground in those two episodes. Maybe my complaints will disappear once I’ve seen more Megas in action.

Here’s a great GIF animation remake of The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen. By “remake”, I mean “very loosely modeled on”.

Yes, it’s in Japanese. You don’t need to read it to appreciate it (translations welcome, though).

For comparison, here’s one version of the original Little Match Girl story.

Here’s another shout-out to Vaz and his webcomic Under Power. The current story arc is about Kitten, the girl/cat/android battle-warrior, attending her Artificial Girls Support Group. With a stellar cast (including Mahoro, Chii, Gally, Ryoko, Sharon Apple, and others), and bitingly insightful commentary on the stereotypical treatment of Women in Anime, Under Power continues to deliver the goods.

>Chii.

Plus, today’s installment features the normally stoic and taciturn Rei Ayanami, which just feeds into my overall Evangelion fixation.

Probably old news to some of you, but it took me by surprise: Berkeley Breathed returns to comics. Hearing this was the cartoon equivalent of a stealth bomber attack on my brain; a pen-n-ink Shock and Awe as it were.

Berkeley Breathed was one of my favorite cartoonists back when newspaper cartoons were still worth reading (him and Watterson and Trudeau, of course). Bloom County was a breath of fresh air, and capable of crafting brilliant insights out of the most prosaic of situations. Bloom County’s demise and subsequent lesser transfiguration into Outland was painful, but not as painful as the overall loss of Breathed’s work when he decided to quit.

It’s good to have him and Opus back again.

Opus

There’s been a rash of “re-imaginings” and “re-purposings” in the Marvel comic community — what with the entire Ultimate series and the umpteen-billion X-Men universes (hell, even the multiple Tenchi series are easier to keep track of than X-Men X-treme / Ultimate / Uncanny / Phoenix / Snikt / etc). By and large, this is done to breathe new life into old titles, whose plotlines have been heavily freighted with the problem of too much continuity. Some titles (Ultimates / Ultimate X-Men) do this entertaingly; others (X-Treme and the other spinoffs, the new Ghost Rider) don’t.

1602, front cover art

1602, if you haven’t gotten it by now, is one of these re-imaginings, and a brilliant one at that. Neil Gaiman had his hand in this, and it shows. It’s the Marvel Universe — Nick Fury, Daredevil, the X-Men, Dr. Strange and all that lot — set in the year 1602. Terrible storms of mythic portent hang over Europe, the Inquisition holds sway over Spain (burning mutants, no less!) and the Queen of England has a mission of utmost importance for Doctor Stephen Strange and for Sir Nicholas Fury.

The writing, as befits Gaiman, is tight and moves the plot along entertainingly enough; but it’s the witty, in-character dialogue (no mean feat, considering that the characters have to be recognizable and yet still true to the Fantasy Late Medieval world that they inhabit) and the sly Marvel Continuity puns (visual and otherwise) sprinkled throughout this issue that are just golden.

Andy Kubert’s art is detailed and serves well to bring the characters from all ends of the Marvel spectrum to life, while Richard Isanove does a masterful job with a swirling, muted palette.

As far as I can tell, the series is supposed to be eight issues long, and Neil has just reported that he’s finished putting pen to paper on the seventh issue. As long as the delays between releases aren’t longer than those of the final story arc of The Sandman (or, hell, that of Planetary), I’d say that 1602′s a must-have, buy-it-as-it-comes out series.

Some 1602 links:

• Marvel’s 1602 Press Conference
• Diamond Comics Previews

Ah, is there anything you can’t learn from watching giant-robot anime? Apparently not. Case in point:

• Shaw Island’s Hamgelion
• Dub This’ Too old to be a mecha pilot

Like many an angsty teen geek, reading The Sandman was pretty much an identifying mark for our particular clade of teen culture, like listening to Nirvana and wearing flannel, only more gothy and with a penchant for bickering over the philosophical bent inherent in Todd Klein’s lettering.

The Sandman’s older sister Death remains possibly one of the most endearing characters of that strange clan of powers-clothed-in-human-shape. She never really showed up overmuch in the series, which is a shame, because, as Neil Gaiman put it, “I wanted somebody nice — I liked the idea of a sensible Death.”

With news that Jill Thomson will be doing a manga version of Death’s point-of-view from the entire Season of Mists storyline (wherein the dead in Hell have been freed, and are wandering about on Earth mucking things up), comes this lovely image of a new figurine:

Death takes a breather

Now if only I could do something about the lack of display space, I’d be set…

France, as our Meroviginian friend has pointed out, is certainly an interesting place. It’s also one of the few countries outside of Japan to actually produce anime, and one in particular, the forthcoming Molly Star-Racer, looks to be highly entertaining.

Molly

So far, this Sav! The World production has released one teaser trailer, with episodes forthcoming. By and large, it looks like it’ll be a Telemachean adventure story starring the titular Molly, who races her specialized flyer on the planet of Oban against competitors from other worlds in order to claim the Grand Prize — a wish granted by the all-powerful Avatar, who organized the race in the first place.

Molly races as Human Coalition’s represantative, and they need her to win in order to survive the depradations of the more aggressive starfaring species. However, Molly looks like she has her own reasons to race — to bring back her (missing? dead?) mother.

Molly’s mother

Molly Mayhem is probably the most comprehensive english-language site for Molly Star-Racer, though the official web site is available, but it’s in French (a language which I should have learned back in high school as a citizen of Canada, but sadly, that time was probably spent doodling anime battles in the borders of my notebooks. Irony, I curse your name!).

This week’s Photoshop Phriday is a real doozy. The topic? Super hero movie posters.

The Hulk and Galactus, together at last

Not surprising, I guess, what with X2 having come out, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the Hulk showing later this summer.

In the spirit of these fine efforts by SA’s forum goons, I present two links:

• You’ll all be sorry: The Galactus Blog
• Hulk’s Diary: The Hulk’s Blog

UPDATE: I just noticed that this post should have shown up last Saturday… the server downtime held this entire post in limbo, so I’m reposting it with the right

Was frequenting The Comichop when I picked up Blue Monday, a wonderfully idiosyncratic manga-style comic by Chynna Clugston-Major.

The cast of Blue Monday

By Japanese standards, it would be shoujo, but the particular nature of its setting — small town America — makes for a markedly different approach to the normal friends-growing-up-and-going-to-school hijinks. In essence, it reminds me of nothing so much as a John Hughes film meets manga meets less treacly and somewhat more appealing characters (who, in true comic fashion, seem disposed to absurd situations and sporadically humorous applications of violence).

The stories are fast-paced and energetic, and three issues (and some half-dozen-odd short stories) in, and I’m seeing the beginning of character development and more complex romantic story-arcs.

Plus, it features a crazy-cute Irish redhead. And who doesn’t like crazy-cute Irish redheads?