Megatokyo: Vol. 06 [Paperback]

I've been following MegaTokyo online since January of 2003, when I was in high school, and it was my entry-point to the world of anime and manga and gamer culture, so it was a formative influence on me at a formative time.

I've also picked up the books as they've come out, partly to support the author and partly to support the idea that webcomics can usefully transition to print, and because it's a nice, compact, low-bandwidth format when I want to reread the story, as I did this past week.

The MegaTokyo update schedule has lately grown erratic enough, and the plot complex enough, that I'd lost the thread of the story, and was having trouble following what was going on in the latest pages. MegaTokyo has always been infamous for its update schedule or lack thereof, and online I follow it in Piperka, a webcomics aggregator, so I get notified when it updates, and it's no skin off my nose if it misses one. The site itself also provides a good selection of RSS feeds. I highly recommend technological solutions if you want to follow the comic online, otherwise you're likely to be very frustrated by it.

It is a fairly complicated story, by this point, and one can't pick it up just anywhere. I had been hoping for a recap at the beginning of the sixth volume, but it was not to be, just one page of introduction and then off to the races. Both comic chapters included in Volume Six are long chapters, and the book itself is the longest of the volumes yet, so I expect that everything but the comic got excluded for pagecount reasons. Thankfully Volume Five has a nice recap of volumes One through Four at the back, so to refresh my understanding of the comic I went and read the back of Volume Five, read Volume Five, and then read Volume Six, which worked pretty well.

If you're the kind of new reader who is willing to pick up a new series partway through and rely on a recap and a high confusion threshold to figure out what's going on (hi science fiction and manga fans!), I think that protocol is likely to work fairly well for you as well. My benchmark going in was my periodic MegaTokyo archive binges, which take *days* -- thankfully in print you don't have to wait for the next page to load! The nice thing about print comics, and the thing I always forget when staring at a stack of books in Archive Panic mode, is that they read fairly quickly for their size, so despite MegaTokyo's visual density and the fact that I'm a comparatively slow reader even re-reading, I read each volume in a few hours, and finished the entire project in an afternoon.

Story-wise, volume six is a lot of fun. Both Piro and Kimiko's relationship and Largo and Erica's relationship get deeper, and we finally fill in a lot of the backstory of Piro and Miho's old online gaming relationship, which Piro is still worked up over, and what Miho's current deal is. Yuki begins to make use of her magical girl powers, Ping tries to figure out what it means to be "real" while Ed hunts her, Kimiko holds her first press conference for the game she's involved in which is in danger of being canceled, and everybody else holds on real tight and tries to do damage control. Oh, and a zombie army invades Tokyo. (They have a permit for it, you see.) Underneath the wacky fantasy and the shoujo relationship drama there's an ongoing meditation about reality and fantasy, the relationship of creators to fans, and what we do when we play games, which I find very thought-provoking, and it gets developed a lot in this volume.

Art-wise, MegaTokyo has always combined American comic panel density with manga panel complexity, which can at times be a little overwhelming. It also has a number of threads happening in parallel with quick cuts between locations, tuned to a page-at-a-time webcomic update schedule. In print it's easier to flip back a few pages to pick up the threads, but it's also easier to miss a thread which pops by quickly because you're reading faster and not forced to consider each page individually, so I had to refer back more often than I do online. The art in this volume is less dense than volume five, and usefully so. Fred Gallagher started out an architect, and it's always shown in the strength and detail of his backgrounds, which are still strongly and usefully in evidence here. He's learned how to distribute them usefully, though, making for an easier and more pleasant reading experience. It's not until the very end of this volume that we see anything approaching the complexity of the crowd scene at the beginning of volume five. I have a few production quibbles with the volume, but the art is always gorgeous -- Gallagher's trademark pencil draftsmanship gets more evocative with every volume -- and it well rewards the investment it demands.

(Production quibbles: a few of the pages are noticeably lighter than the rest -- not nearly enough to impede readability or even to really be noticed by someone not attuned to it, but enough that I did notice it. As previously mentioned, I really wanted a "the story so far..." recap, which I suspect was omitted for pagecount reasons. There's usually very little space between the comic and the "omake" (extras) included, so if you're reading quickly you can miss that the "main" story has paused and we're off in alternate-universe-land now -- probably also omitted for pagecount reasons. Good things include that the volume has been professionally proofread, wonder of wonders, unlike the early Dark Horse volumes!)

(More quibbles: DC Wildstorm, why have you not put a final cover image with the text and so on up on Amazon? I thought for the longest time that this book was still in pre-order because the cover image wasn't done.)

In conclusion, I greatly enjoyed this volume -- I now know what's happening in the comic again, and I think I've picked up some new insights into the characters going forward! -- and I expect other long-time readers (and people picking up from Volume Five) will enjoy it as well.

› Go to Amazon.com to see the review  5.0 out of 5 stars