I stumbled across a beat-up, dog-eared copy of Megatokyo Volume 1 at the library ten years ago, and loved it so much I had to go buy my own copy, even though you can read it for free at megatokyo.com. Fred Gallagher’s art is so charming, with such a great story, it’s one of those comics I need to have a paper copy of, so it can sit on my shelf and I can look at it whenever I want, or just give the cover a pat as I walk by.
Seriously you guys, I’m in love with this comic.
How awesome, then, that on April 9th Dark Horse is releasing the first Omnibus edition of Megatokyo, collecting 576 beautiful pages of Fred’s comic and bonus artwork.
It’s a little hard to sum up the comic, because there are four or five interweaving stories going on at all times. To try and set the stage though: on a whim, gamers Piro and Largo fly to Japan. (They couldn’t get tickets to E3, so they said screw it, and maxed out the credit cards. Makes sense, right?)
Having got there, though, reality catches up with them. No money, no jobs, they can’t get home, and the one friend they were staying with decided to leave the country.
Piro is smart, quiet, artistic, and has about the lowest self-esteem of any guy you’ve met. Largo is energetic, loud, good with building computers, and most likely insane. But never boring.
Piro accidentally gets a job at an anime store. Largo accidentally gets a job teaching schoolchildren: he’s supposed to be teaching them English, instead he teaches them how to defend themselves against the inevitable hordes of zombies that he believes will take over the city. Mostly he teaches using video games.
The cast of characters is still growing.
Kimiko, an aspiring voice actress, meets Piro when he gives her his train railcard after she’s lost hers. Her roommate Erika is Piro’s boss at the anime store. Erika’s very careful of her privacy, and is quietly terrifying to anybody who gets too close, so it takes a while to figure out what her story is.
Dom and Ed are friends of Piro and Largo, sort of. They’re employees of Sony and they’re terrifying in a less quiet way.
Schoolgirl Yuki is getting drawing lessons from Piro, and she used to be close to Erika, but Erika’s mother stopped them from seeing each other. Yuki’s mother also has a few secrets she’s not telling.
The guys are given “Ping” to watch over: she’s a life-sized “Emotional Doll System Accessory” for the PS2. A robot, in other words, to interact with the players of relationship-type video games. What could’ve been a somewhat creepy subplot somehow turns into a really sweet secondary storyline.
Tohya is a student at Largo’s school, and after all the issues I’ve read I’m still not sure what her story is. Largo’s convinced that she’s the harbinger of evil, come to take over the city and turn everyone into mindless slaves. Largo is also pretty crazy. But he’s also usually right.
I’m leaving out at least a dozen characters, but Fred’s an expert at handling a large cast without it getting confusing. He’s also got a habit of bringing in people for comic relief, and then turning them into major characters later on. Junpei the ninja, who originally showed up as the punchline of a joke,
ends up being surprisingly mysterious.
There’s also Piro and Largo’s consciences; little angels that sit on their shoulders and give them advice. Piro’s is a sexy smartass named Seraphim. Largo’s is a winged hamster. (Largo doesn’t take advice very well, I think the hamster was the only one who’d take the job.)
And that’s the best part about the story: weird things happen that everyone takes for granted. It might be Largo taking his students out to a video arcade to teach them strategy and defense, and not getting fired for it. Or it could be the Rent-A-Zilla place where you can hire a godzilla to help you take out a zombie horde.
Or it could be the zombie hordes themselves, who attack the city regularly. Literally, regularly. Tokoyo is a very well-run metropolis and you do not attack on the wrong day or you risk a very big fine. Keep to your schedule, folks.
As much as I enjoy Fred’s writing though, it’s the artwork that I love.
Watching the progression of his art for more than ten years has been wonderful. I loved the 
hilarious expressions on his characters from the very first book, or the sight-gags as something weird happens in the background that the characters don’t even notice.
But by the third book the art changed dramatically. Fred talks in his blog about how he used to draw out each panel in pencil and then carefully trace over everything in pen. This gave it a very clean look, but it took forever.
After a while he started keeping the original pencil drawings, bumping up the contrast after scanning and cleaning up the lines digitally. The resulting sketchy look is beautiful. Everything flows more, the style is more relaxed, and there’s more detail in the shading. Even the backgrounds are lovely.
The new Omnibus edition will collect the first three volumes of Megatokyo, about half the story so far. It has all the comic pages, plus all the extras Fred puts up on the site: Dead Piro Days (single images drawn on days when a page wasn’t ready to post), one-shot stories and omake (tributes to video games or anime), and Shirt Guy Dom strips (where the guy in charge of the T-shirt store draws terrible stick people, because he likes to torture the readers.)
Fred would probably be the first person to point out that while there’s a lot of content exclusive to this new edition, everything else, the whole story from day one, is available for free on the website. Fred’s a nice guy that way. I personally think that niceness should be rewarded by people throwing a lot of money at him, and the Omnibus edition is a good way to do that. It’s even economical, since it’s less expensive than buying the first three books separately.
Good to know; in case you get it in mind to drop everything and fly to Japan to battle ninjas and zombies and Sony employees with bazookas, you might need to save your money.