![]() Sky Kid is one of the Udon strips, and is ostensibly the most faithful to the game, with its world of anthropomorphic birds in endless dogfighting combat. Joe plus emotions, it seems to be progressing towards something closer to the actual Xevious backstory, as Mu and Eve are both figures in the original "mythology" - methinks I'm not the only one who's read the HG101 article. Despite some liberties in the characters and setting that make this comic look and sound like G.I. How did he just now find out? Was she drafted really quickly? There isn't enough time and not enough panels to find out, because the next skirmishes are just around the corner. Oscar left his almost-fiance Eve to join the battle, but then discovers she joined up right after. Regardless, that doesn't seem to be the actual intent once you keep reading. ![]() The first strip has a tongue-in-cheek air about it, or maybe that's just the utterly strange dialogue coming from Oscar. And apparently the Argentinian air force are the ones who fly the Solvalou ships. The hero is Oscar, nickname "Mu," a young guy from Argentina who joined the national air force to fight the Xevious (why not "Xevians?" They're aliens from the planet Xevious!). ![]() The setup is familiar: aliens are attacking Earth, starting with Peru (so far the only reference to the Nazca Lines in the game), but everything else about the story seems to take a sharp left turn. One of Cryptozoic's strips is Xevious, which is pretty much my favorite Namco franchise, so I was drawn to this comic first. Maybe I'll revisit them here in the future.) (Note that I base all this on the first month of strips, so whatever I describe may change one way or the other as months go on. Given that, I was interested in what ShiftyLook was doing, and started reading what they have so far and thought I'd share some impressions. You'd have to be some retro game nerd who makes his own magazine to recognize or give a damn about Xevious, Bravoman and Sky Kid comics in this day and age. And these really aren't Namco games that the average comics reader or gamer would remember. ShiftyLook's current lineup re-imagines three old Namco games (and one new one) as twice-weekly webcomics. I bring this all up to frame a recent development in game comics that had me thinking of Valiant: ShiftyLook, a comics site/imprint/thingy owned by Namco Bandai, but with the comics themselves done by contributors from Udon and Cryptozoic Entertainment. Meanwhile, Archie scored Sonic the Hedgehog, which is the longest-running video game comic in the Western world. Their four books continued apace for just one year, when Nintendo parted ways, and Valiant continued on with their original superhero titles. That said, they were all better than you'd expect, with the Mario stories in particular being genuinely funny, sometimes even deadpan. It was potentially a great opportunity to get original stories from games that deserved them, but the comics were essentially extensions of the TV cartoons - obviously Captain N, but even Mario and Zelda took more elements from the shows than the games. So.You might remember the beginning of Valiant Comics, when their first big titles were under the "Nintendo Comics System " officially-licensed comic books featuring Super Mario, Captain N, The Legend of Zelda, and a few others. My favorites were everything to do with Bravoman, their Mappy webseries, and there Galaga webcomic. ![]() I was able to take in everything except the Wonder Momo anime before they went down (though that is still being made by a third party company). Through that I found the Bravoman comic, then everything else Shifty. I found them through a band that my brother listens to religiously (and I admit have a few good songs) that did the theme for Bravoman, one of their webseries. So my question is, during those sweet few years of existence, did anyone else here watch/read them? What were your favorite parts of what they did? How did you find them? Unfortunately, Namco dissolved them last year, and both their website and YouTube channel are no more. For those of you who don't know, ShiftyLook is a now-defunct sect of Namco (Pacman, Digdug, etc.) that was set to bring some of their more obscure games to light by making webcomics and webseries about them.
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