Mega Man – the robotic protagonist of the original Mega Man video game series.
#MEGAMAN SPRITE GAME MAIN VILLAIN SERIES#
The first frame of the Apanniversary comic, showing many different characters.īob and George has a large cast of characters consisting of characters from the Mega Man series of games, as well as original characters created by Anez and others. David didn’t know it then, but he’d be the pioneer in shattering this stereotype" Cast Regarding the use of sprites in a comic, Clevinger has said,Īs we all know, it's only a comic if it uses art, and it can only be art if it's hand drawn. Clevinger has called Anez "the Father of Sprite Comics" for his role in popularizing the phenomenon, and directly credits a friend showing him Anez's Bob and George for his inspiration to make his comic. Anez's comic "paved the way" for the creation of numerous other sprite comics, including Oldskooled, Life of Wily, and Brian Clevinger's 8-Bit Theater. At the height of its readership in 2004, Bob and George held an Alexa traffic rank of around 20,000. While not the first webcomic to ever use video game sprites in place of hand-drawn art, Bob and George is noted as being the first sprite comic to gain widespread popularity and the originator of the sprite comic "craze". There were a total of 2,658 daily comics produced. However, the story took longer than expected, and the comic ended on Anez's birthday, July 28, 2007. Bob is depicted as a gray Proto Man recolor while George is a Mega Man recolor with blond hair and no helmet.ĭavid planned to end the comic by April 1, 2007, which is the end of the seventh year of the comic's run. This was fixed with the introduction of sprite versions of the two characters into the comic. However, this meant that the comic strip was titled "Bob and George", but did not contain any characters named "Bob" or "George". Dave stated the reason for this is he realized that he still could not draw, and was not going to get any better. The hand-drawn comic made something of a return in the storyline "All Good Things"-the hand-drawn format is used to represent George's home dimension, though this time drawn by Liss, Dave's wife. Anez has stated that he hated the hand-drawn comic. Neither the initial attempt nor a later attempt at it went well, and both times he returned to the Mega Man sprite comic. The hand-drawn comic was to revolve around a group of superheroes attending college. He eventually purchased a scanner, and on June 1 he released the hand-drawn comic. He stated "I was hoping to use my friend's scanner, but he was never around." He instead released a sequence of filler comics using Mega Man sprites, which he intended to be a temporary measure until he gained access to a scanner, at which point he would implement his initial plan involving the hand drawn comics. Slated to start on April 1, 2000, the plan fell through because Anez did not have a scanner with which to scan his drawings. In addition, many of the story arcs involve either time travel, dimensional travel, and villains who want to kill all the characters.īob and George was originally planned to be a hand-drawn webcomic about the college adventures of the two titular brothers. Amongst past story arcs there have been retellings of various Mega Man games (which often play out quite differently from the originals), as well as battles against powerful foes. The comic's plot is mostly made up of story arcs of varying lengths. Animated comics are generally used for the annual week-long anniversary parties (usually culminating in a brief animated comic that recaps the events of the past year in a matter of seconds), for especially climactic scenes, and for a series of videos depicting an in-comic event known as "the Cataclysm".
Some of the Flash comics have the characters speaking, voiced by Anez and others (often forum members). In addition, occasional comics are animated using either animated GIFs or Macromedia Flash. The initial strips were mostly done in GIF format (occasionally using JPEG for more graphic-intensive comics) before converting to PNG in May 2004.
Most Bob and George strips are still images. It was updated daily, with there being only 29 days without a comic in its seven years of production and with 2568 comics being made altogether. The comic first appeared on Apand ran until July 28, 2007. It was written by David Anez, who at the time was a physics instructor living in the American Midwest. Bob and George strip from December 18, 2001.īob and George was a sprite-based webcomic which parodied the fictional universe of Mega Man.