Why did the Mega Man comics not gain 1/10th the popularity of the Sonic comics?

Why did the Mega Man comics not gain 1/10th the popularity of the Sonic comics?

Sonic fans will buy anything with sonic on it and mega man fans are far less numerous than sonic fans

Because autism sells.

Sonic is for autists and people with good taste are far less in numbers overall

Tron Bonne is best waifu and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.

Sonic came out when comics were still netting pretty big numbers, and retained a lot more of an audience. Sonic's also had more supplementary media, while Mega Man suffers from being split into sub-settings; kids who remember, say, the NT Warrior cartoon might not grab a book based on the classic setting.

Roll > all other girls

Because they started at Mega Man 1 and slowly trudged forward instead of telling a bunch of interesting stories with the huge cast.

People who blame the condition of comics or says it's just because Sonic is more popular is making excuses. The book was just not constructed to pull in new readers at all. It's repetitive, glacially paced, and not terribly interesting aside from a few issues. I have no idea why the fuck they kept Ian on for over 40 issues when his version just wasn't selling.

Do your parents know they raised someone who is so very wrong?

Lolis are for the thinking man

>implying Tron Bonne isn't a prime loli.

I don't want to have to search for a screwdriver every time I'm in the mood for some lewd.

The shops near me just never carried it in the first place, while Sonic was available at supermarkets.

Roll is more cute, you'll understand it someday

Because Mega Man fans are actually just a myth.
Capcom wised up to this a while ago.

Because nobody plays Mega Man games for the story or setting. Also because it's a lot harder to come up with new robot masters than it is to recolor a Sonic character.

There have to be near 100 robot masters to pick from though...

>[noun or verb] man is too difficult to think up

Sonic is a bigger franchise that actually has games constantly coming out. Also, it was around for 20+ years including through Sonic's peak popularity.

Needing to come up with new robot masters is moot when they didn't even use half of the existing ones.

Capcom put a lot of effort in ruining Megaman over the years.

Because Mega Man only has 1/10th of the popularity of Sonic in general.

This, but nobody actually cares, they just want to meme it up.

Because the Sonic comics launched during a comics boom, during the height of Sonic's popularity, while a cartoon series was serving to cross market it.

Mega Man launched alongside a Dead Franchise, to an ailing Archie comics, and unending crossovers with a past it's prIme Sonic franchise.

I thought that the Mega Man comic was doing fairly well? At least, relatively speaking. It was their investment in Bloomwood or whatever, along with a failed Kickstarter, which ran the company short on money.

Also, the whole Penders lawsuit was starting up again, and Capcom might've had cold feet about renewing.

Although what says is true as well. The Sonic comic came out when Sonic was a best selling video game on the Genesis, when the SatAM Sonic cartoon was airing, and when Sonic was one of the most memorable video game characters alongside Mario. The Mega Man comic came out over five years after the last new Mega Man game, over 20 years after he was last on TV, when pretty much all new Mega Man games have been cancelled, and the only activity in Mega Man were a few really shitty mobile titles and the MM Legacy re-releases. Sure, I can understand a classic Mega Man comic series being released when MM Legacy came out to make some sense, but most people interested in Mega Man were understandably not looking for any new material.

Plus, comic stores are not exactly as well populated now as they were back in the 80s.

Dead franchise walking + a plot that was drowning itself into referencing every bit of lore it could possibly could as opposed to having the narrative take front and center.

Mega Man kept dropping every time they did an adaptation of a game.

Like, hard. By thousands of issues. Even if it wasn't for the cost-cutting, the 8 month MM3 arc was killing sales.

Really? I did not know that. I guess people liked Tempo more than watching the writers give Rock reasons to blast robot masters without killing them. (Although I doubt many people cared for the Xander stories.)

Nearly every single comic drops thousands of issues montly though.

Because it lacked shipping. Archie Sonic shipped Sonic and Sally, Sally and Monkey Khan, Bunnie and Antoine, Tails and Fiona, and Knuckles and Julie-Su. Considering the games have ZERO romance, this was huge with fans of the book. It was giving them something they couldn't get otherwise outside of fanfiction.

Mega Man had none of that. The closest they got was Dr. Light x Dr. Lalinde, but even that didn't get very far.

wasn't protoman and quake woman teased too (at least by vesper woman)?

Sonic got a comic at the height of his popularity and it coincided with his television appearances. While Mega Man was released during somewhat of a nadir as far as public awareness is concerned.

Most comics start far higher than Mega Man did, and it had the added bonus of being sold in regular stores and news stands. On top of that, the regular decline you're talking about is direct market numbers, but Mega Man was dropping hard even in book stores. THAT'S why it's absurd.

MM's decline was pretty typical except during the game arcs, but specifically 3, and the three issues we got after Worlds Unite bottomed right the fuck out back to the pre-crossover numbers whereas WC boosted the series significantly. It was down to 6000 or less in direct market by the end. Nothing was going to save it. MM3 torpedo'd the book.

Looking through both Comichron's direct sales data and the legal-ese Archie had to publish within the book yearly, it seems like readers were keen on material they weren't familiar with regardless of whether they were game related or not (The Proto Man arc, most of the original stories, even Ra Moon) as numbers were most stable for that. Meanwhile, the complete lack of jump for the X crossover and the actual increased decline for MM3 implies that teases and retreading ground wasn't very popular.

It's all a matter of inference, of course, but based on sales and online reactions it seems like the comic's biggest problems were its pacing and strict adherence to the games.

>The Mega Man comic came out over five years after the last new Mega Man game
MM10 came out in 2010

They tried shipping Ice Man with Roll and fans complained about it or didn't care. They tried shipping Tempo with Blues and it was met with lukewarm response.

Also, reboot Sonic was much steadier than Archie Mega Man despite a total lack of shipping.

Sonic's comic sold best when his TV shows were dead and they shilled popular characters. Its best sales period was 2005 when they spammed Shadow for about 2/3 of the year.

But Sonic sold at all because his comic started at his personal peak.

It is when you're a lazy internet autist who just wants to take a picture of Knuckles, recolor him with the paint tool, add sunglasses and list all your hobbies next to him.

Because Megaman's characters have always been boring one dimensional and just uninteresting. Think about it, the most popular character is Zero and his development came at the expense of even Megaman X himself. So with that vacuum character high jacking the franchise, what are you left with? Uninteresting plot devices.

In some ways that's true, but it's more that it sustained itself long enough to have a foothold because it premiered then. It had a strong start as a generally well produced gag comic and rode the wave of quality + timing for nearly a decade with shit stories. If it had been produced at the wrong time but was well written it could have still lasted.

Mega Man was not inherently doomed, but the comic wasn't good enough to sustain itself.

What about the readership during the MM1 and MM2 events?

The X crossover was bullshit and I'm not surprised to see a readership drop. Most people reading Mega Man were likely into it for the classic Mega Man stuff; suddenly involving time travel and X and Vile and whatever else was likely to throw that off. Sure, you'll have MMX fans who say they really wanted to see more X and wanted to see the story branch from the classic series into X, but fans of the classic stuff were probably more interested in Rock and his daily life, dealing with Wily, and the setup they had with either the robot masters interacting (Proto Man, etc.) or with just the population in general dealing with talking and "thinking" robots.

Plus, from what I remember, all the X stuff was related to Xander and any of the Xander stories were fairly screwy.

then penders sues your thieving ass

1 was literally the start of the comic, you can't really judge that.

The rest of the year is actually pretty interesting. When talking direct market, the Powered Up saw a notable sales drop after the first part (probably because Chad Thomas' art isn't to most people's liking) but then stabilized to a pretty consistent rate. Mega Man 2 was pushed hard by Archie and saw a big sales spike, but sales then started plummeting at an increasing rate until the arc ended around 1000 less copies sold than the previous arc. The book then stabilized afterwards with small drops over time.

So yeah, even as early as Mega Man 2 the game content was causing quick drops because "I already know how this goes." It's pretty interesting.

>X crossover isn't surprising
Well the interesting thing is that sales went UP when X had his two-parter backup before that. It seems that the actual act of having a story trying to tie them together was the culprit, not having X stories in general.

Also, Xander doesn't correlate to increased dropped sales anywhere, the post WU issues being the only possible exception.

Interesting. Well thanks for the data. It's a shame that the series died off (especially before Vesper Woman got into a trade paperback) but at least it is informative of where the dips in readership were located.

I don't think that anybody else is really interested in making a licensed comic, perhaps outside IDW, so I guess there isn't really much chance at seeing another shot at the idea. I guess we'll just have to be happy with Megamix and Gigamix out of Japan if we want further Mega Man comics.

Considering one of the original ones is Quake Girl, who looks extremely bland and has really bland powers, both of which have basically nothing to do with her namesake, yes. Yes, it was too hard for Archie.

Where exactly are you getting all the sales data from?

Because Megaman fans are illiterate.

Comichron for direct sales, and every year Archie has to publish legal notices of how many books they put out, etc which gives you a good sense of how their books do outside of the direct market.

Mega man has split fanbases. Several different series means not every mega fan even cares about the classic series or the x series or whatever. There's like six mega men with fans who look for different things. Sonic is more or less the same across the board.

>Sonic is more or less the same across the board.
Heh.