Commentary
for July 15, 2022:
I took a little
break between finishing the previous chapter and starting this one.
It was mostly due to offering to run a small Dungeons & Dragons
adventure for some friends and needing to do a lot of prep for it,
so I had no time to start on this. Fortunately, I had a decent
backlog of pages done already.
Anyway, this chapter is one adapted mostly from the version featured
in my 2018 attempt at remastering Eon’s Comic; but I’ll go
into more details about the similarities and differences at the end,
as usual. Now, I may have mentioned previously that Eon’s Comic
got very political in places and I don’t really plan on
toning that down. The difference between now and then is that I hope
I can write something that feels a bit more sophisticated than what
I was capable of between 2002 and 2011. That’s not to say that that
what I wrote back then was all bad. I think some of my later stories
were pretty good, actually. But some of the early politics stuff
doesn’t hold up well at all.
Now, who is Walter Haig? Have we met him before? Well, I’m pretty
sure we haven’t -- and I really hope I’m right about that, because
if we have met him, he will have definitely looked different
to my redesign of him here. Anyway, Haig is the Governor of New
Deseret, which is a north-western province of Meridia, roughly
corresponding to the real world region of Utah and some of the other
surrounding states. He is a member of the United Federation’s
Conservative Party and we’ll learn more about him in a page or two.
Now, while Haig did appear in Eon’s Comic, in the original version
of this election story arc, the conservative candidate was actually
Mega Man. Yes from the game series Mega Man.
I made Mega Man the victim of my very poor attempt at a parody of
George W. Bush, by portraying him as an aggressive warmonger who was
obsessed with terrorism and wanted to use perceived threats to the
nation as an excuse to take away people’s rights and freedoms. You
know, like the Bush administration actually did. The problem is, I
was an angry seventeen-year-old, who had just been forced to watch
my country, the UK, being willingly drawn into an unjust war of
aggression in Iraq at the whims of this awful American president,
and I felt utterly powerless. So I used my comic to try and lampoon
him. But Mega Man didn’t deserve to be treated that way. Sadly, this
was back when I knew nothing about Mega Man and would just use
whatever sprites I thought looked cool. It didn’t occur to me yet to
try and make some human OC to fill the role. I think, having had
Bass run at the previous election, I felt some need to continue this
very silly trend of having official videogame characters running for
office, or managing restaurants, or just doing weird stuff that was
not at all what they were actually about. Years later, I did read
the very good Mega Man comics by Archie and I came to realise how
terrible my use of Rock back in 2003 had truly been. But even before
then, as early as 2005, I came to regret using the Mega Man
franchise the way I’d done and tried to rehabilitate its role in
Eon’s Comic somewhat, give it a good send-off, and then never
touch it again. Needless to say, coming into Eon’s World Vol.
1, a complete remake of Eon’s Comic, ultimately there was no
real question that I wouldn’t have any Mega Man characters running
for office, and ultimately I decided to nix the Mega Man
content altogether, to just keep things simpler.
So that’s why Sally is going up against this Walter Haig guy. Now,
like I said, Haig did appear in Eon’s Comic, although not
until a few years later than this, and his name was spelt “Hague”,
because he was literally named after William Hague, former leader of
the UK’s Conservative Party (who is still a prominent MP to this
day, unfortunately). I was not subtle back then. In any case, I
decided to change up the spelling to make it a little less on the
nose. Now he’s just named after
the Butcher of the Somme... Anyway,
I changed his appearance a little, too. He was originally bald and
had a rounder head, but I decided to give him a full head of hair
and a square jaw, to give him the kind of commanding, authoritative
statesman look that people see and say, “Yes, he looks
presidential.” Whatever that is supposed to mean. |