Galaga

**Galaga** is a webcomic based on the original arcade game of the same name. It was written by Ryan North, drawn by Chris Hastings, and colored by Anthony Clark. The comic was contracted by and published under ShiftyLook, the name of a website by Bandai Namco created to revive their old video game properties in the form of webcomics and other forms of media. It is the second of two webcomics that the North/Hastings/Clark team did together for ShiftyLook, the other being Dig-Dug.

### Official Description

"*Released in 1981, Galaga is a fixed shooter arcade game that made the genre famous! It is now one of the most well known and loved arcade games in history. The player controls a space ship located at the bottom of the screen as enemy aliens fighters in the shape of "bugs" fill the upper portion and take turns firing at and dive-bombing the player's ship. Galaga has been ported to nearly every home gaming system as well as modern phones and tablets, and it's spawned more than sequels and remakes. Now Galaga has been re-imagined as a webcomic from three of the comic industry's top creators: written by Ryan North, illustrated by Chris Hastings, and colored by Anthony Clark.*"

## History

The Galaga webcomic was first announced on a Twitch livestream hosted by ShiftyLook at the New York Comic Con on October 11, 2012.

The Galaga comic was hosted on the ShiftyLook website, with the first three pages being put up on January 21, 2013. Two new pages were released every Monday and Friday, with each page being given its own title. In December of 2013 the release schedule was reduced to one page a week, on Mondays only, instead of bi-weekly. The final page was uploaded on March 10, 2014.

## Plot

The story begins with people protesting at the White House over the U.S. government reducing funding to NASA, while meanwhile in space a swarm of alien bees are advancing toward Earth, attacking government satellites. In response to the bees, the U.S. President sends out a robot spaceship to destroy them, but it only manages to damage one bee. The damaged bee hurtles toward the Earth and crash lands in the backyard of Betty Moodie, who is playing a video game with her friend Penelope Eagleburger. Upon impact the bee explodes into a variety of colored cubes, some of which the two girls bring inside to investigate.

The President streams a live video informing Americans of the alien invaders. While inspecting the cubes, Betty sets a red cube on top of a white cube, accidentally causing a giant laser blast to shoot upward through her house and into space, destroying one of the advancing bees. The laser blast and demise of the bee shows up in Washington on the President's computer screen, which is viewable from the live-stream as well. Penelope, who is watching the live-stream, shows Betty the President's computer screen and allows her to use it to fire more laser shots at the bees with accuracy. Using the screen to view the aliens' location, Penelope and Betty successfully destroy all the bees to the praise of the President.

The girls spend the next few days putting the blocks together in different shapes (coincidentally representing old Namco arcade icons), trying to get the blocks to stick together like the laser did. However, all of their block structures end up falling apart after a few seconds of being built. Finally, after many days they create a red and white ship that sticks together.

Meanwhile, the government sees that a second, larger swarm of bees are approaching from space, and so over television the President invites the owners of the laser gun that defeated the bees the last time to call in. Betty and Penelope call the President and assure him that they will take care of the bee threat, but the President demands that they turn over their ship to the U.S. Military. Ignoring the President's warnings, Betty climbs into the ship and blasts off anyway.

Right as she begins her flight, Betty realizes that there is a blue alien bug in the Earth's atmosphere and - after struggling to figure out the ship's firing controls - proceeds to blast it with her lasers.

Betty then proceeds to fly into space, and meanwhile Penelope uses the excess blocks (which they refer to as "points") to create a mission control center for her to monitor and communicate with Betty through. Betty fires through lines of enemy bees, and points start to gather up, following behind her ship. When the number of points following behind her reaches 20,000, they form together to create a new ship that tails her. During this, the President commands his Secret Service agents to find a way to give him control of Betty and Penelope's ship remotely.

While celebrating the accomplishment of acquiring another ship, Betty promptly crashes the ship she is flying into a bee. She survives inside a single red point, and is floated over to the second ship, which she initially doesn't know how to fly because the controls are in different places than they were before. She eventually figures out the button for firing the lasers, but because she does not know how to maneuver the ship she promptly crashes into one of the bees and destroys her second ship. As Betty floats around in a point, preparing to die in space, a new ship piloted by Penelope suddenly flies in and saves her.

Meanwhile on Earth, the president is getting frustrated with his Secret Service for not being able to hack into the girls' ship. One of the Secret Service members then enters the room and informs the president that they have triangulated a location in the Midwest where a strong signal is coming out of, and that it is probably the location of the ship's owners. The President and his personnel get into a helicopter and fly to the house's location, where they encounter Betty's parents. The government members confirm that the house is indeed the location that the ships were launched from, and the President uses the girls' communications devices to speak with the Betty and Penelope in space. The President listens as the girls' current ship is captured by an alien bee, and they eject a their cockpit from the ship and use it to board their extra craft. The girls then talk to the President, and after negotiating to have Betty's parent's roof fixed, Penelope agrees to help the President build his own ship from the pieces in their back yard. The president constructs his own red ship and blasts into space, but because he is far away from the action he has to turn on the hyperthrusters and fly a great distance to get to the girls.

As this is going on, the bee that captured girls' old ship takes their ship to a giant alien spider floating along behind the alien swarm army. The ship is dropped off above the giant spider, and two blocky replicas of Betty and Penelope appear inside the cockpit. Just then, the real Betty and Penelope detect the huge spider on their scanners and conclude that it must be the alien mothership. They theorize that if they can destroy the mothership, the alien invasion will end, so they begin firing through the remaining waves of enemies to get to it. As they are doing this, they spot their old captured ship being dragged along by a bee. They are about to blow the ship and the bee up, but then realize the ship is using its blinker to communicate with them in Morse code. They use their ship's lenses to zoom in on the captured ship and spot the pixelated doppelgangers of themselves inside.

Betty and Penelope are unsure if their look-alikes are friendly or not, so they destroy the bug that is towing the new ship along. The pixelated girls fly their ship straight toward Betty and Penelope's, which they at first believe to be an attack, but then realize the opposing ship is simply docking with theirs. Penelope and Betty go and meet their doppelgangers as they enter the ship, and at first are suspicious of the newcomers and their motives. The pixelated Betty and Penelope explain that they are made from the same cubes as the bugs but do not agree with what the rest of their kind is doing. They elaborate that the cubes are hyper-advanced supercomputers and that they have been travelling for millions of years to reach Earth, which was detected to be the planet with the highest likelihood of containing life.

At that time, the President of the United States reaches the girls in his own ship and, after defending their ships from bugs while the girls converse, reprimands them for spending time chatting while they should be firing at aliens. The pixelated Betty and Penelope (now dubbed "Petty and Penelope") return to their own ship and help the girls and the President fire at the alien bugs.

The defenders of Earth manage to make some headway and destroy most of the bugs leading up to the mothership. However, the mothership then sends out a tractor beam straight at Betty and Penelope and at the last moment before they are caught in it, the President swoops in and takes their place. The girls try to save the President and attack the mothership itself, but their lasers go right through the giant monster. As his ship is being pulled in by the tractor beam, the President commands the girls to keep destroying any alien bugs that come out of the mothership, and to wait for him to give them some sort of signal from inside the mothership. He then flies down the path of the mothership and straight into its opening.

Inside the mothership, the President is snuck up on by a group of cubes that form themselves to look like him. This new pixelated President disarms the original and threatens him with a laser hand, informing the real President that he will only be left alive as long as he is useful for gleaning information from. The true President and his cubic counterpart argue, and in this exchange the President claims that the the people of the Earth look up to him. The pixel President uses this information as his final bit of intelligence needed to invade earth. Because they are all connected through a computerized hive mind, all of the cubes left as debris from being blown up by the girls stream toward Earth and form together to make millions of pixelated American Presidents. These Presidents then descend into Earth and stand as sentinels watching every human on the planet. In addition to this, many other cubes join together to make a giant replica of the President's head watching over the Earth with the ability to shoot lasers from its mouth.

Back on the mothership, the real President punches the head off of the pixelated counterpart that had been threatening him and returns to his spacecraft to escape the mothership. He alerts the girls and their look-alikes of what has happened, and the five of them blast back toward the planet to stop the alien takeover.

When they arrive at Earth, the four girls return to Betty's parents' house and reunite with them. Petty and Penelope then enact an idea they came up with to debate with each of the pixel Presidents and reason with them not to subjugate Earth. Being computers, the pixelated girls are able to debate with thousands of arguments a second, so they attempt this strategy on the two pixel Presidents guarding Betty's parents and have great success. To be able to have enough allies to debate all the evil presidents of the world, pixel Penelope explains that they will need a massive amount of points on their side to create new debaters. One of the pixel Presidents suggests procuring more points by destroying the reinforcement bugs still coming at the Earth with the use of a device out of the real President's office. The pixel President sets up the unit, which is called the "Governmental Abstraction Layer: Aeronautics and Generalized Analysis" or "GALAGA" for short. The human Betty and Penelope then use this machine, which looks like an old arcade cabinet, to control their ships in space and destroy the alien bugs.

At this same time, in space, the President flies his ship toward the giant floating space head. Initiating a protocol installed by pixel Penelope, the President transforms his ship into a giant robot mech that he then uses to start firing at the President head. Eventually he shoots the head enough to destroy it and he uses the extra points around him to create a "heat shield" in shape of an American flag. Using this heat shield, the President surfs down to Earth to meet the girls.

The girls continue to play GALAGA and destroy the alien bugs, eventually collecting enough points to be able to chain ships together and destroy the mothership. The pixelated Presidents spread around the world, debating with evil pixel presidents and convincing them to not invade Earth. After some time every pixel President on Earth is convinced and they announce to the world that they no longer wish to invade the planet. A parade is held for Betty and Penelope as the world celebrates its freedom.

## Comic

Want to read the comic? You can read each page using the slideshow below. Click on an image to expand it, and click the left and right arrow buttons to advance pages.

* Galaga page 15
* Galaga page 39 Did You Belive Me When I Said It Was Over Because That Was Lies.jpg
1/58
Alternatively, here is a list of the pages along with their release dates:

* Page 1A "Invasion" - Released January 21, 2013
* Page 1B "Invasion" - Released January 21, 2013
* Page 1C "Invasion" - Released January 21, 2013
* Page 2A "My Favorite Speed" - Released January 25, 2013
* Page 2B "My Favorite Speed" - Released January 25, 2013
* Page 3A "Do You Want To Be Dead" - Released January 28, 2013
* Page 3B "Do You Want To Be Dead" - Released January 28, 2013
* Page 4A "Governmental Abstraction Layer Aeronautics And Generalized Analysis - Released February 1, 2013
* Page 4B "Governmental Abstraction Layer Aeronautics and Generalized Analysis - Released February 1, 2013
* Page 5 "Legit 8-Bit Styles" - Released February 4, 2013
* Page 6 "This Is Awesome, You Are Awesome" - Released February 8, 2013
* Page 7 "How Hard Could it Be" - Released February 11, 2013
* Page 8 "All The Aliens Are Blown Up Now - Released February 15, 2013
* Page 9 "Spooky Ghosts" - Released February 18, 2013
* Page 10 "Still Think This is Awesome" - Released February 22, 2013
* Page 11 "Like from the TV" - Released February 25, 2013
* Page 12 "(202) 456-1414" - Released March 1, 2013
* Page 13 "Hello Mr. President" - Released March 4, 2013
* Page 14 "Two Lady Bros" - Released March 8, 2013
* Page 15
* Page 16 "Safe Flight Betty" - Released March 15, 2013
* Page 17 "You'll Just Have to Deal" - Released March 18, 2013
* Page 18 "Kinda Busy Here" - Released March 22, 2013
* Page 19 "For Real This Time" - Released March 25, 2013
* Page 20 "I'm Gonna Blow it Up" - Released March 29, 2013
* Page 21 "I Just Stuck on Cubes" - Released April 1, 2013
* Page 22 "They're Just Cows" - Released April 5, 2013
* Page 23 "50 Points Right There" - Released April 8, 2013
* Page 24 "An American Landscape Featuring Penelope" - Released April 12, 2013
* Page 25A Pretty Sure My Phone Won't Work In Space, Part 1 - Released April 15, 2013
* Page 25B Pretty Sure My Phone Won't Work In Space, Part 2 - Released April 15, 2013
* Page 26A You Got This, Part 1 - Released April 19, 2013
* Page 26B You Got This, Part 2 - Released April 19, 2013
* Page 27A What if Christopher Hastings Wrote Galaga, Part 1 - Released April 22, 2013
* Page 27B What if Christopher Hastings Wrote Galaga, Part 2 - Released April 26, 2013
* Page 28A What if Anthony Clark Wrote Galaga, Part 1 - Released April 29, 2013
* Page 28B What if Anthony Clark Wrote Galaga, Part 2 - Released May 3, 2013
* Page 29A Keep Doing That, Part 1 - Released May 6, 2013
* Page 29B Keep Doing That, Part 2 - Released May 6, 2013
* Page 30A Wacky Cubes, Part 1 - Released May 10, 2013
* Page 30B Wacky Cubes, Part 2 - Released May 10, 2013
* Page 31A Your Zingers Need Work, Part 1 - Released May 13, 2013
* Page 31B Your Zingers Need Work, Part 2 - Released May 13, 2013
* page 32 20,000 Points - Released May 17, 2013
* Page 33 Video Games Are For Diaper Babies - Released May 20, 2013
* Page 34 Achievement Unlocked - Released May 24, 2013
* Page 35 Blast to Meet You - Released May 27, 2013
* Page 36 Sim Katamari Ball Roller - Released May 31, 2013
* Page 37 The End, Thanks For Reading - Released June 3, 2013
* Page 38 Seriously, the Comic is Over Now - Released June 7, 2013
* Page 39 Did You Believe Me When I Said It Was Over Because That Was Lies - Released June 10, 2013
* Page 40 It's Totally Messed Up in Here - Released June 14, 2013
* Page 41 The Entire Script for This Comic Only Has Two Letters in it - Released June 17, 2013
* Page 43 I Hope It Tastes Good - Released June 24, 2013
* Galaga Page 44 I'm Gonna Die In Space - Released June 28, 2013
* Galaga Page 45 The Script For This Comic Doesn't Even Have Any Letters In It - Released July 1, 2013
* Galaga page 46 Mabel Was Handy In A Tight Spot - Released July 5, 2013
* Page 47
* Galaga page 48 When You're President They Teach You How TO Do That - Released July 12, 2013

## Physical copies

A physical volume compiling all of the pages of the comic was announced to be published by UDON Entertainment, but it is uncertain if the book was ever actually released.

## Accolades

Galaga won "*Best Sci-Fi Comic Where Teenage Girls Refer To Each Other As "Dude"*" in ComicsAlliance's The Best Comic Books of 2013.

## Trivia

* The idea for having the ship be made of pixels came from Hastings' apprehensiveness about having to draw a 3D, realistic Galaga ship from different angles. Hastings suggested drawing the ship in its pixelated form as a joke, and writer Ryan North took the idea and ran with it, incorporating building a ship out of pixels into the story.
* The entire comic was also translated into Japanese for the Japanese version of the website.
* The number that the President invites people to call in the comic ((202) 456-1414) is the actual number for the White House Comment line.
* Pages 27A and 27B were titled "What if Chris Hastings Wrote Galaga," and for two pages Chris Hastings hijacked the story and imagined the President popping out of Betty's ship and destroying the alien bees with his punches. This was followed by two pages of Anthony Clark's own imagining of the story.
* Some of the images uploaded to the website contained "(V2)" or "(V3)" at the end, possibly implying that there were previous versions of these pages before they were changed and put on the website.
* Betty's line "I came here to blow up aliens and screw up... ...and I'm all out of screw-ups." is a reference to the meme started by the movie *They Live*.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 http://comicsalliance.com/namco-bandai-shiftylook-webcomics/
2. ↑ http://investcomics.com/news/take-a-shiftylook-at-new-galaga-online-comic
3. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20141003105141/http://www.shiftylook.com/news/post/galaga-schedule-change?lang=en
4. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20190909193557/https://www.bleedingcool.com/2014/03/10/shiftylook-closes-but-udon-to-keep-their-comics-going-if-they-can/
5. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20190715185912/http://comicsalliance.com/best-comic-books-of-2013-master-list/
6. ↑ https://www.twitch.tv/shiftylook/v/38680793
7. ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20131204164521/http://www.shiftylook.com/comics/galaga
8. ↑ https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/write-or-call
9. ↑ File:Galaga page 27A What if Chris Hastings Wrote Galaga.jpg
10. ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20130710053941/http://www.shiftylook.com/comics/galaga/keep-doing-that-part-2
11. ↑ http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-here-to-kick-ass-and-chew-bubblegum