A lot of people claim that the beach is the perfect place to relax and recharge. I do concur, just with the qualification that it only applies, im my eyes, to entities which employ an aquatic-life-based breath or projectile weapon. I’ll allow for a pretty loose interpretation of that restriction*, but it’s still probably a very exclusive group of people…even assuming a similarly loose interpretation of ‘people’.
But, hey, after what happened in the last strip, Mechagodzilla definitely fully qualifies for that group – and his well-deserved R&R trip to the beach seems to go very well. Because, yeah, that one attack took a lot out of him – a lot of Great White sharks, that is. So, naturally, he has to restock his…well, I guess he has to have some internal storage pool, or something? As well as some facility to mount the multi-barreled lasers to the fish. Plus, of course, storage for the laser guns themselves…unless he has an internal production facility for multi-barreled lasguns? Yeah, I’ve said (and shown) it before – the internal workings of a giant robot are some sort of non-Euklidian multi-dimensional grey area which can contain anything or nothing, as the plot dictates…
But showing the reloading process for fish-based breath weapons isn’t actually the purpose of this strip – the real purpose is not showing what has happened to the protagonists. If you go for cheap tension, and which B-movie wouldn’t?, you can’t follow up a seeming catastrophic defeat/destruction of the heroes with a scene showing the results. You have to put stuff in between, ideally irrelevant stuff. I think this should qualify nicely.
Bonus B-movie authenticity moment: in panel four, you can faintly make out the tiles on the bottom of the pool. XD
More on Thursday.
* A bad case of halibut-breath might fall under it, for example.
I just assumed he had a supplier, like a sharks-with-multi-barreled-lasers emporium. He’s MECHAgodzilla, his recharge method doesn’t have to be natural. That’d be like saying gunowners have to hunt for bullets out in the wild.
THAT said, if you CAN make your artificial kaiju replenish itself naturally, that’s definitely a cost-saving design on an already dubious extreme military expense. Maybe that was the selling point: He forages for sharks on his own and eats metal scrap to maintain his internalized multi-barrel laser production and outfitting center.
Well, the physics behind giant robots and mecha-kaiju are vague and sketchy enough – so don’t let’s get started on the economics. XD Anything you could actually build along those lines couldn’t come much cheaper than $500 mil per pop…and the infrastructure to build it at least four times that. And that only gets you the features a giant anthropomorphic robot could realistically have – to get the plainly impossible features these things tend to flaunt on top of that, you’d probably have to pay a multiple of the base price.
Admittedly, the squadron of jet fighters such kaiju usually tend to take down as proof of basic proficiency doesn’t come cheap, either, but it’s still at least one order of magnitude outside of being a sound investment…
Ironically, with the kind of bizarre behavior certain billionaire investors have been displaying recently, the idea of somebody of vast financial means wasting them on this kind of project no longer seems as far-fetched as it did in classic age of kaiju movies. XD
I think I vaguely remember a breath attack that shoots sharks, but I’m not sure. I may need to go back and double-check.
Absolutely possible – it wouldn’t be the first element which I’ve unwittingly recycled from earlier in BMC history. The comic has been going on for a long time, and my memory keeps getting worse. XD
Sharknado-powered Mechagodzuki?
XD More like Sharknado-enabled. For historical reasons, kaiju have to be nuclear-powered in one form or another. You have to honor the Godzilla/Nuke association that formed the original foundation of the franchise…