Webcomic / In Wily's Defense

"I think it's a plan that's not just madness and insanity, but in fact transcends them and becomes the shape of a lawnmower."

— John "Blues" McQueen

"And let me tell you, if you think [In Wily's Defense] is your average Mega Man sprite comic, slap yourself and think again."

— Alan Solivan

In Wily's Defense is a completed Sprite Comic by Mike Renner centered on the question of what would happen if the roles of Dr. Wily and Dr. Light of the classic Mega Man games were reversed; i.e., Dr. Wily is a roboticist-turned-Twinkie factory owner that only wants a quiet life (but does a fairly poor job at it), while Dr. Light is a megalomaniacal Mad Scientist dead-set on killing every last one of the Wilys. Throw in a loud, lazy egotistical God and his Angels of Love, Death, Destruction, and Fate, and, well, guess what happens next.

About halfway into IWD's third season, Renner began its sequel, Tales of Southtown, another sprite comic primarily focusing on the Seraphim, the children of the three female Angels (who have been promoted to Goddesses), and a few characters from Fatal Fury, The King of Fighters, and one from Street Fighter. ToS was discontinued due to a lack of a concrete plot.

IWD was started again four years after the original series, taking a Darker and Edgier turn.

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These Webcomics provide examples of:

• Action Girl
• A God Am I: Heat Man, Elec Man during his cameo, Storm Green in season 2.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Eddie and X.
• And I Must Scream: Gabriel Knight's soul was stuck inside Freeze Man's encapsulated body for a year before Fiora decided to start working on him.
• Animated Actors: It wasn't until late in the first season, but IWD was portrayed as a TV show.
• Anti-Villain: Possibly Mist Violet, if the fact that she still keeps in contact with her "mother" long after her Face–Heel Turn is evident of anything.
• Art Shift: In Series 2, the sprites are less Mega Man-based and more original-styled.
• Author Avatar: Parodied.
• Ax-Crazy: Eddie, X, Freeze Man, Magdelena.
• Back from the Dead: Cut Man.
• Badass Bookworm: Pharaoh Man.
• Beard of Evil: Dr. Light and Dr. Doppler.
• Better than a Bare Bulb
• Beware the Nice Ones: Plant Woman kills Dr. Light.
• Body-Count Competition: IWD 200.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: "The last thing we need is you attacking the city with fire and lightning and lightning that's on fire."
• Break the Cutie: Poor Planty.
• Butt-Monkey: Kiki.
  Kiki: Okay, seriously. Why is it that I'm physically or mentally abused even in my own flashbacks?
• Catchphrase: Freeze Man uses the word "spiffy" a lot.
• Ceiling Cling: Gemini Man, by way of being held aloft by "no fewer than four large air duct rats".
  • Chekhov's Gag: By Series 2, Plant Woman has learned the language of said air duct rats.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Gabriel Knight, aka Freeze Man.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Gemini Man in IWD, Tyrine in ToS
• Combat Commentator: Played for laughs by Heat Man and Gyro Man.
• Conversational Troping
• Cowboy Jesus Is Way Cool
• Crystal Dragon Jesus
• Cute and Psycho: It's really disturbing how cheerful Magdalena can be while talking about destruction.
• Cute Clumsy Girl: Keimi
• Darker and Edgier: The second series. Thanks to Freeze Man and Doppler's actions, robots have come under increasingly severe scrutiny in fear that they too will go on a rampage. The prologue explicitly states that Amy and co are blamed completely for Freeze Man's Megapolis attack (which is KINDA true) and resentment towards Robots being treated equally as humans have sparked several mass riots (some led by Glenn Beck). Oh, and the series proper opens with a massive terrorist attack by a group of renegade robots even more powerful than Freeze Man, Dr Knight is revealed to have had a hand in the attack and is arrested, and Amy herself is also under suspicion of being involved in the attack. Hell, the first chapter is basically a Smug Snake government agent interrogating Amy on her role in the attack.
  • Even the villains are far more brutal and dark. In the first series, even Freeze Man and Sputnik had most of their atrocities kept off-screen, and Freeze Man was played for laughs just as often as he was played seriously. The Prism Masters, though? Of the ones we've seen so far, Red incinerates a hapless civilian, Indigo massacres dozens of security guards, Green KILLS Crystal, brutally, and Black strangles an unarmed woman right in front of her preteen daughter. All of this happens completely onscreen.
• Deadpan Snarker: Cut Man
• Dénouement: Part of Renner's Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: knowing what this means and using it as the name of an arc.
• Disproportionate Retribution: "So, this all started because nine-year-old Amy depantsed Dr. Light. Yeah, I'd say that's grounds for trying to kill Dr. Wily's entire family and destroying the entire multiverse."
• Distaff Counterpart: Plant Woman
• Don't Explain The Joke: Here.
• Elemental Powers: the Seraphim
• Emotionless Girl: Aria, sort of.
• The End of the World as We Know It: The consequences of the Space Distortion going awry
• Enemy Within: Sputnik
• Evil Brit: Dr. Dominic Doppler
• Expy: Heat Man's egotistical God complex came directly from Sphere (who predates the comic)
• Eyes Always Shut: Tyrine
• Fetch Quest: discussed in IWD; Renner notes the irony of such, since it has nothing to do with his magnum opus of the same name
• Finagle's Law: the most frequently re-occurring Running Gag, called Murphy's Law
• Fluffy Cloud Heaven: lampshaded
• Funetik Aksent: used exclusively with Pierre Delacroix, IWD's director
• Ghost in the Machine: Literally.
• God Is Evil: "Evil" might be too strong a word, but on the rare occasions Sphere gets off his rear and does something, it usually involves mass destruction
• Godwin's Law: Blues is immediately disqualified from participating in the Battle of Wits because, to quote Cut Man, he'd "invoke Godwin's Law within the first ten seconds". This ultimately leads up to:
  Blues: "This ISN'T the internet, you fascist Nazi pigdog!"
  Napalm Man: "You lose."
• The Grim Reaper: Who's also a part-time weatherman with a love for tornadoes and hurricanes
  Death: "Go towards the tornado for an extra life! They want to be your friends!"
• Hammerspace: "You're using Looney Tunes jokes to explain your actions now?" "I've clearly lost my mind."
• Handsome Lech: Sphere and Antilles
• Halloween Cosplay
• Have You Seen My God?: Sphere is too lazy to do a damn thing about anything.
• Hilarious Outtakes: Actually just a series of one-panneled gags
• Idiot Hair: Kiki and Fir. Musta been hereditary.
• Idol Singer: Athena Asamiya claims to be one
• Incendiary Exponent: Heat Man
• Innocent Flower Girl: Plant Woman again, sort of
• Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!
• I Take Offense to That Last One
  Dr. Light: I hope you know that I never liked you.
  Amy: And I hope you know that I think you're an old, fat blight on humanity whom, if he were to suddenly explode and disappear, would not be missed by ANYONE.
  Dr. Light: Hey, I'm not fat!
• Jerkass: EVERYONE!
• Kangaroo Court: Agent Wilfork is basically a one-man version of this. He claims that he's impartial and only wants the truth, but his arrogant, condescending attitude, his near constant smug grin, and his obvious disdain for robots and roboticists make it clear he's not on Amy's side.
• Karma Houdini: Parodied with Freeze Man.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes
• Killed Off for Real: Pharaoh Man. Renner even pulled an 8-Bit Theater here, having to make a strip confirming that he's dead and not coming back.
  • Later Gyro Man bites the dust for good.
• Large Ham: Again, Heat Man and Blues.
• Laughably Evil: Freeze Man. He's a complete lunatic, but he's so comedic and likable that he gets off without any real punishment (unless you consider being turned into a Mettool sufficient).
• Light Is Not Good
• Love Freak: Kiki, who even gets called Flonne at one point

• Magical Girl: Athena Asamiya
• Mirror Universe
• The Mafia: Made entirely of Mettools, led by Don Bluehat
• The Man Behind the Man: Dr. Doppler, but really, it ends up being pretty obvious
• Medium Awareness:"This box makes Gutsy blind", among other examples.
• Mega Manning: Mega Man and X, natch
• Mental World: the Dimension of Eddie
• Monster Clown: Cut Man uses this trope to his advantage in the battle of wits in response to Napalm Man's claim that Kefka was "nothing more than a glorified clown".
• MST: Gyro Man's backstory
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: "My dear, beloved angels...and Kiki..."
• Mythology Gag: Robots are classified from Mark One (rather weak or dumb) to Mark Six (almost human-like); however, the Robot Masters in the series are all ranked at the number of the game in which they appear (for example, Guts Man is Mk. 1, while Plant Woman is Mk. 6, being the Distaff Counterpart of Plant Man). This leading to the fact that Freeze Man, who comes from 7, is ridiculously overpowered.
  • Cut Man is the Mk. 8. Renner says that he "kinda felt like he was cheating" when he made that decision.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: As Blues explains, destroying Doctor Light's Artifact of Doom turns out to have been a very bad idea, mainly because destroying it unsealed Freeze Man.
• No Fourth Wall: It gets worse over IWD's run, to the point that characters break the fourth wall by way of lampshading it
• "Not So Different" Remark: Doppler tries to make this comparison to him and Freeze Man when the latter calls him on his plans for deicide. Freeze Man's response?
  "Yeah, but I'm insane. What's your excuse?"
• No Sense of Direction (Amy. See here.)
• Noodle Incident: Benny lost his eye because of an accident involving a duck, a stapler, and a plastic toaster.
• Oh My Sphere
  • Heat Man also goes by "Oh my me" and others "What in the name of ME")
• Older and Wiser: Plant Woman, in the second series.
• Omnicidal Maniac: see Ax Crazy
• Our Angels Are Different: the four Angels in IWD are described as aspects of Sphere and maintainers of the world, though Death and Magdelena are highly irresponsible.
• Outrun the Fireball: subverted: Gabriel tries and fails to outrun the explosion that kills him
• Patriotic Fervor: Geese Howard, going above and beyond the (coincidentally-named) Keith Howard
  Terry Bogard: "You look like the douchebag hellspawn of Uncle Sam and some two-cent Japanese whore."
  Geese Howard: "My mother was American. And five dollars."
• Physical God: Sphere. The Angels and Seraphim, to a lesser extent
• Powers That Be: the Multiversal Commission.
• Prematurely Bald: Dr. Wily.
• Psycho Lesbian: Amy
• Ridiculously Human Robots
• Robot Girl: take a wild guess
• Rousing Speech: again, parodied
• Running Gag: Dodongo dislikes tropes.
• Sanity Slippage: See And I Must Scream
• Satan: He's buddies with Freeze Man. And Sputnik.
• Say It with Hearts: Magdalena.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Freeze Man, though he's technically not "evil", just Ax-Crazy.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: In Renner's words, you need a dictionary to understand his work. "Tachyon" comes to mind.
  • For the record, a tachyon is a hypothetical particle that moves faster than the speed of light.
• Sharing a Body Fiora and Aria.
• Shrug of God: The author pretty much admits that he has no idea how Gyro Man knew about the location of the Globe.
• So Long, Suckers!
• Shout-Out: IWD is filled with them
• Shrinking Violet: Keimi, though she's actually the most powerful of the Seraphim.
• Smug Snake: Agent Wilfork. He makes it perfectly clear in his first scene that he's already decided that Amy's guilty of supporting the new terrorists, and is only letting her tell her side of the story just to see her squirm.
• Smug Super: Heat Man
• Swirly Energy Thingy: The Megalopolis Spatial Distortion
• Taking You with Me: Dr. Light
• Talkative Loon: Happens to Gemini Man whenever he copies himself (and sometimes when he doesn't ("Flying jalapeno!")) until Fiora fixes him
• Talking Is a Free Action: IWD's second most re-occurring Running Gag is the "Dodongo" comic, in which the old man from The Legend Of Zelda that originally said "Dodongo dislikes smoke" appears amidst the stack of speech bubbles and says "Dodongo dislikes X," where "X" is something related to what the person or what said person is talking about. X has been things like "text", "Axl Rose", "shrimp", "Pharaoh Man" (who is the one to most frequently cause a Dodongo comic), "quasiphysics", and "Satan".
  • Don't forget Elvis!
• Time Skip: Series 2 takes place in 2X13, five years after the Megalopolis Incident that dominated Series 1.
• Timmy in a Well: Parodied, naturally, when Mega Man encounters Skull Man, who can only communicate through intricate dances.
  Mega Man: "Look, Little Timmy can just go fend for himself. I'm tired of him falling down the well!"
• To the Pain: Used almost disturbingly frequently).
• Uncanceled: After four years, Renner has started IWD up again out of nowhere.
• Uncanny Valley Girl: Magdelena. Bonus points since she's literally a Valley Girl.
• Unsound Effect
• Verbal Tic: Dr. Doppler, yes?
  • Oi oi, Freeze Man.
  • And Gyroman, buddy.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: "Dénouement", ends with Blues (who's narrating) about to talk about himself, when Heat Man cuts him off with "You can stop now. No one has ever cared about you."
• Wrench Wench: Amy
• Yaoi Fangirl: Cut Man's trump card in the Battle of Wits. It works.
• Younger Than They Look: Doctor Wily is only forty-eight. According to Pharaoh Man, excessive use of hair growth treatments are to blame.

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