Hidden Details: Age Rage (Patreon)

This comic was perfect to put jokes in the background. If I had more time, I could've made three times as many panels with just as many characters/jokes. But alas, you have to live with the usual six!

You can see some pictures in the box Falco is holding that don't appear in the rest of the comic. Here's a better view of them:

From left to right: (feminine) Richter Belmont with beautiful wavy hair, clay Ness, Mario and Yoshi from the Super Mario Bros TV show, Zelda as she was supposed to look in the very first Zelda game, Nana (with blonde hair) and the original art for Palutena.

If you take a close look at the newspaper Sakurai is reading, you'll notice it says "PALUTENA TOP TIER". The full text is "PALUTENA IS TOP TIER NOW" but half of it was cut off. Underneath that, it says "TWEEK WINS GLITCH 6!", which is a reference to a very recent Smash Bros Ultimate tournament, where Gavin Dempsy, AKA Tweek, won with Wario.

In the second panel, I've put in a teaser for the bonus panel. You can see Mega Man's arm reaching over the table and grabbing a folder titled "MEGA MAN".

There's another bunch of old pictures from fighters in the second panel that I'll give you a closer look at here:

From left to right: Fox's symmetrical portrait from Star Fox 2, Kirby as he was originally supposed to look (white), King K. Rool from the Donkey Kong Country TV show, Donkey Kong and Lady from the Donkey Kong arcade game (technically this ape is a young Cranky Kong, but whatever), Ryu and Ken in a screenshot from Street Fighter 2's character select screen and Ridley as the appeared in Metroid Other M.

Behind Falco, Fox and Kirby, you can see Link and Young Link arguing about who is the Link in the picture. It is, in fact, Link from the Zelda CD-i games. Those games aren't canon though, so the answer to their bickering is: neither one of them. Calm down guys.

Pikachu looked VERY chubby in his original Pokémon Red/Green artwork by Ken Sugimori. He's a lot more skinny now, so I depicted him dragging about his training and weight loss.

In the same panel, there's another childhood picture that I'll give you a better look at:

This time it's Pit, who looked like an adorable little baby angel in the original Kid Icarus. I originally wanted Dark Pit to tease him with this picture and Palutena looking like a proud mother seeing baby pictures of her child, but there wasn't enough room!

Behind Simon and Richter in the fourth panel, you can see Roy laughing his ass of while holding a picture of Marth who is not wearing any pants:

And who can blame him? Marth looks hilariously weird in this concept art. It's from the very first Fire Emblem game, by the way.

In the background behind Sakurai, you can see Jigglypuff reenacting her original Pokémon Red/Green sprite, making Luigi cry out in laughter.

I feel like the addition of a young Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto might have cluttered this panel a bit, making the joke needlessly confusing, but I just really wanted to draw them in their 80's glory. Also, that hilarious suit that Sakurai is wearing in this picture? He actually owned a suit like that at some point in his life! This picture is based on the following (real) photograph:

(Iwata in the top middle, Miyamoto to the right, Sakurai in the lower middle)

As you can see, I directly copied Sakurai's clothes from this picture!

And finally, you can see that in the final panel, both Richter and Simon have thrown bottles of holy water by the color of the fires. Simon's bottle causes yellow/orange fire to erupt. Richter's holy-water fire is blue (and the damage it causes is classified as "aura" damage in Smash Ultimate! The only other character that can cause aura damage is Lucario). Also, you can see Richter praying furiously, making a Sign of the Cross and holding a little golden crucifix against his chest.

And that's it for Background Characters Fest 2019! Hope you're enjoyed it. See you all next week :)

Cheers!

- Abel