After the first installment of Iron Legion went on sale, it quickly became a smash hit throughout the Empire.
Betty the Puppy had been popular too, but its main fans were children and women, which was perfectly normal. After all, Li Wei had originally drawn it for Alice and the others. He could hardly draw something rated eighteen-plus for them. What the hell would that be?
So boys, teenagers, and young adults hadn't thought much of Betty the Puppy.
But Iron Legion was different.
The sheer weight of those steel Mecha, the impact and excitement of the battles-it struck straight at the hearts of countless young people with grandiose fantasies!
The plot in particular was a textbook example of wish fulfillment.
Li Wei had seen so many stories following that formula that they had become mass-produced fast food to him. He could simply copy them without even bothering to think up anything himself.
But the people of this era prized artistry in their novels and stories, favoring tragedy and pretentious literary sentiment, like those deranged romance novels Matilda wrote. When had they ever encountered wish fulfillment like this? It knocked them senseless with a single punch, leaving them howling with delight. In a word, it was awesome!
Who wouldn't want to become the protagonist and pilot a Mecha in a thrilling, all-out battle against monsters?
There was another very important point: Li Wei made extensive use of cinematic framing in Iron Legion to build dramatic tension.
Cinematic framing was extremely important in comics. When Li Wei drew Betty the Puppy, it was basically a four-panel strip. It hardly needed varied angles or compositions; all he had to do was show how cute Betty the Puppy was.
But he obviously couldn't approach Iron Legion that way. To convey the monsters' menace,