a rather alarming series of email messages from an old foe. what could they portend?

a peculiar delivery seeming to correspond with the e-mail, but evidently from someone else.

oh no! RYGARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR! (the book)
Plus his assistant Rygarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr Junior.
to be clear, this guy looks like he is SAYING “Rygar,” I do not have official documentation proclaiming that he IS Rygar, but that seems like something Rygar would say if he spoke in words rather than disapproving game-over jingles.
I hid the smaller Rygar object that I thought was simply a little card with a picture of Rygar on it, because why WOULDN’T there be such a thing, in a stupid place before I went shopping last week, wondering how it would be received,

and it was stuck to a car when I returned. Which is probably for the best because I might never have realized it was a sticker otherwise, and if I had I might have perpetually imagined a superior place to attach it was yet to be revealed, and kept it unjustly out of public view.

The important matter here is that somebody did indeed write a book about Rygar and I bought one. FINALLY a book I can read in public, or at least keep at the ready to show how intellectual and absorbed I am until someone gets close and realizes it is about RYGAR. It is the perfect conversation starter, or if necessary conversation concluder. Perhaps Rygar was Ender’s game all along.

apart from providing more information than any sane person could require about rygar, it is also an effective tool for reminding various people you may know in your own life what rygar has done for them and how much worse off the world could be were Rygar not there to throw his trash can lid on a string at angry turtles.

as the back of the box states, now rygar is battling evil EVERYWHERE. I challenge you to identify a location not covered by that statement.

I became aware of the book when some months ago the author Brian Riggsbee asked if I would like to contribute this piece to the book, which was initially drawn in order to accompany my comments on the Rygar Racing phenomenon that is sweeping the one youtube video I saw several years ago. I certainly was not going to say no. I did however say just about every other thing I could think of about Rygar, and the author at one point thought he might be able to include some of those in the book, but I didn’t realize what a graphic-design intensive tome it would be, so I can understand why space for unplanned contributions from people nobody has heard of, especially ones which don’t take the subject matter seriously, would be at a premium.

It takes devotion to list factual information in the form of this CORNY rygar tower, complete with the creepy lines, those dopey gremlins AND the stupid island up there. I wish every book I bought had Rygar graphics incorporated into its layout. Although in fairness, so far every book I bought this year has. It reminds me of the magical, tragical period when I changed this website’s appearance every month.

Unfortunately there is no DOOR floating there with a ROPE going up to it, but considering how uncommonly tall this variant of the tower is I can excuse Rygar for not reaching the top and playing the dumb bagpipes yet.

excuse me the INSTRUMENT. You are never going to achieve your dream of hosting Jeopardy(!) with that “please be less specific” attitude.

it appears without context, and I wonder if it might be better for that. I WANT somebody to look closely at this and realize that it isn’t quite what the text says it is.

Initially I was a scrap miffed to have my picture that, contrary to what it may seem, I DID think about and work hard on, appear between several examples of people who just pasted or recreated existing sprites for easy internet forced retro-stalgia points, one of whom apparently SELLS them on merchandise by the hundreds through etsy as if that is “legal”. On closer examination the Kari Lyn sprites are retouched as if for a sega genesis release in the vein of Megaman, the Wily Wars and there is purplish gradient lighting on the scenery, neither of which are my particular cup of beans but I can consider some thought went into the presentation. And I don’t know enough about Mine Craft to say if creating an enormous Rygar even with instructions is a simple task, especially with a name like “Slugboi,” meaning a man who has not grown to maturity with the further physical and academic deficits of a slug, but I like the idea of it being visible to other players who weren’t expecting it. ALTHOUGH I think a wise adventurer should always allow and be prepared for such a possibility, but whatever the case people are celebrating the legacy of RYGAR who do not necessarily need to.
I still seem to take umbrage with the collage-person presenting the sunset mountains as awkwardly symmetrical. Maybe the lighting, at least for a still shot with no scrolling, matches where the sun is better, but it could have been done in a way that didn’t look folded down the middle. And besides the foreground pillars AREN’T mirrored to match the sun, even though by being far apart than the mountain graphics it would be less noticeable if they had been! OH!

It reminds me when doom add-on authors would make the sky repeat like that since they couldn’t be bothered to match the edges of the graphic they wanted to use or because they are afraid of the doom engine’s sky-mirroring bug

in fact it may be ideally suited for that!
And anyway having my drawing in that position DOES help it show how I used the sprites for inspiration. Anyone who wondered why I would elect to show the right-most Rygar in such a stupid running pose need merely examine the image before mine to understand that ah of course, Rygar ALWAYS runs like that.

However the left-most Rygar may be in an unorthodox position because the in-game Rygar simply recycles the jumping pose for using the rope-attachment item,

and it only occurred to me this very week that the developers may have intended that to be not a hat but a hand-held object, and the pose may indicate a raised arm. Which is still impractical but a helmet wouldn’t hold up its wearer. UNLESS rygar has the arm up to grasp the helmet. The fact that in some stages he is content to walk into an instant death pit instead of grabbing the rope is just more proof nobody needs that Rygar’s ancient methods are mysterious and not always meant to be understood by us. I always thought of it as a hat because my cousin Patrick told me the item was “The Mickey Mouse Hat” and the game never definitively stated that it was not a hat, and so I continued believing it was one long after I became skeptical of Tecmo deliberately violating one of Disney’s most sacred copy rights. This is Argool, not Etsy! Shirts may not exist here but there are laws.
I was so CERTAIN it was a hat

that I prominently featured it in my extremely important hat video. I have to believe that if it wasn’t a hat the Washington Post would have awarded me four out of four Pinocchios by now, and then I would have had to replace Rygar with Pinocchio, and I can assure you that Pinocchio is battling evil in relatively few locations, and even a dedicated team of four would have trouble covering as much ground, much less groundless areas using their less-adequate hats.
Patrick also told me those red gargoyles in the tower area were “the guy who flies with his pants on” and I believed it, because why would such a guy fly with his pants off? Pants don’t always restrict wings the way shirts do, or would if they existed in Argool, anyway. You need not remark upon the great number of beastly creatures I have illustrated engaging in activities without proper clothing on because I never show them flying!
In those days I knew little of Rygar and readily accepted whatever I was told. But even in 2021, with a scandalous expose at last in print, there are a multitude of facts about Rygar that nobody knows.

For example, were you aware that Rygar started a deviant art account in 2002 and never used it at all? Undoubtedly he has the power to have illustrated the whole book himself but recognized that deviance is a step removed from evil and Rygar will have naught to do with that apart from battling it, but he reserved the account anyway so that no impostor could sully his good name. Or even his less-good name, Steve. I wish I had realized this back in 2010 when I was dwelling in New Haven and would occasionally place take-out orders at Modern Apizza under the name of Rygar. I could claim I assumed the pizza was a new kind of diskarmor but that would be disingenuous.
OR perhaps by being an undead warrior from millennia ago Rygar simply couldn’t figure out how to log in. You know, old people and computers and all.

I wish I had prepared a more interesting illustration (and incorporated more details from the official concept art items), since I certainly drew plenty of boring stuff (furries) for less interesting projects (getting $30) in the time between when I learned of the book and when it went to press. And I already had plenty of old, stupid rygar sketches which I had even scanned and uploaded to a page I don’t talk about earlier the same year in case I or anyone else needed them, and somebody making a rygar book and telling me about it so that I could contribute a drawing is undoubtedly the closest that would ever come to happening! However late last year I was very concerned with moving out of my old residence, which took months to execute on top of the years already spent nudging that process along, and by the time that was settled I figured the book was already being finalized and I didn’t have time to bring anything elaborate to completion.

This may be more important to me than is reasonable!

I am glad to know I am in good company.

Despite primarily talking about ME, I do think that all in all it is a fascinating, well-designed book that I might have even bought if it didn’t have a picture that i made in it and I appreciate that Brian Riggsbee permitted that to occur! I could probably write a book about Rygar, and it would have much less justification to exist than this one, and it is fortuitous that I shall devote that energy into other endeavors.

some of which may even have nothing to do with Rygar.

The might of his diskarmor ranks second only to his guiltarmor.