#(maybe it is red I just... have trouble taking xdive's word for it)

[bassdaily]

There is no Official Capcom Game Canon™ hair for Bass. No unused design sketches or character art that has been released. Nothing even from canon-adjacent licensed games.

But I wonder if it might exist? Because we’ve seen his hair across various comics, and while ‘Manga / Comic & Cartoons Canon’ is not ‘Official Game Canon™’ ...weirdly enough it’s been consistent, especially compared to, y’know, Blues. (Blues, who 100% had a game canon hairstyle from his debut in MM3.)

Classic Rock’s hairstyle is drawn really uniformly. Sometimes it’s black, sometimes it’s brown, sometimes it’s desaturated navy blue, but it’s always a dark color and even with radically different art styles his hair still has the same basic, well, shape.

The same goes for Bass! Ariga’s sketch isn’t even canon for Gigamix, and we only see some hair poking out of his broken helmet in Archie comics. But like Rock, the style is consistent, and both times it’s colored in, his hair is dark. (The sketch is just not colored in. It could be light, it could be dark. There’s also a sketch of Blues on the same page... his hair isn’t colored in either.)

The Rockman & Forte manga ran from April 1998 to January 1999. From what I can gather, the “Burning Shot” short is from 1998.

Rockman Gigamix was published in 2009. The sketch Hitoshi Ariga drew of helmetless Forte was at FanExpo Canada, August 2010.

Archie's Worlds Collide crossover ran from April to August 2013.

It’s entirely possible that Kouji Izuki came up with something for the game’s manga adaption, and when asked about it on the spot Ariga drew from that, and then Archie comics kept what was previously done by the manga artists. Especially given how Archie loved to pack in references to other Mega Man ‘verses.

Conversely, any one of them could’ve gone with whatever unique design they wanted, and they didn’t. I think it’s possible that the artists and writers producing licensed franchise spin-offs might have had access to unreleased “series bible” material that we the public will never get to see because Capcom has totally forgotten this character exists in the first place. So the real question is: after Novas Aventuras, did Capcom have the wherewithal to go “hey maybe we should lay down some guidelines on how these characters are depicted”?

(Quick comparison of how helmet failure is shown for both characters in Archie comics. Rock’s hair is disheveled from the fight, yet still the right style and color.)