Nintendo Comics Retrospective

Press the Buttons has up a look at the Nintendo game comics that were published in the early 90s. He includes some scans of the truly excellent writing and storytelling that could be found in those four color masterpieces. From the article: "Five series of comics were published: Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Captain N: The Game Master, Game Boy, and the compilation series Nintendo Comics System that consisted of reprints of stories from the other comics. Sold in limited quantities in comic book shops and an occasional K-Mart, the Nintendo comics never took the world by storm and today are mostly forgotten. When I was in the second grade my father would drive me to the local comic book shop each month so I could buy the latest issues."

Don't forget the greatest!

[mike_lynn]

HOWARD [nyud.net] & NESTER! [nyud.net]

Re:Don't forget the greatest!

[Lisandro]

Mod parent up, WAY up. When i was younger i used to borrow a friends' Nintendo Power magazine (he imported them) just to check the "Nester!" comics. There was some very funny stuff in those ones, and i never saw gaming oriented comics again until the webcomic boom some years ago.

Re:Don't forget the greatest!

[AvantLegion]

My favorite was always the Maniac Mansion [iodized.net] one...

Can anyone tell me

[Ailure]

Where is the third door in world 1-1, I searched and searched for years and years but never found it.

Re:Can anyone tell me

[WWWWolf]

Are you talking about the minus levels?

Nope, about the Super Mario Land comics. In them, Tatanga somehow managed to come out of Game Boy (hypnotizing one guy to do some tricks in game which did this, of course), and the kids in the comic managed to do some tricks to bring Mario from the game to fight Tatanga.

In end of most levels in SML there's two doors (one on ground level and one high up); the trick was to use the third door in middle. The comics regrettably never told how to make the door appea

creative.

[Irashtar]

Sure, they were corny, but the art wasn't bad, and the way I see it, If you like the comic, you'll love the game, 'cause it was better.

Re:creative.

[dauthur]

But... But... Corny is good! At least it's having to endure the 10-20 pages of cheap plotline in a cult comic, and not an hour of nearly boobless soft-core TV pr0n.

Mario Mania

[Doomstalk]

From TFA: "Back when Mario Mania was reaching its peak in 1990 and 1991..."

I'm not sure if I'd say 1990 was the peak of Mario's popularity. I clearly remember chomping down on a big, mouth-lacerating bowl of Mario Cereal [answers.com] (why is it that so many childrens' cereals are scientifically designed to cut the crap out of the roof of your mouth?)- and I didn't even own an NES. Mario had enough clout that, without even playing the games, I was willing to rush home from school and watch the Super Mario Bros. Super Show while eating a bowl of cereal that turned my mouth into a bleeding mess. That, to me, is the peak of "Mario Mania".

Sweeeet

[Rethcir]

Wow, bring back memories. For christmas in what must have been about 1992, my aunt gave me and my brother two hardbound collections of these comics. I thought they were pretty amusing at the time. I'll have to dig them up, but yes, the plotlines were by no means memorable, except I do remember one of the Game Boy comics where a young girl somehow ends up accidentally boarding the space shuttle and releasing the hordes of enemies from Super Mario land into it.

Even the publisher didn't want to do the comics.

[duck2ducks]

Interestingly, these comics were screwed from the get-go. In a 1998 interview [comicbookresources.com], Jim Shooter talked about how Valiant Comics was supposed to receive a great deal of support from Nintendo - essentially benefiting the products of both Nintendo & Valiant - but instead, Nintendo never delivered.

This then was a huge stumbling block early on in Valiant's history, nearly crippling them before they had even begun.

(Of course, it's worth noting - as the main article does - that the actual Nintendo comics weren't all that great. Interestingly, this is entirely at odds with the early period of Valiant's subsequent superhero work, often regarded as unusually well-done - especially for the time. Considering Nintendo's infamous [crockford.com] game standards, one has to wonder if the disparity in quality was due to the created comics going through a number of N-overseen committees and censors before pen was ever put to paper.)

I still like them

[dancingmad]

I still have the hardcover collection of the Mario comics and I actually think they're funny. Certainly funnier when I was a kid, but it still has moments of coy lucidity. If one can find the hardcover cheap (it's not worth paying $100 on ebay for), it's worth looking into.

Limited Quantities???

[WWWWolf]

"Sold in limited quantities?" Not intended as a flame, but I've never understood Americans and their mysterious obsession with "limited" comics circulation. The rest of the world has already understood that God meant us to read comics, therefore comics should be everywhere. =)

In Finland these comics were published in Nintendo-Lehti, which was at the time, to my understanding, the only official Nintendo magazine in the country (aside of the importer's news leaflets which were its predecessor, and such). It was circulated just as widely as any monthly magazine at the time - not sure how well it actually sold, but everyone I knew who played Nintendo were subscribers =) What was odd about the magazine is that most of the interesting content (game "reviews" and such) was in subscriber-only appendix and most of the space was devoted to these comics (and, later, the Japanese Zelda and Mario comics, which were made for Nintendo Power, I think).

These things were legendary, yeah. And some had some... unspeakable translation errors. (Same was true for game manuals. If you thought getting game manuals from Japanese to English was broken at the time, try translating the broken English to even more broken Finnish. When I got my copy of GBA Legend of Zelda, my heart was on fire and ice because the new importer had retranslated the manual.) My absolutely favorite was the description of Samus' ship - apparently, it had chaff release system (ummm... countermanouvers for ancient 20th century weapons technology, how thoughtful =) which was translated as "unnoticeable garbage chutes". But otherwise, I thought it was pretty good stuff. =)

Re:Limited Quantities???

[nickrooster]

>GBA Legend of Zelda
>description of Samus' ship

Wow, which Zelda game were you playing?!?!

Re:Limited Quantities???

[WWWWolf]

I have an annoying tendency to ramble about things that are vaguely related to each other.

I was merely trying to hint that translations in both the comics and the NES manuals were just as bad at the time. Well, actually, the manuals were far worse. =)