Comics from before, being read now

[Beowulf]

These two kinda had me worried at the time, because I was digging the vibe they were putting down just prior to this. Knowing that things returned to that, these are pretty good. Also, #27 had a character that seems to be the inspiration behind Scratch, one of the rarest figures from the original TMNT toy line! (He also appeared in TMNT3: Radical Rescue on the Game Boy, presumably as a result of having a toy, and that's on the Cowabunga Collection, of course.)

I mean, there's also a convenient LP of that right in the TT2.0 archives.

Those later issues there were apparently not reprinted by IDW for their collections, which... to be honest, I kinda hate, especially as I'm not sure my original copies survived (let's just say that... stuff... happened). I really wonder if they couldn't have edited that page, or done something with it. Seems like a waste to cut an entire chunk out of the ongoing story like that...

It wasn't just the single page--honestly, the entire "black stone of Mecca" arc only worked in a pre-9/11 world, before every grandmother in Kentucky had an opinion about Islam. It was well-meaning and progressive at the time, but would be hopelessly controversial today. And they also didn't reprint the two issues in Tibet that centered around the Charlie Llama, probably because neither Mirage Studios nor IDW would like to make an enemy of the Chinese government.

Didn't know about the mindwipe, or even that they sent him back!

Oh, right, I don't know if I posted this! The TMNT Mutant Universe Sourcebook, which was buried in the pile of minis and Specials I read at the end, claimed he escaped into the future and wasn't sent back at all. So it's entirely possible they intended to fix that bit of continuity in the big final unpublished story.

 

[Beowulf]

Nintendo Comics System

Valiant Comics was founded in 1989 by former Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, and one of the first things they managed to do was form a partnership with Nintendo and create the Nintendo Comics System series of comics. The books were all released in 1990, almost all of them with a $1.95 cover price. I’m entertained by the house ads telling you to subscribe for 12 issues, given that none of the series made it a full year. The four titles were Super Mario Bros, The Legend of Zelda (both obviously choices, as The Super Mario Bros Super Show had aired the previous fall), Captain N the Game Master (which had also premiered the previous fall and would run for three full seasons), and Game Boy (the hot new system which was released the previous summer).

As a video game fan and comics fan, I fell securely within the target demographic and I collected most of the issues. The revelation that Archive.org had scans of a few issues I had missed inspired me to dig out and re-read the entire collection.


Captain N The Game Master (#1-5)

Kevin Keene (not to be confused with Archie’s Katy Keene or Kevin Keller) was a normal American teenager who played too much Nintendo, until one day when Videoland needed a hero and he was pulled through the Ultimate Warp Zone. Now he fights to keep the citizens of Videoland free from Mother Brain’s League of Darkness as Captain N, the Game Master. (And if you didn’t know that, the first two pages of the first issue recap it for you.)

The lineup from the TV show had to be edited because of rights issues, causing them to leave out Simon Belmont and Mega Man and instead use Kid Icarus (going by that name, instead of “Pit”) and Samus Aran. I talked specifically about Samus Aran’s appearances in this in my Metroid 2 LP. So I apologize for re-treading it for people who read that.

This was a case where there was a gap in my collection: I originally only had issues #3-5, so the very first story was new to me when I found it on the Internet Archive.

So I got to read the very first story, “The Fruit and Vegetable War” for the first time, and it’s a pun-tastic romp through Cornucopia, a part of Mount Olympus where all the people are fruits and vegetables but have been manipulated into war by the evil Eggplant Wizard. (I actually have to wonder if it was independently conceived, or if it was intended to be a Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom story that had to be re-worked.) A two-page story sees Duke the dog fight off some skeleton warriors sent by Mother Brain and Uranos.

Then the second full story, “Money Changes Everything” introduces Samus Aran and reveals the original game’s big secret on the second page: Samus is a woman! And with that, the number of female regulars doubles and we set up the Betty-and-Veronica dynamic that will define every story Samus and Princess Lana both appear in. The story itself revolves around the gang heading to Zebes to prevent Mother Brain from getting a power source called Zeebetite, and Kevin showing off because he’s played Metroid a dozen times. (Zeebetite is the name of the tubes you need to destroy to reach Mother Brain in Metroid. Apparently they’re her power source, too.) Then it looks like Samus is willing to sell out the N-team to Mother Brain for money…but it’s all a trick to get both the money and the team out safely. Because Samus is a greed bounty hunter but she also has a heart of gold. And Mother Brain is as stupid as any 80s cartoon villain.

Note that in this case the setting of the game Metroid is named “Metroid” instead of SR388. I feel like that was a common misconception at the time, and I’m not sure if the writers just assumed it or deliberately ran with it because they figured kids wouldn’t recognize SR388. (Several issues later, as we’ll see, they establish that the space pirates have a new base named “Metroid” after Samus destroyed their original one.)

In the second issue, Princess Lana is kidnapped by Uranos, and put in “The Happy Zone”, a place of no escape. Mother Brain tries to lure Kevin there with a chance to join her, but allowing her armies to conquer videoland in the process. Kevin resists, defeats the army, and threatens to smash Mother Brain’s jar and kill her. Faced with that prospect, Mother Brain reveals that Lana can be freed and does so, but escapes afterwards. The final panel is sufficiently vague that Lana and Kevin might be kissing or just hugging.

Then we have a goofy two-pager of “Villian Dos and Don’t” and a one-pager where Mother Brain is delivered “the item”, an object that looks like a horrible torture chair and is apparently used to give her a facial. I don’t know, that one really doesn’t work.

The second story, “Just A Dog,” establishes a rivalry between Duke the dog and Kid Icarus, which is mostly Kid Icarus being a jerk. They get into a fight with the Eggplant Wizard’s new mysterious samurai army, but when they get defeated, Duke saves them…by being a dog, because the samurai are secretly cat-people and hate dogs, so they walk off the job. This is a particularly dumb resolution, because the day is saved by a dumb coincidence and it doesn’t actually resolve the “Kid Icarus thinks dumb dogs are useless” conflict.

The third issue opens with the Palace computers going haywire and threatening a reactor meltdown. Eggplant Wizard and inexplicably-blue King Hippo have spread a gooey glowing purple liquid “computer virus” into the systems, but due to their incompetent bungling Mother Brain is infected, too. Fortunately, the N-team comes to Metroid and uses a shrink ray to get inside Mother Brain’s mind (it turns out that, at least in Videoland, if you shrink into somebody’s brain you can get small enough to interact with their inner thoughts). They discover a strange girl fighting off all the evil monsters and memories who helps them locate the antidote to the computer virus. When they escape, Kevin deliberately saves Mother Brain’s life, because now that he knows that there’s good in her he has hope that it’ll someday win.

On one hand, the “computer virus” being a glowy liquid or the idea you can shrink into someone’s thoughts is ludicrous. On the other hand, in Videoland this actually isn’t unreasonable. It isn’t the real world and it isn’t uniquely tied to any specific video game’s logic or lore. In theory, anything that can happen in any video game can happen there. So this plot actually seems pretty viable.

A two-pager shows “The Fabulous Powers of Captain N”, explaining how all of Kevin’s gadgets work. It’s really a shame he never had a Power Glove or a R.O.B. There’s also a one-page splash introducing Video-Town, the setting of the next story.

The second full story is “A Dog’s Life”, when Kevin and Duke accidentally switch minds by messing with the Power Pad inside a warp zone. Kid Icarus maintains his rivalry with the dog while Princess Lana demonstrates sitcom levels of obliviousness. The secret weapon Mother Brain gave King Hippo was a brain-zapper that makes people really stupid, and I bet you can guess that it doesn’t affect Duke-in-Kevin because he’s got a dog’s brain already. Kevin-in-Duke saves the day by defeating King Hippo and mashes the Power Pad to switch them back as they warp home.

The fourth issue opens with “The Real Game Master”, in which Kevin’s plans are ruined because of new monsters he’s never seen before. This is a commentary on Kevin’s actual skill as a game master: It’s not that he’s particularly clever or talented, he just knows everything about video games because he played them all. Which is also a meta-commentary on action games of that era, where memorizing patterns, secrets and surprises was often much more important than reflexes. It turns out that the new monsters were created by Mother Brain’s new hologram machine, and her next trick is to use it to create a fake Game Master to split up the N-team. Fortunately, Kevin’s ability to memorize video games means he notices the strange new machine in Mother Brain’s chambers when he’s lured there, and he destroys it, foiling the plot.

The two-page “Secrets of the Warp Zones” explains how they work and guest-stars Pluton the Robbing Orc and Donkey Kong. A one-pager introduces Prisonworld, planet RX338.

Then our next story, Breakout” opens with Captain Dare of the Federation Police showing up at the palace to arrest Princess Lana. It turns out that she’s been charged with all of Mother Brain’s crimes, and when Samus tries to object, Judge Ridley throws them both in prison. (This is, of course, all a sinister plot by Mother Brain.) Samus beats up a bunch of space pirates who come look for revenge, and forces Kraid to act as bait for her escape. Meanwhile, Princess Lana tells off an abusive guard and rallies the prisoners to improve their conditions. Samus briefly considers leaving without Lana so she can have Kevin’s affections to herself, but she’s too honorable to go through with it. By the time Kevin finds out what was going on an frees the real judge, Samus and Lana have already escaped and Lana is making plans to force them to improve conditions for the prisoners. When Kevin leaves again, they agree to complete fairly for Kevin’s affection.

It's interesting that the TV show focused a lot on Kevin and Simon competing for Lana, and this swapped it to Lana and Samus competing for Kevin. Gotta have that love triangle!

This issue opens with “A King of Shreds and Patches.” On the eve of Princess Lana’s birthday, a surprise attack knocks Kevin into the chute to Garbageworld. Samus has a portable space-time warp she’s itching to try out, so she volunteers to rescue him. The warp malfunctions and instead of arriving fifteen minutes later, she arrives after Kevin has spent 15 years ruling Garbageworld, the last free kingdom in Videoland. He invites Samus to stay and be his queen. She is briefly enticed, but realizes that the freedom of Videoland matters more than her chance to be with Kevin, so she warps back and prevents him from falling.

A one-pager tells us more about Garbageworld, then we get a two-page spread of Samus’s ship, the Hunter IV. (This was wholly from the minds of the writers and doesn’t appear in any video game. And the influence of the Star Trek Tech Manual on it is very obvious.) Then we get a second one-pager about The Locker, a safehouse space station for bounty hunters.

Which leads into our second story, “When Friends Fall Out.” Kid Icarus was turned to stone by a Gorgon, and a Medusa Ray Samus has in her storage at The Locker might be able to be reversed to restore him. Lana spots a Flame-Chip in the locker and is convinced that Samus received it as payment for kidnapping Lana’s missing father, King Charles. Kevin isn’t sure, so Lana conks him, steals the Zapper and goes after Samus herself. After an extended fight scene, Samus reveals that she was kidnapped by space pirates and hooked up to a brainwashing machine, and had the flame-chip when she woke up, but has no idea what happened in the interim. Kevin talks Lana down and convinces her that whatever happened, Samus is their friend. In the epilogue, the consciousness of the flame-chip reveals to Duke the dog that Samus broke free of the machine, grabbed the flame-chip and semi-consciously flew them both to safety. (Implying also that King Charles was kidnapped by space pirates and they received the flame-chip as the reward.)

The series was cancelled after #5, so though cover art was done, #6 was never published. We’ll never know why Kevin was protecting Mother Brain. And we’ll never know if Lana or Samus wins Kevin’s affections. I suspect that there’s a desk drawer somewhere with a pile of notes on Betty-and-Veronica stories and goofy one-off gimmicks.

Though this isn’t the end of the Captain N story! There are two Nintendo Comic System omnibus books that have additional stories. These were clearly a some mix of testing out the larger format and also an advertising for the individual series; and they had new stories, not reprints, which is particularly impressive.

The first volume had the crazy cover price of $9.95 for a 48-page oversized book. I’ll talk about the Mario and Zelda stories when I go through those books, but the rest make more sense here. The Captain N story is actually preceded by a reprint of the two-page “Welcome to Videoland” intro from Captain N #1. Then there’s a proper N-team story titled “All’s Well that Ends Swell”. The team is in Kongoland looking for the Well of Despair, which apparently holds an ultimate weapon at the bottom of it. The well, however, is really a psychological test that teaches you that the ultimate weapon is patience; which Kevin learns after persevering against despair.

Then we have a pair of Punch-Out stories, an intro titled “The First Fight,” and a full story called “Outsiders.” Little Mac never appears in the Captain N stories, but King Hippo does, so this is logical to note here. In this, Little Mac is slated to fight Piston Honda, but when he learns that Honda is going to use the money to build a school in a poor Japanese village, he’s tempted to throw the fight. Honda is angered by this and reminds Mac about the importance of honor, so Mac wins the fight and gives the prize money to Honda’s coach for the school anyway. (This is the sort of story that you could only get in a kids comic in 1990—it assumes the reader has basically never heard of Japan or anything Japanese, and has some very impressive orientalism going.)

The second volume is much more reasonably priced at $4.95, but is also cut down to 32 pages. After another reprinting of “Welcome to Videoland”, we have the Captain N story “The Master Machine.” Princess Lana has installed a Master Computer System to control all of the palace defenses, but Kevin is skeptical. Which turns out to be correct when a strange energy bolt reprograms the computer to think that Mother Brain is Princess Lana, and vice-versa. When the League of Darkness attacks, the defense system captures ad incapacitates Lana, so Kevin thinks fast and challenges the system—figuring correctly that a video game computer will act like a video game computer. It gives him 15 minutes to defeat the palace defenses and save the Princess. He wins, of course, but then Mother Brain arrives. She disables the palace defenses, but Kevin uses his pause button at the last minute to turn the tables, drives her off, and kisses Lana back to wakefulness. (Yeah, I know. They were going for a “Sleeping Beauty” moment. Given that the other stories seem to indicate that Kevin and Lana are non-exclusively dating in some capacity, this isn’t terrible, but I still wouldn’t expect to see it nowadays.)

Then we get a Punch-Out reprint of “The First Fight” as a lead in to “Fox and Hounds.” A rich woman named Vonnie watches Little Mac beat Super-Macho Man and introduces him to lifestyles of the rich and famous, despite Doc’s objections. Vonnie’s ex Reg pays off Super-Macho Man to ambush Mac and seriously injury him, but Doc saves Mac at the last minute. Mac goes on to win the fight, but Reg’s actions make him realize the rich people only think he’s a sideshow and don’t actually care about him, so he heads back to his old life. Vonnie, heartbroken because she apparently really liked Mac, punches out Reg. What’s the moral? Some rich people are assholes, but some just have poor communication skills.

Finally, we have a several Metroid stories: The two-page “The Coming of a Hero” that introduces Samus Aran as a former star space cop who mysteriously quit and disappeared, but then reappeared as the galaxy’s most fearsome bounty hunter. Then we have a one-page introduction to “Metroid” a mobile asteroid base build by the space pirates to allow them to travel far from Zebes. Finally, “Deceit Du Jour” is the real story, where Mother Brain hires bounty hunter “Big Time” Brannigan to find the intruder in her base. (I love Big Time’s character design—he’s a bug-creature who look humanoid but his body cuts off at the waist, so his two large arms also function as legs. He’s constantly balancing on one to fire his one-handed energy cannon.) Samus and Big Time fight and it seems like Big Time gets the upper hand, forcing Samus to surrender and give up her handgun. But Samus outsmarts him, and booby-traps her gun to explode when he tries to shoot her, allowing her to escape and leaving him to Mother Brain’s displeasure.

While the Metroid stories don’t directly reference Captain N, it’s very clear they’re in the same universe and that’s the same Samus. Meanwhile, the Mario and Zelda stories make no reference to Videoland and the N-team never visit those worlds. There were three major tentpoles to the Nintendo Comics System, but they didn’t interact with each other.

The Captain N comics generally avoided tie-ins to actual video games (probably because of rights issues), where the cartoon show leaned very heavily into a “game of the week” format. The comic writers clearly found the Metroid sci-fi world most interesting and built out from there, making up new planets within the Galactic Federation to use as setpieces.

Most of the stories were scripted by either Bryan D. Leys or George Caragonne, though this was clearly a team effort and they were at least trying to keep points like the various rivalries consistent. The art team also was piecemeal, but you wouldn’t know it, because they all hewed very closely to a well-done house style.

(More posts to come.)

 

[Beowulf]

The Legend of Zelda (#1-5) and Nintendo Comics System Presents The Legend of Zelda (#7)

Once upon a time in the land of Hyrule, there was a legendary princess Zelda, an adventurer Link, a monstrous evil named Ganon, and a trio of Triforces that drove their destinies.

There’s an untitled, two page intro story that opens the first book (and is reprinted in a few other places), telling the basics about Hyrule, Ganon, Link, Zelda and the Triforce. This series, like the Zelda cartoon, takes as gospel something the games started ignoring with A Link to the Past: That the three parts of the Triforce are Wisdom, Courage and Power, and that they’re held by Zelda, Link, and Ganon respectively.

This was also published when The Adventure of Link had established the “greater Hyrule area” to be exceptionally large. It does ignore several other important points from that game (and the first), though, particularly the existence of the second Princess Zelda who was under the sleeping curse, and the fact that Ganon, y’know, was killed and Link reclaimed the Triforce of Power from him at the end of the first game.

The first story, “Missing in Action” involves Zelda making a plan to take the Triforce of Wisdom and leave Hyrule forever, thereby preventing Ganon from ever getting a complete Triforce. Link is upset, but agrees to guide her and turns down the opportunity to destroy the magic flute she needs. But in the end, she realizes that Link is all the protection that the Triforce needs and she can stay.

Then we have a one-page “The Compleat Hero,” where Link teaches aspiring swashbucklers to swing through windows.

The second full story is titled “Trust Me,” and features Ganon (cloaked and in shadow—I’m not sure they had decided what his face would look like yet) coming to the town of Saria and convincing the townspeople that he’s really just misunderstood and Zelda and Link are the real villains. When Link and Zelda come to investigate a drought and crop failure, they get a cold shoulder and their efforts are fruitless. (It turns out, of course, that Ganon secretly cursed the fields as part of his scheme.) Ganon returns, promising to restore the fields if the villagers capture Link and Zelda, but when a small child questions him, Ganon just can’t stop being evil long enough to complete the ruse. Link defeats Ganon, and Zelda delivers an Aesop about not always trusting easy solutions.

In the second issue, we open with a story oddly titled, “He Also Serves…” Impa reveals that the Triforce of Wisdom prophesied that if Link leaves the North Palace that day, Hyrule will fall. Link promises not to leave, despite Zelda going out on tour. Various characters, including the fairy Miff, guard captain Krin, and Impa herself bring Link dire tidings and try desperately to get him to leave, but Link figures out that they’re all actually Ganon in disguise. A Wizzrobe and a Darknut wait outside the palace with a magic wand, empowered with “all the evil magic in Hyrule” for that one day, ready to annihilate Link when he leaves. Unfortunately for the villains, Ganon needs to disguise himself as Link to escape the Palace, and he gets blasted by his own trap. (It clearly doesn’t keep him down for long, but at least the plan has failed.)

A two-page story of “Zelda’s Consumer Tips” gives you good advice for shopping; and then a one-page “Impa’s Info” reminds you to build up your levels of Attack, Life and Magic before facing the ultimate evil. (I’m reminded of the Nintendo Power “Howard and Nestor” stories; where they take one video game tip and turn it into a goofy comic.)

The second story, “Thief in the Night,” features Link’s buddy Bagu from the second game coming to visit him. It quickly becomes clear that a thief is after the Triforce, but Link wants to trust his friend. Zelda divides the Triforce, and Bagu does indeed steal part of it. When Link hunts him down, he reveals that Ganon is holding Bagu’s pet frogs hostage and will trade them for the Triforce. Bagu pleads one last time for Link to loan him the Handy Glove so Bagu is strong enough to break into Death Mountain, retrieve the Triforce piece and also free the frogs. Link waits for hours and finally heads home in shame, convinced he was a fool for ever trusting anyone…only to find Bagu, Zelda, the Triforce and the frogs safe and sound.

I’d love to be able to ask the creative teams from this about the fact that so few humanoid monsters were drawn as monsters in the first few stories. Ganon and his major minions are all wearing cloaks with shadowed faces. Was the artist lazy? Was it a rights issue they straightened out later? Were they trying to keep the pig-face secret? Did they think it looked stupid in the first draft? There are so many possibilities and I have no idea which one it could be.

The third issue actually has a two-part story spanning the full issue. The first part, “The Power” opens with Link and Zelda trying to retrieve a magic trophy from Ganon. Link stumbles on something even better: The Triforce of Power, which he claims and uses the magic of. Link handily drives Ganon away and the monsters start to bow to him…but Link also starts acting very un-heroic, demanding Zelda give him the Triforce of Wisdom and declaring he’ll kill Ganon once and for all.

(In between the two parts, there’s a one-page “Secrets of the Triforce”, explaining how the three pieces work; and a one-page “The Adventurer Link” giving some backstory about Link and his various weapons.)

Then we get t the other half of the story, “The Price.” While hunting Ganon, Link agrees to let the goriya serve him and starts dressing like Ganon. The Triforce of Wisdom reveals to Zelda that Link has “power without wisdom” and he’s doomed because of it. Link and Ganon battle and Link handily wins again, claiming the Triforce and command over the monsters. Zelda then confronts Link and even professes her love, but Link declares that he doesn’t want love, only more power. When he tries to blast her, she reveals that she now has the Triforce of Courage and it can protect her, because Link has misused the Triforce of Power and isn’t worthy of Courage any more. She forces Link to confront his reflection and the fact that he’s got the same pig-face as Ganon. Link, sure that giving up the power will kill him but keeping it will destroy his soul, chooses to throw the Triforce of Power down a bottomless pit (and Ganon greedily plummets after it). But Link doesn’t die; his courageous act returns the Triforce of Courage, which heals him. The story ends on Link and Zelda debating about that “you love me” comment.

(And then there’s a one-page “The Legendary Zelda” detailing her various skills and powers.)

The Lord of the Rings influence is very strong here (as it also inspired the “corrupting artifact” theme so common in Dungeons & Dragons). It does ignore a very obvious solution for the sake of drama and returning the status quo, though: Basically, if you get Power first, it corrupts you, and if you claim Wisdom afterwards you’ll become a tyrant and destroy everything. But if you have Wisdom first, you can balance Power and claim Courage. So…why can’t Link just hand the Triforce of Power over to Zelda? Then the Triforce will be re-united by an uncorrupted holder and can be used to bring peace to Hyrule.

But see, then things get kinda weird. My copy of issue #4 (and the Internet Archive one) has the same cover art as #2, with Link fighting Bagu. The above cover art appears on the Internet Archive’s issue #2. My best guess is that the series was reprinted with a bunch of things switched around; all but one of my collection are from the first printing (and have a prestige-format cardstock cover), and all of the Internet Archive ones are from the second (which seems to be in standard, cheaper paper). In my copy, the first story is “Thief in the Night”, then the “The Adventurer Link” and “Impa’s Info” one-pagers, then a new story called “Queen of Hearts.”

In the Internet Archive version of the books, #1 contains “He Also Serves” and “Missing in Action.” Issue #2 has a story I hadn’t see before, “To the First Power.” I’m guessing that was the original story in the first printing of #4, as it matches the cover art. Then they put “Trust Me” as the backup. Their #3 has a slightly different cover but still contains the full “The Power” and “The Price” two-part story. #4 matches my physical copy, with “Thief in the Night” and “Queen of Hearts.” (Their #5 has the same two stories as my copy, but swaps the order.)

“To the First Power” features Link bringing Zelda to Eagle’s Labyrinth (the first dungeon of the first game) and giving her his sword and shield for what should be some easy practice. But a rebellious Wizzrobe has hatched an evil plot, and stocked the dungeon with the nastiest enemies, hoping that when he defeats both Link and Zelda the monsters will abandon Ganon and follow him. He spirits the unnamed Link to the end of the dungeon to await Zelda’s failure. Zelda has some mishaps, but then runs into Miff the fairy, who berates her for trying to fight like Link (“Link survives on dumb luck and brute force! He’s built like a rock with a head to match!”) They hunt down the magic bow, and Zelda makes it through the labyrinth her way. Zelda rescues Link and sends Wizzrobe back to Ganon…who is just delighted that his minion is so deceitful and treacherous.

The backup story (in both cases, as far as I can tell) is “Queen of Hearts,” where Link rescues Queen Seline of Calatia (his homeland), who has traveled to Hyrule for the first time in sixteen years. It turns out to not just be a social call, because Ganon stole her magic and sealed it in a container that she needs Zelda’s help to break. (But not Link’s; the Triforce was very specific on that.) Zelda refuses, and Link and Seline look like they’re going to fail…but Zelda appears in the nick of time, destroys the magic jar and restores Seline’s power. Zelda admits she was acting out of jealousy and everyone parts as friends.

The fifth and final issue of the comic opens with “The Day of the Triforce”, a mysterious day once a decade when all three Triforces vanish from dawn to dusk. Especially with Link traveling, Zelda hoped for a day of peace; but Ganon’s Lynels attack Saria anyway. Zelda packs up a silver arrow and goes to the rescue, vowing to kill Ganon if given the chance. She leads the people to free the town, but a small child is poisoned in the battle and will die if not gotten to a fairy. The people encourage Zelda to leave him and go confront Ganon, so she goes to Death Mountain…but is distracted from killing Ganon at the last minute by cries for help. She rescues the captured fairy Miff and realizes that she can’t let vengeance get in the way of saving innocents, and rushes back to Saria to have Miff heal the child.

Next is a two-page spread map of Hyrule, which is actually a really well-done melding of the two games. Then the one-page “Secrets of the Triforce” is reprinted from #3; and a one-page “advertisement” for Calatia’s favorite drink, “Ambrosia Lite,” the family business of Link’s parents.

The second story is “Coming Home,” as Link returns to visit Calatia but doesn’t find a warm welcome. It turns out that the throne has been claimed by someone who looks just like Link, and Link is defeated and put into a cell with the deposed Queen Seline. Seline demands a trial by combat for their lives, and Link doesn’t fall for the usurper’s attempts to get him to flee back to Hyrule. The usurper calls Ganon for help, who reveals that Link won’t have the Triforce of Courage the next day because of the Day of the Triforce. Despite lacking his usual strength, Link is willing to sacrifice himself to defeat the usurper, who is revealed as the Shadow (the final boss from Zelda 2). Seline regains her throne, Link is hailed as the hero, and the day is saved.

After the main books were cancelled, the Game Boy numbering was inexplicably kept for “Nintendo Comics System featuring”, a catch-all book of rotating titles. #7 was full of Zelda stories.

This issue actually has a two-part story. It opens with “Assault”, where we see Link charging through Death Mountain to rescue Zelda, who’s been captured by Ganon. Link and Miff the fairy go bungling through a series of traps, while Ganon taunts Zelda and makes it clear to his underlings that he, personally, wants to destroy Link (for revenge and also funsies). When it looks like Gleeoks have destroyed Link without permission, Ganon leaves an opening for Zelda to escape. In the second half, “Choices,” Zelda perseveres against a Darknut and claims a silver arrow. Link defeats a four-headed Gleeok but gets caught by a Wallmaster at the last minute, and Zelda recovers the Triforce of Wisdom. The Triforce is dismayed that Zelda might let her feelings for Link interfere with her duty to protect Hyrule, and gives her the power to defeat Ganon with the promise that it won’t happen again. Zelda and Ganon get into a Mexican standoff, Link breaks it up, Ganon escapes, and no one gets a kiss at the end.

This is a particularly interesting story in that it opens in medias res, ignores a number of points of established continuity (Zelda already had silver arrows and tried to use one on Ganon in “Day of the Triforce”), but still seems like a setup for why Link and Zelda need to maintain a will-they-won’t-they romance.

There’s also brief interlude between the two stories for a two-pager called “The Perfect Date,” which has Link and Zelda going on both a high-class and low-class date (each revealing that they can’t stand the other’s idea of a good time), but when an exasperated Impa asks why they keep going out, they declare it’s because they have so much in common. (I’m 99% certain I’ve seen this exact gag as an Archie strip multiple times.)

“Assault” and “Choices” were also published in the first Nintendo Comics System omnibus volume. (Which, by publication date meant that #7 was reprints.) “Queen of Hearts” was reprinted in the second volume.

George Caragonne wrote 99% of the material in these books, and my best guess for some of the continuity snarls is that stories were clearly rearranged and reprinted in different orders. I’m not sure if the writers had a “series bible” for the comics, but you can put together a rough framework of how the timeline of the comics differed from the games: Ganon got the Triforce of Power and captured Zelda, who had split the Triforce of Wisdom to keep it safe. Link, as a young man in Catalia, went searching for adventure and traveled to Hyrule. Impa found Link and recruited him. Link gathered the Triforce of Wisdom and rescued Zelda, but didn’t kill Ganon or retrieve the Triforce of Power. Then Ganon cast a sleeping curse on Zelda (the only Zelda), so Link traveled to the various palaces, defeated the Shadow (and presumably the Thunderbird, but who knows?) and claimed the Triforce of Courage so he could awaken her. Then we get to the status quo we see in the comics.

Link and Zelda are very clearly romantically matched, but where in the cartoon Link was an annoying, obnoxious and immature jerk, here he’s a little bull-headed but generally a decent guy. Honestly, the “asking for a kiss” thing in the cartoon felt like he was a creep, and here it feels like they’re been dating for years and she’s indulging his humiliation kink.

 

[Rascally Badger]

I am planning to get to some write ups here, but I happened to be reading some old JSA issues, and do you know that James Robinson wrote a JLA/JSA crossover around 2010? And that James Robinson wrote a 2 year Justice League run with a JL consisting of Batman (Dick Grayson), Supergirl, Donna Troy, Green Arrow, Starman (the blue one), and Congorilla? There were others that appear to have been around during the run (Jesse Quick, Hal Jordan, Vixen, Jade, Cyborg, Mon-El) but the six above were the core team.

 

[Kirin]

Had fun reading the Zelda writeups. Nice that Zelda gets a lot of agency and action in several of these. I wonder if there’s an easily linked copy of that version of the combined Hyrule map out there.

Also slightly perturbed by the last cover’s promise of HOT NINTENDO ACTION.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Issue 3 is not bad but this is the only one I feel like has an out-and-out good cover (The monster on #5 is drawn lovingly but it's the same one that appears in this more interesting cover, meaning it's just a monster we've seen and that isn't something to draw you in).
Actually, #3 would be a great cover for a Gauntlet comic.

He Also Serves IS a weird title and I think is a reference to Milton's famous line "They also serve, those who stand and wait." where the message was even though he is blind, those who don't directly act can still serve god. But it's weird in this context. Also the next story is "thief in the night" and I don't know if the analogy existed long before that but it is one used in the Bible in reference to God's coming day so... is something going on with these titles? Should I read into this?

 

[Octopus Prime]

I definitely had the Garbage King of Planet Trash issue of Caprain N when I was wee.

Always thought the Flame Chip thing meant I was missing an important issue for context

 

[Beowulf]

Had fun reading the Zelda writeups. Nice that Zelda gets a lot of agency and action in several of these. I wonder if there’s an easily linked copy of that version of the combined Hyrule map out there.

The last page of issue #1 on the Internet Archive.

 

[Violentvixen]

Nintendo Comics System

This was so fun to read through, thank you!

I remember my cousin had some of these comics and I loved them. I wanted my own copies but my comic budget was small and I could read them at his place I didn't get them. Wish I had!

 

[Beowulf]

Hey, I'm not done yet!

Game Boy (#1-4)

The fourth major tie-in for the Nintendo Comics series wasn’t a game, but a device: The new Nintendo Game Boy, the first real portable console the American market had seen and a revolution in battery-burning technology. Unfortunately, the system was only a few months old when production for the comic had to be started, so there were only a handful of games (Kirby wouldn’t come along for three years, and Pokemon wouldn’t hit the states for nine) and you can’t make a comic book about Tetris. So they fell back on their flagship property, Mario.

I only have copies of #3-4, but the Internet Archive has the full set and I have vague memories of reading the first two—I’m guessing one of my friends had copies and I read them 30 years ago.

(I also talked about this a bunch in my Super Mario Land LP. Again, apologies for anything I repeat. )

In the first story, “In the Palm of Your Hand”, the Game Boy comics open with an introduction to our villain protagonist, Herman Smirch. Herman is mean to beggars. Herman hates jaywalkers and liberal politicians. Herman thinks stealing from his employer is okay because he’s paid badly. He does love playing Game Boy…specifically, he likes getting Mario all the way to the final boss so Tatanga can defeat him personally. It turns out that his weak-willed bitterness means he’s just the bridge that Tatanga’s armada needs to invade our world. (Tatanga is convinced our world is ripe for conquest, despite being the size of an action figure.) The armada is set forth to capture the local mall.

Tatanga’s ability to hypnotize people and the fact that his armada is preceded by a large black cloud are both established in the game’s manual. I bet the writers did a little happy dance when they saw they had that to work with.

Anyway, Tatanga has two major things working against him: One is that he’s holding Daisy captive, and she’s very good at manipulating him. The other is that teenagers Rick and Josh also have a Game Boy, and figure out that if Tatanga’s minions can come through to the real world, Mario can too.

It’s then that we learn the first part of this story took place in my back yard in New Jersey, because the boys and Mario have to take the PATH train to New York City to chase down Tatanga’s armada…which has headed for the Windows of the World in the World Trade Center.

They boys are able to use their knowledge of the video game to help Mario find some power-ups, defeat Tatanga’s minions and send him packing back into the Game Boy. But Herman escapes! The boys vow to spread the word about the trick for getting Mario out of the game and into the real world when he’s needed.

Interestingly, this issue is the only one where knowledge of the games matters in the real world, and the only one where Mario gets any power-ups (an invincibility star). He never switches between small and super Mario or uses superballs in these comics. The Zelda comics used more references to in-game weapons and items as they went on, whereas this series leaned much more heavily into the idea that it was taking place in the real world.

In “It’s a Small World After All,” Tannis is flying as an unaccompanied minor to see her grandmother in Cape Canaveral, but what she really wants to see is the space shuttle. Over the phone, Herman tells his mother about Tatanga and she convinces him to get rid of the Game Boy because it’s clearly making him crazy. He then gets hypnotized, promptly breaks a window, punches a cop, steals another Game Boy and opens a gateway for Tatanga again. Tatanga wants to impress Daisy with a vacation, so demands Herman take them to Disney World. They go to Newark Airport, hijack the plane Tannis is on (oh, pre 9/11 plots!) and head for Florida. Fortunately, Tannis heard on the schoolyard that if Tatanga comes out of a Game Boy, you can get Mario out too. So when Tatanga changes his mind about Disney World and decides to steal a space shuttle instead, Tannis is along for the ride. She steals Herman’s Game Boy, gets ground control to patch her through to her sister and gets walked through the secret trick for getting Mario. Mario forces the shuttle to land (“pipes is pipes!”) and Tatanga flees back through the portal with Daisy, who was injured in the crash. Because Herman is an unassuming white man, the cops shuffle him away from the shuttle without any questions. And Tannis goes to Disney World.

There’s a lot of this series’ plot that only works because Tatanga and Mario are coming from a world with different rules than ours. Tatanga is an 80s cartoon evil overlord, convinced that despite Daisy hating him she’ll love him if he only blows up enough monuments. Mario is generically heroic, less concerned with the people around him or Daisy than he is with punching out monsters. (And completely unconcerned with property damage. But why should he be? Blocks always respawn when you leave the screen.)

This Mario, incidentally, is clearly unconnected from the one in the Super Mario Bros series of comics. There’s never any mention of the cast of characters from other games, and the Sky Pop and Sub Pop don’t appear in other comics; much less Tatanga, Daisy or any of the strange monsters from Super Mario Land.

“Team Play” opens with Herman hiding out at his mother’s house, because despite the cops letting him walk away from the space shuttle, he’s wanted by the FBI for hijacking a plane. The Game Boy he tried to give away last issue gets mailed back to him, and fearing that Tatanga will hypnotize him again, Herman steals money and his mom’s car to flee. Sure enough, as he’s attempting to flirt with a waitress (right after thinking about skipping out on the bill, to remind us he’s a terrible person), Tatanga sends Ponopi through and demands to go to the world’s largest population center…China. The minions upgrade the car so it can fly, but Herman gets them lost in the south Pacific and starts lying to save face. Ensign Greg Campbell spots the black cloud from a navy carrier and gets Mario out of his Game Boy. Tatanga’s troops have upgraded the weapons in their new fortress and Mario’s Sky Pop is insufficient to defeat them, so Greg upgrades it with navy ordinance. With the help of a navy fighter jet, Mario gets all the way to Ponopi, but has to retrieve to save that pilot from crashing, giving the villains a chance to escape. The base self-destructs, Ponopi goes back through the portal, and Herman flies back to California in his flying car, riding high on being part of the winning team…but then leaves the car in gear when he goes to the restroom and it flies away without him.

In “Pipes Is Pipes,” Herman has made it back to Seaside Heights, New Jersey and is working in a carnival doing manual labor. Tatanga makes him open a gateway and comes through, hoping to celebrate Daisy’s birthday. (Daisy, as usual, isn’t having any.) Because the fireworks aren’t impressive enough, Tatanga apparently decides to trigger a nuclear meltdown at a local power plant instead. Teenager Michael’s mom works at that plant, so he decides to see if what he heard from Eddie Pasternak at school was right, and gets Mario to emerge from his Game Boy. Mario agrees to go save Michael’s mom from the power plant, and Michael declares he’ll go save Daisy. Michael makes a good effort to snag Daisy and flee, but Tatanga’s forces catch up and capture them both. Meanwhile, Mario defeats the monster messing up the nuclear plant and saves the day, but the radiation gets to him. A technician mistakes him for a doll and, in an obscene violation of radiation safety protocols, puts him in a plastic baggie and gives him to Michael’s mom. She takes him home, but Tatanga has already left and closed the warp corridor, dooming Mario…except not, because Daisy cleverly tossed aside the gift Tatanga gave her and Ponopi has to re-open the gate to retrieve it. Mario returns to Sarasaland (where he can shrug off things like radiation poisoning) and Michael and his mom have a lot of catching up to do.

Mario makes the curious comment, “I know my way around. I got relatives in Jersey.” This Mario is four inches tall. Is this a joke? Did he originally come from Brooklyn? Does he think he originally came from Brooklyn? He’s clearly not human or not human anymore; he’s drawn in a cartoony style and everyone else is realistically proportioned. The people of this world all know him only as a video game character; you’d think that if a plumber named Mario Mario disappeared from Brooklyn before the video games got big it would be a thing. The potential depth of this backstory is mind-blowing.

Issues #1 and #3 were written by our prolific buddy George Caragonne again, while #2 and #4 were written by Marc McClellan and Bill Vallely. It’s probably for the best that they only got four issues, because I’m not sure how long they could actually keep this gimmick going. Herman was the only recurring human character and he didn’t have any redeeming traits. Mario was a one-note caricature and Tatanga was, as I noted earlier, a stock 80s cartoon villain. Honestly, Daisy probably got the most character development of anyone and I have to wonder if the writers were building toward having her escape from Tatanga and attempt to change the status quo.

A common theme of these comics is that they do a lot more with their female supporting casts than the games or even the cartoon shows ever did. Samus saves the day just as often as Kevin does; and both she and Lana both get more character beats than any other member of the N-team. Zelda spends very little time as a damsel in distress and when she does, she rescues herself as often as Link rescues her. Link and Zelda are presented as equals and the stories generally give them similar narrative weight. Daisy is a prop in Super Mario Land, but she’s one of the few characters in the Game Boy comics who actually has anything special about her. I don’t know how much of this was actually intended as feminism; my guess is that the female characters were the ones the writers had more latitude to work with. Nintendo’s higher-ups might have decreed that Mario must be this or that, or that Link must always adhere to a certain status quo; but why would they bother to make any demands about Daisy? She’s a blank slate, which means she has room to grow.

(I'm putting together a final post about SMB comics.)

 

[Octopus Prime]

I love what a cartoonish dick Herman is

 

[Beowulf]

I've got to split the SMB comics into two posts, one with most of the stories, and one with the reprint books and a wrap-up.

Super Mario Bros. (Special Edition, Issues #1-6)

The publication schedule of the Super Mario Bros books was a goddamn mess. In my personal collection: There are Mario stories in the two volumes of the Nintendo Comics System omnibus books. There’s a #1 Special Edition. There were issues #1-5 of Super Mario Bros, but then a different #4-5 also titled Super Mario Bros., and issues #5 and #7 of Adventure of the Super Mario Bros., and issues #5, 8, and 9 of Nintendo Comics System featuring the Super Mario Bros. (Yes, I have four different books that all purport to be issue #5.) I’m going to try to sort these out as I go.

We’re going to switch it up and start with the last few stories in the Nintendo Comics System omnibus volumes, because the first one actually opens with the Super Mario Bros. A two-page story titled “The Legend” introduces the cast of characters: Mario, Luigi, the Mushroom King and Princess Toadstool, Toad, Bowser, and an assortment of minions from all three Mario NES games. If there was any doubt, this pair of Mario Bros did originate in Brooklyn, though the “real world” never figures into any of the stories.

Then we roll into “Just Deserts”, where Mario and Luigi are accompanying the king dune-buggying through the desert. They run over a cactus and set to fixing the flat tires, but it turns out King Koopa has a secret fortress under the sands and a mirage machine, which he uses to kidnap the king. Fortunately, Bowser is just as much of an incompetent nincompoop as the king is, so the Bros steal the mirage controls and rescue the king in record time. This wonderfully goofy romp, packed with sight gags, was unusually scripted by John Walker.

Later in the same volume is “The Fish That Should’ve Gotten Away” by Bill Vallely and Mark McClellan (who also wrote all the following stories), which the intro page notes was created on stage in a live event and was the first story created for the Nintendo Comics System. This delights me, because it also introduces my favorite original character from the comics: Stanley, the talking fish. Mario dodges lots of enemies while Stanley talks his ear off, and when he finally escapes, it turns out that at least among the tree-monsters, Stanley is a hot guy to know.

Then we get two one-page gags, a “Public Service Announcement” about playing poker, and the “Guide to Grooming Your Mustache.”

Later in the book we see “The Adventures of Dirk Drain-Head”, introducing Mario’s favorite fictional character who will become a running gag. The Princess is much more interested in reading Baroness Blue Blood, and she sends the bros off to retrieve her the latest issue. The bros banter their way through a hoard of monsters, with Luigi increasingly annoyed by Mario’s obsession, until Mario drops the magazine and it turns out to be just the distraction they need to actually reach the comic shop…which is, of course, out of Baroness Blue Blood.

And lastly, we have “You Again?” a rather trippy take on the open sequence of SMB2 and the nature of extra lives. Every time Mario gets bonked on his way out to rescue the Princess he wakes up back in bed. After many rounds of this, Toad walks up to a call from the Princess, and notes he was having a dream about Mario getting bonked and waking up repeatedly…only to, of course, end up in the same loop when he steps outside.

The best thing about every story in this volume is the banter: The action is treated as very “workaday” with Mario jumping and stomping and going about his video game business; so the meat is in the dialogue going on during it including the fact that all the enemies have little asides that may or may not be related to the main action at all.

Volume 2 of the omnibus also opens with “The Legend”, and then has only one SMB story, “Betrayal Most Proper”. Royal mushroom retainer Wooster is accused to treason by the idiot king, because he dared criticize the king’s new giant light-up crown. Wooster packs his bags and leaves and is promptly captured by Koopa. Mario and Toad go to rescue him, and make amazing time to Koopa’s throne room, where they discover that Wooster is willingly serving Koopa. They rescue him anyway just as Bowser and every one of his overbloated servants fall asleep—Wooster was arranging for his own release by overfeeding Bowser and the staff into submission. When they return, the king has had a change of heart about declaring Wooster a traitor, because there’s one thing he’s smart enough to be scared of: Princess Toadstool being angry about his actions.

Let me also say, I love the anti-monarchist sentiment this series is rife with. Though they were forced to include the king, he’s a useless twit and the princess is only sometimes better. Though the “this character is really dumb” style of humor may be a little overdone, it’s also one of my personal favorite forms of low comedy.

There was a Super Mario Brothers Special Edition, numbered as #1. It once again opens with “The Legend” and then goes into “Mutiny on the Fungi”. Koopa has a new coin-operated airship and a staff of mushroom people, including one who gets very obsessed with a specific magic coin. Mario needs to retrieve a magic wand to transform the king back from a dog. A good time is hd with canons, explosions, and Koopa being a horrible boss. Mario snags the wand and Koopa blows the bottom out of the ship…including the treasure he needs to keep it aloft. The king is returned to normal and Bowser has a bad day.

Then we have a one-page “Koopa’s Health and Beauty Tips”, in case your warts need a touch-up. There’s also a “Dear Princess Toadstool” letter column.

Then we get to our second story, “A Mouser in the Houser”. Mario and the royal family prepare for an important official function, where an ambassador will be presented with the Sacred Cylinder of Cheese. On the way to the party, Mario and the Princess are waylaid by a bunch of mousers, who are distressed both that their previous leader (Mouser) followed Koopa, and that everybody seems to think they love cheese when they’re totally overwhelmed and hate the stuff. They offer queenship to the Princess, but she’s more interested in getting herself and Mario out of the situation intact. She stuffs Mouser full of the scared cheese log and restores the travel routes he’d been messing up. So at the party, the king is disappointed because Mario and the Princess are a mess and aren’t acting with appropriate dignity, but the ambassador is happy not to get a stupid cheese log regardless.

The series proper begins with yet another printing of “The Legend”, and then we get into “Piranha-Round Sue”. The king was turned into a chameleon and Mario needs to go to piranha plant headquarters to retrieve a magic wand. The king gives him a Green Gecko Gem for protection. A seductive piranha plant convinces Toad that he should get the protective gem instead. They hatch a plan to make Mario put down the gem to save Toad from drowning, and the piranha plant predictably grabs it. But it turns out that the gem only protects you from weak enemies, as King Koopa ignores it while throttling the traitorous plant. Mario and Toad retrieve both the gem and the wand and restore the king.

Our two interim one-page stories are a “Dear Princess Toadstool” and “Koopa’s Believe It or Else”.

The backup story is “Cloud Nine”. The king is sick of his lumpy old mattress, so they plumbers take him to Snooze World (A Division of Wart Enterprises) to find a new one. Wart, in disguise as a salesman, distracts the bros and puts the king to bed on an actual floating cloud. A storm cloud, that causes the citizens to think he’s a drip as he rains over them. Fortunately, a drip is a drip and Mario and Luigi fix it. Then they dispose of Wart and get the well-rested king back home.

In case you hadn’t gathered: While Captain N and Zelda were “action” comics with things like stakes and character-building, this was very much a “goofy comedy” comic. (Not quite Looney Tunes in that it was tied to a specific setting and certain character constraints, but more like Garfield and Friends. You never worry that the bros won’t win or that anything really bad will happen, you’re just enjoying getting there.)

This issue was missing from my collection, but fortunately “Magic Carpet Madness” was reprinted in “Best of Super Mario Brothers” volume collected on the Internet Archive. The king has been enjoying garden, but the princess doesn’t enjoy the amount of mud he’s tracked on the carpets. She hires carpet cleaners who turn out to be Bowser’s minions, who turn the carpets into uncontrolled flying carpets. The princess floats up to the Koopa Zone and is hypnotized by the pidgits into a punk teenage version of herself. Mario and Luigi grow a beanstalk to knock her out of it, but not before she punctures Koopa’s Badyear Blimp, making him regret the entire scheme.

Then we have “The Kingdom Enquirer”, where Toad takes up journalism. He tries to follow Mario on a top-secret mission and instead ends up getting lots of Bowser’s minions to spill their secrets…about all the ridiculous ways they’ve pranked Bowser or shirked their duty. When the minions realize what Toad’s the story is going to be about—and that it won’t make them famous in a good way—they abandon trying to catch Mario to instead chase down the filed story before it sees print.

In “Bedtime for Drain-Head”, Mario spend 72 hours reading comics and falls asleep just when Koopa kidnaps Toad. Then he starts sleepwalking, dreaming that he’s Dirk Drain-Head out to rescue his sidekick Snakey. He leaves a trail of destruction to Koopa’s lair and rescues Toad, capturing Koopa for good measure. When the king accidentally wakes Mario, Koopa is so upset to have been captured by sleepwalking Mario that he storms off. Everybody else is so annoyed by the proceedings that Mario is left alone. So he reads more comics!

Then we get a one-page splash of the “Fryguy High Yearbook” and a second of the “Mario Bros. Museum of Plumbing.”

Then our backup story is “Love Flounders”, where we see Mario upset because instead of going bowling for pasta with the guys, he needs to put on his frog suit and go find chuckberries for the princess. And guess who’s there to make his day even better? Stanley the talking fish! Stanley is in a love triangle with a jellyfish named Smookers and giant fish named Bertha…that he’s decided to fob off on Mario. Mario does the standard farce runaround snagging the chuckberries and avoiding various fish, until Bertha corners him and kisses away his frog suit. She realizes Stanley lied to her and is upset, so Mario gives her the chuckberries and offers to go on a date and say nasty things about Stanley together. When Mario returns, the princess has forgotten all about the chuckberries because she ate Mario’s bowling meatball and now needs some bi-carb crystals from World 5-2.

This issue wraps with a one-pager of the Mario “Family Album: The Early Years.”

In “Beauty and the Beach”, Mario, the princess and Toad have a sailing trip go wrong and wind up at a suspicious island where the locals are clearly working for Bowser and they’ve been tossing bombs in the local volcano to heat it up. Koopa’s plan is to get the volcano to erupt and transform all the local mushroom surfers into fryguys for his army. (Hey look, we’re learning about the bizarre biology of Mushroom Kingdom fauna!) Mario sets up a water pump to cool the volcano back down and save the island, foiling the plot.

A one-page advertisement for “Koopa-Kola” is followed by “Fun and Sun Fashions” starring various Mario monsters, and then an ad for “Klub Koopa.”

Then we open on Wendy O. Koopa in “Fins and Roses”. Wendy has intel that Mario’s going to be coming by, and she looted daddy’s arsenal to blast him. Unfortunately, she didn’t count on…Stanley the talking fish! Stanley does his best Pepe Le Pew attempts at romance with Wendy (despite the fact that apparently he did get together with Bertha after all, and she’s jealous!) and Wendy keeps careful count of the time while using her weapon stock to attempt to gut Stanley. Wendy, of course, gets blown up a few times and her day totally ruined and misses attacking Mario, and when he hears the reason he declares a ten-minute truce to complain about Stanley together.

And we end with an ad for “Koopatone” sunscreen.

In “Duh Stoopid Bomb!” we learn about Koopa’s new ultimate weapon: A “stupid bomb” that makes anyone really stupid for hours. (Have you been reading the same books I have? You really don’t need one in this Mushroom Kingdom!) Toad manages to snag one and bring it home…and then trips and dumb-ifies the entire core cast. The shyguy army is also not smart enough to trust with stupid bombs, so the army also gets dumb-ified. Koopa actually (briefly) has a clever plan: Using smart bombs on his army to give them the advantage. Except that one snifit blows up the whole pile and becomes a super-genius, and promptly deposes Bowser. Not that he manages to accomplish much, because the entire shyguy army is going to be dumb until supplies run out. As is the core cast. The story ends with the understanding that this was a really stupid plan, and has left everyone too dumb to accomplish anything of note for the rest of the day.

Between stories we have a page from the “Family Album: Summer Camp,” and a one pager called “Throne Out” of the king buying a new throne.

Then we have “Cloud Burst”. Princess Toadstool has lost her crown right before the annual re-coronation ceremony. Mario and Luigi go off to confront Koopa—the obvious thief—but we discover that he’s got similar problems: Someone has nicked a bunch of his gold and his crown, too! Luigi realizes that Lakitu is the culprit and climbs up to his cloud, while Mario ends up surrounded by a very irate Bowser and his army. So Luigi pulls the plug on the cloud, dropping all the stolen treasure on Bowser’s head. They retrieve the princesses crown and head home.

I don’t have a copy of #6, but it contained “The Buddy System” and “It’s Always Fair Weather.” And I was able to find those in the Internet Archive, too.

In “The Buddy System,” Bowser and Lemmy are having some bonding time by blowing up chunks of the kingdom’s pipe system, and Mario has to go fix it. After Lemmy makes a particular big boom, Bowser and Mario get knocked silly enough to be captured by irate mousers. The mousers crack the water main, and Bowser wants to flee, but Mario convinces him that he needs to help solve the problem. They fix the pipe, Bowser goes off to throttle Lemmy, and Mario stumbles home to an ungrateful royal family who are convinced the minor repairs Luigi did were what solved the problem.

And in “It’s Always Fair Weather,” the last story of this series, Mario and Luigi set up the Mushroomland Fair. Luigi puts on a Koopa costume to sit in the “Douse the Bowser” tank. Mario eats too much in the baking contest judging and then accidentally snags a magic leaf walking it off. Which turns out to be handy when the real Bowser shows up a sets whirlwinds to mess up the festival balloons. Mario confronts him and sends him flying into the dunk tank. This was a John Walker story and a particularly weak one, it felt like a product tie-in for the Raccoon Tail power-up.

I can’t find cover art online for the Super Mario Bros reprinted issues (which are nonetheless still called “Volume 1, Number 4” in the indicia despite not matching the versions printed a year earlier. Super Mario Bros #4 has a cover featuring Mario meeting Big Bertha for the first time, and contains “Love Flounders” and the Captain N story “The Master Machine.” Issue #5 has Mario in Wendy’s crosshairs on the cover and contains “Fins and Roses” and then Captain N in “A Dog’s Life.” I have to assume that there were reprinted versions of #1-3, but I can’t find any trace of them.

 

[Beowulf]

Adventures of the Super Mario Bros. (Issues #1-9)

There was clearly a second series running besides Super Mario Bros., titled Adventures of the Super Mario Bros. I only have two issues of that, but I found some details about a few others online. Fortunately for our time and the thoroughness of this endeavor, they were mostly reprints of stories from other books.

According to the Valiant Comics wiki Issue #1 contained “It's Always Fair Weather” and “Welcome to Videoland.” Issue #2 was a “Special Swimsuit Issue” meaning it probably contained “Beauty and the Beach”, and it also had a Captain N backup. From the cover of Issue #3, we can guess it contained “The Adventures of Dirk Drain-Head” (and Captain N). Similarly, the cover for #4 looks like “Bedtime for Drain-Head” is within.

In Adventures of the Super Mario Bros #5 we have “Betrayal Most Proper” and the Captain N story “When Friends Fall Out.”

Issue #6 apparently contained “Elect Mario for Man of the Year”, a story I can’t actually find, but the Mario wiki has a recap of it.

In Adventures of the Super Mario Bros #7 finally has something new I can recap, “The Revenge of the Pipe Ooze.” (And the backup story is Captain N in “All’s Well That Ends Swell.”) Mario’s crew are all dressed up in cosplay for the Annual Dirk Drain-Head Role-Playing Game. Bowser and Lemmy are there to cause trouble, but the real trouble comes when Mario and Luigi switch costumes and the fans realize that Luigi is the spitting image of Dirk himself. But by the end, Koopa gets the snot beaten out of him—mostly by Lemmy—and Luigi arranges to bolster Mario’s bruised ego.

Issue #8 looks like it contains “The Buddy System.” Issue #9 has “Bowser Knows Best!”, which also has a Mario wiki recap.


Nintendo Comics System featuring Super Mario Bros (#5-9)

And then finally, as I noted before, the Game Boy title numbering continued with “Nintendo Comics System featuring.” #7 was a Zelda comic. The others were Mario:

Opens with “Just Deserts”, and has the Punch-Out story “Fox and Hounds” as backup.

I don’t have this issue, but sources I can find seem to think it reprinted “The Kingdom Enquirer” with a Metroid story (presumably “Deceit Du Jour”) as the backup.

This issue finally has a new story, “Minor Defects”; and then Captain N in “Breakout” as the backup.

Princess Toadstool investigates some racket from Mario room, and discovers that he’s trying to manage roughly 12,000 shyguys who’ve decided to defect. Mario leads the army back to attack Bowser, gets lost for a while, and then gets waylaid by Clarence, the shyguy everybody hates because he has cooties. When they confront Bowser, it’s revealed that the shyguys only revolted because they didn’t get any Kind-to-Lackeys Day fruit baskets—which Bowser had ordered, but apparently went off track. (Clarence knew, but nobody ever talks to him.) Mario and the princess high-tail it back to the castle, and discover the king and Toad stuffed full of fruit from the mis-delivered baskets.

Our final new story of this adventure is Dr. Mario in “The Doctor is In…Over His Head”. (With the Punch-Out story “Outsiders” as the backup.)

Dr. Waldo Bloom of the Mushroom Kingdom General Hospital has an emergency! Mario shows up because he thinks it’s going to be a plumbing emergency, but instead gets shanghaied into being a doctor. Bloom has isolated some viruses through his mega-microscope, but they accidentally fall all the way through the microscope and come out huge. The viruses name themselves Chill, Fever and Weird and release their smaller brethren to go cause havoc. Mario snags Dr. Bloom’s coat (which strangely turns his hair brown) and starts going through the pockets for anything that can help. Mario figures out that certain combinations of colored vitamin pills (every single one of them is labeled “vitamins”!) will make the viruses disappear. As Dr. Bloom has decided to take a long golf holiday, Mario will now need to be the kingdom’s protector as both a plumber and a doctor.

I hadn’t realized exactly how much they emphasized the “vitamin” thing in earlier readings, but in retrospect it was 1991 and the War on Drugs was still going strong. Nobody wanted to even imply that you could throw medication willy-nilly at problems to make them go away. (Though I’m going to guess the labels on the pills were added after the original artwork was turned in!) Honestly, everything about this story screams “last-minute corporate-mandated media-tie-in” and the writers did their best to cram in some fun bits and asides anyway. (And this final story—possibly the last original material created for the Nintendo Comics System and published in October 1991—was scripted by Laura Hitchcock, who isn’t credited for anything else in the series.)

I’ll also share my person headcanon that Dr. Mario is, in fact, not the main plumber Mario Mario, but his brown-haired cousin. He might have a different first name or his first name might be Dr.; but given that it’s been established in multiple media that their last name is Mario, having other family members isn’t unreasonable.

I count 24 original stories, two of which I only have the Mario wiki synopsis to go by because they only appeared once, in comics I don’t have. The Mario wiki claims the existence of a 25th story, “Tanooki Suits Me”, which was only published in the trade paperback Mario's Special Powers. The one scanned page reveals it was by John Walker.

I would argue that the mark of a good rotating writing staff is when you can’t guess who wrote what. That implies that the overall series voice is stronger than any individual writer’s. Compare against the TMNT comics where the non-Clarrain issues always stuck out. Or compare a TV series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer that managed a consistent voice with a series like Glee, where you could tell that the different writers had very different ideas for the show and the characters. In this case, John Walker did a lot of the one-page gags, but Vallely/McClellan, with rotating top billing, wrote virtually all of the stories.

The continuity of these stories is shaky at best, but unlike the Zelda comics, they weren’t worried about creating a consistent world. They were trying to be funny, ten pages at a time. They had three Mario games they were trying to smoosh together, and that lead to all sorts of inconsistencies about pipes vs. warp eagles, throwing vs. stomping, and which monsters to use. (Honestly, I think the reason shyguys saw so much action was because they’re really easy to draw!) One of the letter columns actually addresses the fact that Wart was the big bad of SMB2 and the shyguys, snifits et al reported to him, but they decided that Bowser was clearly the “bigger bad” everybody should report to. But really, they were trying to knit together a completely different game that had be reskinned into a Mario game for American audiences with two actual Mario games, one of which was brand new (SMB3 came out in February of 1990) so the comics were doubling as an advertisement for it.

You can tell the whole experiment started off flush with cash and clearly had to be cut back as it went on. The first printing issues (four to six of them, depending on series) all had prestige shiny covers and heavy paper interiors. The later comics and reprints were all standard pamphlets. Almost all of the original content was created and first published in 1990, with only a handful of new SMB stories scattered among the reprint books in 1991. Summer of 1991 also saw the release of the Super Nintendo and Super Mario World (and A Link to the Past the following spring), which the comics line was clearly never going to connect to. My guess is that Nintendo and Valiant saw the sales figures for the first couple of issues, cut the budgets but kept reprinting with the hope of getting a long-tail return from the investments (and hoping that they could ramp up sales of Solar: Man of the Atom and Magnus Robot Fighter in time to keep the company afloat).

One more fun story before I go: When I was in business school, I had a professor tell a story about investing in a comics company. He talked around which one it was, but I know enough about comics to figure out it was Valiant. (Apparently one of their big innovations was figuring out how to sell comics as an end-cap rack in Toy R Us without making the accountants cry.) I asked him about it later, figuring he was a comics fan. No, he said, it just seemed like a good opportunity to make money. And let me just say, the fact that this man thought he could make money as a venture investor in comic books makes me question everything else he taught me.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this walk down memory lane with me.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Baroness Blue Blood

I can only imagine this looking like Rose of Versailles

 

[Kirin]

The last page of issue #1 on the Internet Archive.

Thanks! I was wondering if it was one of the Zelda 1+2 drawn maps I’d seen floating around before, but this looks like a slightly different interpretation.

The Mario series seems downright bananas, thanks for the recaps there too!

 

[LBD_Nytetrayn]

In issues #55-57, “Terracide” picks up right after Megadeath (thankfully with Allen doing the art), as Future-Don and Future-Raph discover that the Mutanimals are dead, but that doesn’t match what was supposed to happen, indicating the timeline is being changed. Meanwhile, the plane the present turtles are taking back from Israel gets shot down (also not according to history), and Mikey gets captured by the coast guard. The turtles, along with Slash (seeking revenge for the death of his only friends) and Candy Fine (Mondo’s girlfriend) hunt down the “gang of four” that killed the Mutanimals and discover that Null is running the show and also has Skul and Bean on his side. When the gang of four are revealed to be robots and destroyed, Null kidnaps Candy and heads to the dark side of the moon, where Maligna’s hive world is hiding. Their ship is destroyed, but the spacebound party (Future-Don, both Raphs, Slash, Ninjara and Splinter) time-slip onto the hive world. (The rest of the turtles stayed on Earth to rescue Mike.) They damage the hive-world and slaughter the drones, and the damage sends the hive-world tumbling into the sun, and the time-slip remote is lost. Null escapes, and Slash stays behind to make sure Skul, Bean and Maligna all burn up as the party boards an escape shuttle.

This was the story that cemented Slash as a favorite of mine.

And I already wasn't huge on the cartoon version, but this drew a definitive line between the two versions.

Two side notes, both relating to the fact they weren’t bound to cartoon show standards & practices: The first is that the word “death” gets thrown around a lot, and we have extended scenes of the Mutanimals lying in pools of their own blood. The second is that Null uses mind control on Candy and clearly has turned her into a sex slave (wink, nudge, plausible deniability, she’s clearly just feeding him grapes in that dress) and I wonder what the average age of the readership was by this point. In 1993 I had certainly hit puberty, and as we noted, I was the prime demographic for this comic when it started.

Like I said before, this was jarring. I thought for sure they'd be brought back to life, but... nope. This was for keeps. Sure, we got that with Man Ray's sidekick all the way back in Issue #5, but that felt like it was trying to teach a lesson, while this felt more... real.

Might even be the first time I remember death being really final in something like this. I mean, even Optimus Prime came back.

I like to think this had something to do with the maturing of my tastes at the time.

(I’m missing #58; it’s apparently a one-shot flashback of “how the turtles got their colors” that Mike thinks about while in lockup. And Leo and Don meet up with Kid Terra and his men, who are interested in helping them.)

Meanwhile, on Earth, #59-60 are the “Blindsight” storyline. The evil reporter McIntyre who’s been trying to present the turtles as a menace since Sarnath landed gets April to appear on his talk show so he can twist her words. Fortunately, she’s no fool, so she has Oyuki seduce the AV Tech and put a video of the turtles rescuing Mike on live broadcast: It includes footage of the evil government scientist torturing Mike, but then Mike rescuing that scientist anyway when he almost drowns. The crowd interprets this as the turtles being heroes and McIntyre is thwarted. (From the art changes, it appears that Oyuki has aged from “kid” to “mid-teens” since we saw her last.) As the space team pilots an alien fighter back to Earth, they’re forced to land at Area 51 by strange government fighters. They escape with the help of a captive alien, but end up in a standoff between the rescue party and the reinforcements outside, so the alien agrees to return to captivity to let them go free. Don swears to come back for him. (But he probably won’t, because remember that Amaggon steals the alien’s bones to power the time-slip generator in the future.)

This was a fun story. Also:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1550415065416974339

#61 opens with a funeral for Slash (and Lawson art, thankfully for the last time). The two Raphaels have another heart-to-heart, and the Future versions of Leo and Mike arrive with a human woman named Nobuko, who reveals herself to be April’s great-granddaughter. They contemplate the changes in history: In the original version, Maligna’s invasion sped along the greenhouse effect and she killed Slash and the Mutanimals; in this version they still died and man apparently wrecks the Earth’s climate all on our own. Kid Terra’s friend Sleeping Owl (who Splinter can apparently communicate with telepathically, because that’s just something meditating lets you do) tells a creation myth about the World Turtle.

Issues #62-66 are a story called “Dreamland” headlined by the Cyber Samurai Mutant Ninja Turtles (aka, the future turtles, but in mecha-armor that I vaguely recall being a new toyline at the time). And the opening panel finally gives a time to our future period: 2094. Continuing to bring home the “this comic isn’t for 8-year-olds any more” theme, Future-Raph has a nightmare and wakes up next to a naked foxwoman. (Mezcaal, presumably a descendent of Ninjara.) Verminator-X has built cyber-zombies and is out committing crimes, and seriously injures Mike.

Yep. There was even a cartoon episode featuring it, although sadly, not with the Future Turtles.

God, I so loved this arc, and I still do. I wonder whose idea it was to feature the Cyber Samurai armor, because frankly, I LOVED it. TBH, I feel like it was my introduction to Iron Man before Iron Man, and made appreciating Stark's suits come that much more naturally for me. I'd love to see them return.

Plus, I loved getting a full arc of just the Future Turtles on an adventure, without their past counterparts being there. Not that I didn't enjoy those, but this felt like more of a chance to see their normal, you know?

Don fiddles with Armaggon’s souped-up time-slip generator (which he doesn’t know Hitler’s brain is attached to) and activates it enough that the brain can open portals to 1945. The turtles then go back to 1945, stop the Hilter’s brain-in-a-robot-body, punch Hitler himself in the face, and lose another time-slip remote before the automatic system retrieves them. Verminator-X, now working with the alien Crainiac to steal a bunch of important human brains before a rogue comet destroys Earth, lures the turtles into a pair of traps, where they fight both zombies and evil brains. Verminator-X breaks off his alliance when Crainiac wants to kill the turtles to take their brains, so Crainiac flees Earth alone. Raph shoots Verminator-X, in what plays like a serious “I did what had to be done” moment, but then Don rebuilds him into Manx again and they work together to shoot down the comet before Earth is destroyed.

That moment still affected me, since Raph actually went there. Sure, Manx got fixed, but as we've seen many a time in this book, that's anything but a guarantee; he was the exception to the rule.

Also, the Hitler punch is just pure classic. As is this:

(This whole thing made my #2 for the "12 Times Adolf Hitler Has Been Owned in Fiction" article I wrote years ago.)

The backup stories “The Angel of Times Square” involve April and decidedly adult-looking Oyuki investigating what seems to be a grifter selling tickets to see an angel. (The second issue reveals it’s a flash-forward to New Years Eve 1999.) April rescues woman being held captive, who may actually be an angel, and who encourages April to think about the beauty of the world as she flies away.

That was wild. Also, it's the same story that Michelangelo was drawing in the lead story!

Issues #67-70 are the “Moon Eyes Saga”. The turtles and Ninjara travel with April to Alaska in pursuit of a story just as tensions start to flare between Raph and Ninjara about their relationship. They meet a werewolf named Mokoshan, who is smitten with Ninjara and nicknames her “Moon-Eyes.” There’s some hubbub with toxic waste creating mutant polar bears; but the thrust of this story is Ninjara falling out of love with Raphael and his bad attitude and pursuing something new.

This was a bit of a heartbreaker to go out on, I gotta tell you. Sure, there was still a little more, but...

And that’s where my collection of the main series ends. According to TMNTPedia, #71-72 were a flashback storyline called “The Early Years” that told how the turtles chose their weapons. The final story was supposed by a five-part epic called “The Forever War” uniting both eras of turtles and lots of guest stars. It was supposed to be finally published in 2009…and then as a fan-sponsored project in 2019…and the last updates I can find were that Chris Allen was drawing the fifth issue following Covid delays. So it might be dead again or it might actually appear online; but it doesn’t exist yet. Presumably it would tie together a bunch of loose ends, including the time-slip remote Don loses in 1945; Null’s escape and his hand in rewriting the history of Maligna’s invasion; and whatever happened to Shredder after he was properly returned to the timeline.

Speaking of heartbreaks, it still kills me that Image got to see their continuity tied up while this is... I guess I can't call it a cliffhanger, but damn.

I still hope we get to see it someday.

Incidentally, I remember some guy at like, Kay-Bee at the mall telling me they did end the series after, with Splinter dying or something. Which I believed for a while until the internet came along and I could discover the truth for myself.

In the meantime, there was a mini after, "The Year of the Turtle," written by Dan Slott, of all people (I'm just learning this now).

IIRC, it was Archie's way of doing some sort of reboot, despite featuring a human-again Hamato Yoshi telling "the last Turtles story" to a Michelangelo who had been de/remutated, and was suffering from memory loss.

Because of course it was Mikey. Whether it was a Molotov cocktail to the face, electric cables to the genitals, getting ripped apart by Verminator X atop the city, or getting demutated and losing his memory, it's always Mikey. -_-

Upon reflection, though the series was excellent at presenting recaps and flashbacks in case you missed a few issues, this was insanely continuity-heavy for a comic aimed at kids in the late 80s/early 90s; and clearly by 1992 the higher-ups at Archie weren’t paying any attention to what they were publishing. At the time, I thought that bringing back the eyes of Sarnath plotline four years later was brilliance; but I was a comic-collector child and re-read my old books constantly. I have to wonder how many kids had either picked up the series later or just had forgotten they’d ever read the older stories. Four years for the adult Spider-Man audience is nothing, but four years when it’s a third of your life so far?

There were a lot of clever ideas in the series, and they did a lot more with the “buy more toys” character than I remember the TV show managing. The attempts to add cultural depth were clunky (I’m pretty sure the portrayals of Japan, Tibet, Israel, native American cultures, etc wouldn’t fly today), but it was a pre-internet era and they get credit for trying. The arc resolutions were very hit-or-miss; Clarrain was great at leaving every issue on a cliffhanger but had some real issues with pacing his climaxes and denouement. I remember this series fondly and the parts that stuck out to me as a kid seem to hold up.

I have a few issues of the Mighty Mutanimals comics, a bunch of the standalone miniseries, and a fair number of specials released in 1993/1994; I may or may not detail those.

I still love this series. It felt like the right series at the right time for me, as the cartoon was starting to fall a little below my maturity level, while this seemed to grow right alongside it. And clunky or not, I think it did at least help open me up to other cultures and things going on in the world more than I would have alone.

For a time, this was my favorite iteration of TMNT, and it still remains among the top today. Maybe the 4Kids version edges it out -- yeah, the last couple of seasons were a bit of a miss, or hit and miss at best, but at least it had a conclusion, and led into the epic Turtles Forever.

Meanwhile, we're left here with more or less a "the adventure continues..." sort of thing, though not by design.

Like I said, not technically a cliffhanger, but this ranks right up there with Mega Man Legends 3 in terms of longstanding stories I want to see resolved. (Legends 3 would win the choice, though, because MegaMan is stuck on the freaking MOON, while we at least have Cyber Samurai Turtles to tell us how things shake out here.)

 

[Rascally Badger]

I was going to go back through DC's 90's Eclipso series, but I can't really bring myself to dig through it again. So I decided to use DCU Infinite for its proper purpose: reading short lived series from the late 80's/early 90's that were trying to launch new characters. I am calling this series of posts (we'll see) "Well, They Tried." And I'm starting with Starman. No, not that Starman. Or that Starman. And probably not that Starman.

This Starman:

Created by Roger Stern and Tom Lyle.

I have fond memories of Stern's work on Superman around this time. A little workman-like, but usually pretty solid work. I am not familiar with Tom Lyle; his work in this first issue seems a little like diet John Byrne.

This is a fine origin issue. I mean, nothing really stands out, but it pretty effectively establishes the character, his status quo and his powers. He's got super-strength, flight and some ability to shape-change. Also, he is very pink. He got powers when he was hit by a space-laser that was part of some experiment to give people powers but their satellite exploded and sprayed power lasers everywhere.

Will Payton, Starman, is a recent college grad who lives at home with his sister and mom. He recently lost his job when was hit by a space laser and disappeared for a month. He tries out his powers and saves a dude.

Nothing truly outstanding, but there are a decent number of hooks for stories and his design is interesting. Plus, his sister has faith in him.

Or maybe she is insulting him? (Geo-Force?)

The series runs for 45 issues, Stern writes the first 30 or so, I don't know how long Lyle stays on. I'm going to keep going.

 

[ghosttaster]

45 issues... man, those were different times!

 

[gogglebob]

To be clear, this was before the seminal James Robinson-Jack Knight Starman, right? My memory of chronological DC releases is muddy before about 2000 (that would be the real-life year 2000, and not any crossover or series dubbed "2000").

 

[ghosttaster]

Yep, this series predates the Jack Knight one by a couple years ('88 vs '94)

 

[Rascally Badger]

I said it was not that Starman.

 

[Octopus Prime]

So, on FCBD, I picked up something that Wizard Magazine was agog about 25 years ago and started reading Battle Chasers.

And I can see why Wizard loved it as it has two things they loved in equal measure in abundance; Joe Madeira art and also bosoms.

Otherwise, not gonna lie; pretty underwhelming. On the plus side, it’s got some characters I really like just from a general aesthetic standpoint (Callibretto, the giant robot soldier/farmer and Gully the invincible kid with the oversized magic gauntlets being standouts). Also Joe Mad on art; ain’t gonna complain about that.

Otherwise the plot feels pretty haphazard; bouncing from place to place without really giving any kind of proper setup; so many of the villains are both Slightly Off Colour Marvel villains and usually depicted as Ominious Shadows and/or Just Big Bulky Guys so it’s really hard to keep track of whose who.

You can tell there’s definitely a lot of love for RPGs and anime throughout it (there’s a deliberate reference to Dragonball, before the show became a *thing* in North America), but on the whole it feels a lot like Gold Digger but without anything approaching the level of fun, and if all the Horniness was restricted to one or two busty babes instead of being equal opportunity for every single character.