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