Valiant Comics – a name you probably haven’t heard much of these days because they’re no longer around – published a number of comics . … Somewhere along the way, they got the rights to produce some Nintendo comics. Mostly Super Mario Bros, but there was also a Captain N comic, a Legend Of Zelda comic, and a Game Boy comic.
You hear me. Game Boy.
Yes, the Game Boy got its own comic in 1990. That’s how hot that thing was.
I don’t recall Atari Lynx getting a comic book.
Or Sega Game Gear.
Running for four issues, Game Boy presents an interesting inverse of the Captain N concept. In Captain N, real life high schooler Kevin Keene is sucked into the world of video games as the chosen savior. In Game Boy, the video game critters pop out of a Game Boy to invade the real world and the only one who can save them all is Super Mario… who is also popping out of a Game Boy. Coincidentally, all the critters seem to come from Super Mario Land, the sole portable Mario platformer at the time.
It’s an interesting yet silly little premise for a book. Certainly something unique for what is essentially another Mario comic, as instead of doing more of what they did in the other two SMB comics, they’re bringing Mario and his menagerie into the real world – which feature fairly realistic looking humans and real world settings to contrast with these incredibly cartoonish looking caricatures, whom look the parts if nothing else. You only get a tease of that in the last few pages of the book and I’m wondering if the series eventually adopts other Game Boy titles into the mix. (Yes, they mostly used first-party Nintendo games… so what? Alleyway is still something they can use.)
Let’s be fair here; this isn’t a particularly good comic. The first bit of it is dedicated to unlikeable store clerk Herman and our main protagonists, Rick and Josh – one cool kid and the other not so cool kid. I’ll let you decide which is which. And then we have Mario Land final boss Tatanga taking over a shopping mall and then Mario shows up from another Game Boy via a third door at the end of a typical Mario Land level (usually, there’s two, so we have some semblance of an out here?) And from there, stuff happens fairly quickly, everyone is repelled back to Game Boy Land, and you’re left wondering how and why… and I’m not so sure that we ever got those answers. And given that this only ran for three more issues before the license expired, I can only imagine how things work out from here.
But you know what? Now I’m intrigued by where this go. Can’t think of a better thing to cover for Game Boy’s 25th anniversary than a comic about Game Boy.
PSP ain’t getting no comic book any time soon.
dtm666 