There are only a handful of video game characters that have become such icons that non-gamers know who they are. Pac-Man, Sonic, the Angry Birds, and Mario. We’ve finished going over all of the Super Mario Bros. comics I own without going through my issues of Nintendo Power (the bunch I have anyway). While I liked The Legend Of Zelda and Game Boy, Captain N: The Game Master, and some of the random tales like Punch-Out in the Nintendo Comics System anthology comic have their charms and even some good stories, for some reason their Mario tales were seriously lacking. Everybody was an idiot to some degree, the jokes weren’t very good most of the time and at best mediocre. The art was good, but it takes more than good art to make a good comic. I don’t think the two writers that worked on these stories really knew the games that well.
In high school my English teacher (whom I often butted heads with over my reading preferences as my superhero and sci-fi tastes had already set in) gave us an assignment to tell a fairy tale in a unique way. I did a mini-comic of Jack And The Beanstalk in the style of The Super Mario Brothers Super Show just for fun. I got a A- because of some misspellings. It was the first time I had shown my comics to someone who wasn’t my friends. It’s not that good and at the time I didn’t know the show itself would do the same parody but I take some pride that the first comic I showed to people got high marks. I also made a pretty good (by my limited art skills) Mario Brothers poster with Mario and Luigi standing upon a pile of knocked-out Koopa forces. Doing these reviews got me to thinking: how would I approach a Super Mario Bros. comic book today? Well, I have a basic template.
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