Super Mario Adventures
© Nintendo
Super Mario Manga
By: Nadia OxfordDate: Friday, November 16, 2007
Happy Middle of November. Manga publishers are doling out heavy loads as Christmas creeps closer, including a couple of hardcover collections that will surely please the packrat in your family (or some otherwise familiar hanger-on you are obligated to treat because he sent you a fruitcake). Tokyopop has the first two volumes of Fruits Basket bundled up in a baby blue hardcover for $14.99. Fruits Basket is a very charming romance manga based around a whacked-out family that can wield powers associated with the animals of the Chinese zodiac, so it might not suit a self-proclaimed badass.
Never fear, because there's something for everyone. If you have someone on your list who wouldn't leave his World of WarCraft game to save his own mother from a fire, Tokyopop has also released the very handsome WarCraft Sunwell Trilogy Ultimate Edition. Written by famous fantasy novelist Richard A Knaak and illustrated in a fetching manhwa style by Jae-Hwan Kim, the Sunwell Trilogy is a lengthy story featuring dragons and head-busting dwarves. Reviews for both Fruits Basket and the Sunwell Trilogy manga are pending.
In other manga and anime-related news, Naruto continues to bust up the sales charts in both America and Japan. Very shocking, yes. Veering off into uncharted territory (literally), Super Mario Galaxy has been released on the Wii and is pretty incredible. Wait, what does this have to do with anime and manga? More than you might imagine.
For most of us, video games served as our first link to the world of anime and manga. The transition from games to the printed page was easy, since there was already some familiarity. Of course, it was some years before video game lovers were truly allowed to revel in that familiarity, as developers took great pains to localize games for "American audiences." This applied to story text and artwork inside and outside the game (illustrations of big-eyed heroes were usually replaced with something even more generic).
But Mario, the first video game hero worth noting (aside from maybe the Pong paddle), has always been allowed to stay close to his Japanese roots, for what they're worth. Super Mario Bros 3, for example, still employed the tanuki suit in American versions of the game. A tanuki is a shape-shifting raccoon creature from Japanese legend, and true to its name the tanuki suit allowed Mario to become a statue at will (the tankui of legend also sported a huge pair of testes, but the game did not employ this power. Perhaps we should be thankful). All things considered, Nintendo could have taken the easy way out and turned tanuki Mario into "bear" Mario or something of the nature.
Also of note is the fact Nintendo printed Mario-related manga in Nintendo Power Magazine as far back as 1992. The "Super Mario Adventures," illustrated by Charlie Nozawa, were loosely based on Super Mario World and presented a surprisingly thorough ongoing story about (what else) Mario and Luigi's attempts to protect the Mushroom Kingdom from the evil King Bowser.
At the time, Mario-based comics were not really a new thing. A few years before Super Mario Adventures was published, the now-dead Valiant Comics had a significant run of comics based on Nintendo's characters, including Link, Samus (from Metroid), the bodacious Captain N and Mario. Observant fans would notice significant differences between the manga and American comic formats for possibly the first time: Valiant's character designs were based on some of the re-designs employed on the Super Mario Bros Super Show, which had a definite Japanese influence, but also carried a more American flavour. Valiant's comics were also very "episodic", choosing to focus on humour (usually through an "Idiot of the Week" type story) instead of an ongoing adventure.
Like a lot of manga, Super Mario Adventures begins with a simple situation that quickly escalates into a big explosive problem. Bowser tries to kidnap Princess Toadstool (who's better known as Princess Peach nowadays) for the purposes of marriage and surrogate motherhood for his seven issue-laden Koopalings. Mario and Luigi bungle the rescue, which means the Princess has to save herself through some surprising acts of bad-assery. The manga did a lot to add to the Princess' character, and it's also safe to say a few young males felt the first stirrings of puberty during certain story arcs. In one much-loved instance, the Princess switches clothes with Luigi and is somehow far sexier in blue overalls and a green cap than her frosting-coloured hoops.
(Sidenote: When I was 11, I wrote a Mario fanfiction about the Princess being forced to rescue herself, too. Hey, I never said I was a normal kid.)
Both the Valiant Comics and the Super Mario Adventures collection have their merits, though the Adventures definitely come out on top for turning the Mario story into more than a scattered handful of gags. It should also go down as one of America's early introductions into the world of manga … even if we didn't realise it at the time.
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