Nintendo Power Comics

[Johnny Undaunted]

Everyone who is or was a Nintendo geek, at one point of their life had a subscription to Nintendo Power. My first issue was the January/February '90 issue, the one that had Batman on the cover. It had articles for both, Double Dragon II and River City Ransom, which was probably what led me to become a Technos fan in recent years. Anyway, my favorite part about Nintendo Power was not it's in-depth walkthroughs nor it's behind-the-scene coverage at Nintendo, but rather it's comics.

During the early years of Nintendo Power, back when Nintendo could do no wrong, they had a videogame strip called Howard & Nester, which chronicled the hijinks of Nintendo Fun Club's president Howard Phillips and his spiky-haired sidekick, Nester. After Howard left Nintendo Power, Nester went solo in his own strip called Nester's Adventures, but eventually he dissappeared from the pages of the magazine.

From 1992 to 1994, Nintendo Power printed Japanese manga based on Super Mario World, A Link to the Past, Star Fox and Super Metroid in that order, but around 1994 Nintendo Power decided to stop printing them with the excuse of putting more articles. Afterwards, Nintendo Power became nothing more than a mouthpiece for the N64. The latest issues of Nintendo Power had ads to fill the wasted space instead, something which was lacking in the earlier days. Nintendo Power needs to consider in bringing back those comics, don't you think?



The Howard & Nester Comics Archive

[FX]

My favorites were anything with Mega Man in it. Oh, BTW, I have the Mario World Manga Graphic Novel. Very funny book.

[Johnny Undaunted]

Originally posted by FighterX
My favorites were anything with Mega Man in it. Oh, BTW, I have the Mario World Manga Graphic Novel. Very funny book.

I have that one too. It has all twleve of the Super Mario Adventures comics, but one of the two Mario vs. Wario one-shots (the second one was published after the graphic novel was already released). Peach was potrayed as a take-no-crap renegade princess instead of a helpless bimbo, which I actually liked.

I was thinking of ordering the Zelda book someday. It followed A Link to the Past very closely and was drawn by the late Shotaro Ishimori, who was quite well-known in Japan (he drew Hotel and Cyborg 009).

[Ashen Victor]

this thread brings a tear to my eyes. those comics were incredible back then, and i no doubt that they still are today. i never actually had a subscription to NP, but my dad works for the postal service and got me (almost) every issue (that the customers didn't want anymore) from issue 0 (the preview issue, i believe might have had zelda or mario on front) up until maybe when the N64 was still being called Ultra64. the Nester solo sdventures sucked and the art style just didn't do it for me. they actually progressed him into a total moron, whereas with Howard, he played off of something. i think around the time they were printing StarFox and Metroid, i started missing out on issues so i never really got into them.

[Freeter]

IMO the Zelda comic was MUCH better than the game. Link actually had a personality in that one. Made me wish they did a Link's Awakening comic. And the Mario comics were ownage, 'nuff said.

Star Fox was actually pretty good. So was Super Metroid(even though it was brief).

Howard and Nester reminded me of the Sunday comics. It was cool seeing Nester fly solo, but when the strip was reduced to one page in later issues the artwork became substansially worse, and Nester lost his edge.

[FX]

Originally posted by Johnny Undaunted


I have that one too. It has all twleve of the Super Mario Adventures comics, but one of the two Mario vs. Wario one-shots (the second one was published after the graphic novel was already released). Peach was potrayed as a take-no-crap renegade princess instead of a helpless bimbo, which I actually liked.

I was thinking of ordering the Zelda book someday. It followed A Link to the Past very closely and was drawn by the late Shotaro Ishimori, who was quite well-known in Japan (he drew Hotel and Cyborg 009).

Yeah, those books did kick-arse, didn't they? Remember when Mario gave life-counseling to that Big Boo? I saw that book for sale in K-Mart a few years back, and I knew it had to be mine

It's still one of my favorite books. Matter O' fact, I just read it about a month ago. Time to go through it again

[Johnny Undaunted]

Originally posted by Ashen Victor
the Nester solo sdventures sucked and the art style just didn't do it for me. they actually progressed him into a total moron, whereas with Howard, he played off of something.

I have to agree with you there. The later Nester's Adventures strip weren't as good as the early ones with Howard. The Howard & Nester strips (with the exception of the last three ones) were actually drawn by a Japanese artist, whereas Nester's Adventures was drawn by American artists.

I read somewhere that Benimaru Itoh's Star Fox comics was previously published in B&W in Japan and the American version was redrawn to remove any hints of Fox and Fara being lovers. Any truth to this?

[NeoZeedeater]

I only looked at the comics a few times. They looked pretty lame to me. To this day, I can say that I have never once bought that biased piece of crap of a mag. Since '89 I stuck only to multi-platform mags like EGM, VG&CE and Game Players. Well, until the creation of demo discs. If Nintendo Power ever gets GC demo discs, I will buy it in an instant.

[Kaneda]

Years ago, some relatives gave me a hardcover collection of Mario comics. I didn't care about it then but now that I think about it, I should dig that up.

Recently when I went through a friend's collection of NP's I found an issue with Mega Man on the cover and flipped through it, only to find a piece of sandpaper cut out into a circle, glued onto one of the pages. I don't know why...

[Chojin]

Yo Johnny Undaunted, you forgot to mention Nintendo Power's last included comic series which was just a cheap self made Pokemon comic(The took screen caps from the key scenes in the episodes and put in word bubbles to make them look like a comic). Perhaps it is a good thing NP stopped including comics if they got that lazy with them.