I wasn't even aware that there was an official Mario comic until I saw it at my local Books-A-Million recently. I've been slowly acclimating my toddler into the world of video games, and like most kids, I'm starting him with Nintendo, as it is obviously the most child friendly of the major video game brands. He's been getting blasted with Pokemon for the last few months, specifically the anime, which I recently reviewed for the site, and has been really enjoying that whole franchise. Then I showed him the newer, actually good Mario movie and he loved it, and now he plays with his Mario and Yoshi toys all the time. He's warming up to the world's favorite plumber. So I grabbed this comic book to read through with him, and let me tell you, it's just delightful.
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| Image Credit: Barnes & Noble |
Super Mario Adventures is a collection of Mario comics that were in Nintendo Power in the early 1990s. They told one continuous story over the course of a year. The author is Kentaro Takekuma and the art was done by Charlie Nozawa, neither of which it seems like are known for anything else. I'm surprised by this, as the writing, or at least the English localization, is absolutely hilarious. I was laughing out loud, while reading to my son. And the art is absurdly charming and filled with cartoonish personality. It seems like a lot of children's manga and anime in this era had sort of chibi-adjacent, adorable aesthetic.
As you'd expect from a story starring Mario, it largely centers around his journey to save Princess Peach (or Princess Toadstool in this comic, as she was still known at the time) from Bowser, who kidnapped her, wishing to make Peach his wife. Mario and Luigi go on a heroic journey to get her back and encounter a few interesting stops along the way. They find Yoshi and his village, which leads to a hilarious sequence where they find another human named Floyd, who is friendly, but constantly trying to hawk his wares to people. The plumber brothers cannot understand Yoshi, so Floyd "magically" produces a Yoshi dictionary, which is quickly revealed to be completely useless, as Yoshi just repeats his own name for every single word. Eventually, they reach Bowser's castle and after a series of shenanigans involving Luigi cross-dressing as Peach to distract everyone, they save the Princess and defeat Bowser in an epic showdown. Obviously I'm leaving a lot out, because I really think you should read this and I don't want to spoil how wonderful it is.
At the very end of the book, there is a brief chapter involving Mario and Wario, that explains that Wario is a villain because Mario was a terrible friend to him in their childhood. This was a fun little story that showed off some bizarre, obscure Mario enemies from Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins and Wario's giant, evil looking castle home. My son was legitimately scared of Wario, which was hilarious, given that he's such a dumb, comic relief type character, but he wasn't familiar with the character before reading this. I get it though, he is a mean looking, ugly guy.
There isn't much more to say about this brief graphic novel, especially without totally spoiling it. I was just so delighted that this even existed and it was such an endearing, cute story that my son loved and I found myself smiling and laughing the whole way through it. I really wish this story was continued longer than it was and maybe we could still be seeing new chapters released today. The book is not expensive, retailing around $17 USD, from what I've seen. If you like Mario, you should pick it up. You won't regret it.
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