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| The art improves after the jump. Honestly. |
I've been reading comics my entire life. Like everyone who's interested enough in comics to write about them, I've read and thoroughly enjoyed my fair share of superhero books. But really, superhero comics are a small subset of comics as a whole. For the majority of my childhood, aside from that amazing box of crazy 60s and 70s comics I found in the basement, the majority of my new comics came from non-superhero sources. The comics pages in the newspaper—both weekday and sunday—were a constant source of new entertainment, and my school's book club would often provide me with collections of new-to-me Calvin & Hobbes, Garfield and Peanuts. And I'd find other comics in weird places, too, like in the pages of video game magazine Nintendo Power.
In 1992 and 1993, Nintendo Power published "Super Mario Adventures" as a monthly comic feature based loosely on Super Mario World. Looking back on it now, it was clearly a translated kid's manga, but at the time I don't think I or anyone I knew had ever heard the term. Between being a primer on some of manga's best (or at least most recognizable) drawing tropes, the fun screwball pacing that came from being published originally in a weekly magazine, and the treasure trove of Mario fan-pleasing references, it's no surprise that I've come to love this book—it's no masterpiece, but it's pulp entertainment, and that's comics as their purest.
