The Game Boy Comics: When Nintendo Gave the Handheld Its Own Comic Book
- Marcel Pflug
- Feb 11, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 2
By 1990 the Game Boy was famous enough that it started turning up in places far beyond the toy shop: on lunchboxes, on breakfast cereal, and, most surprisingly of all, on the shelves of comic-book stores. For a brief moment the little grey handheld was not just a machine you played, but the star of its own comic book, a genuinely bizarre four-issue series that remains one of the strangest artefacts in all of Game Boy history.
The Nintendo Comics System
The comic was part of the Nintendo Comics System, a line published by Valiant Comics between 1990 and 1991. At a time when Nintendo could do almost no wrong, the company licensed its characters out to comics that adapted its biggest games into panel-by-panel adventures. Titles based on Super Mario Bros. and other Nintendo properties filled the racks, aimed at the enormous audience of children who already spent their pocket money on the games themselves.
These were unmistakably products of their era, brightly coloured and cheerfully commercial, designed to keep Nintendo's characters in front of fans between game releases. Most have been half-forgotten, which is exactly why holding the originals today feels like uncovering a small piece of buried treasure. They are a snapshot of just how completely Nintendo had captured popular culture at the start of the 1990s.
The Game Boy Comic: When Sarasaland Invaded Earth
The Game Boy title ran for four issues, published between June and September 1990. Despite its name, it is really a tie-in to Super Mario Land, the handheld's own launch adventure. The premise is delightfully odd: the characters of Super Mario Land, including Mario, Princess Daisy and the alien villain Tatanga, materialise out of a Game Boy and spill into the real world, turning a video game into a very physical problem for the people around it.
It is a wonderfully strange conceit, and a very 1990 one. The Game Boy was still novel enough that the idea of its pixel people escaping the screen carried a genuine science-fiction charge. Rather than simply retelling the plot of Super Mario Land, the comic used the handheld itself as the doorway between the game world and ours, making the machine a character in its own right.
The Game Boy comic was also part of a much larger wave. The early 1990s saw a boom in comics based on video games, as publishers raced to turn the era's biggest franchises into monthly reading. Nintendo, sitting at the very top of the industry, was the most prized licence of all, and its handheld getting a dedicated book, separate from the Mario titles, is a measure of just how big a phenomenon the Game Boy had become in barely a year on sale.
Herman Smirch, the Strangest Hero in Gaming Comics
At the centre of the story is not Mario but an original creation named Herman Smirch, a bitter, cynical loner who becomes tangled up with the escaped game characters. Smirch is such a sour, ill-tempered figure that the villain Tatanga finds him easy to hypnotise and bend to his will, using the man's own resentment against him. It is a surprisingly dark and psychological hook for a comic ostensibly aimed at children, and it gives the series a strange, uneasy tone that has earned it a small cult reputation among collectors.
That oddness is a big part of the appeal. Where most licensed tie-ins play it safe, the Game Boy comic reads like a fever dream, blending Nintendo's colourful mascots with a downbeat human antihero. It is the kind of creative swing that simply would not be made today, which is exactly what makes the surviving issues so fascinating to leaf through.
Who Made It
The series was the work of writers connected to Valiant's Nintendo output. The first and third issues were written by George Caragonne, while the second and fourth were handled by Mark McClellan, both regular contributors to the wider Nintendo Comics System line. Splitting the run between two writers was common practice for these fast-moving licensed books, and it gives the four issues their own slightly uneven, anthology-like rhythm.
For collectors, the distinction between a first print and a later reprint matters. The original 1990 issues are the ones that actually sat on the racks during the Game Boy's first great wave of popularity, and surviving copies in good condition are far from common, since comics of this kind were read, folded and thrown away rather than carefully preserved. Assembling all four first-print issues, as here, is a small feat of patient hunting, and it captures the series exactly as its first readers would have found it.
The Four Issues in the Collection
The collection holds the complete run in first print, from issue one and issue two through issue three to issue four, alongside later reprints of the same stories. Together they preserve one of the oddest corners of Game Boy history: the brief moment when the world's favourite handheld climbed off the shelf and onto the comic-book page.
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