The Paper Trail, Part 1: The Game Boy Comic Books
- Marcel Pflug
- 7 days ago
- 4 min read
Every console leaves a paper trail. Boxes and manuals, warranty slips and magazine spreads, the printed odds and ends that tend to outlive the machine itself. Usually that trail is practical stuff. But every so often it wanders somewhere unexpected, and for the Game Boy it wandered right onto a comic-shop rack. In 1990, while children across the world were still tilting their grey bricks toward the nearest lamp to catch the light, Valiant Comics handed the handheld its very own comic book. Four of them, in fact. The series was simply, proudly called Game Boy.
These issues live on the museum's Publications shelf rather than in the hardware cabinet, and that is precisely where the pleasure of collecting them begins. Four issues, each printed twice, carrying the same adventures in more than one language. It is a small, self-contained corner of Game Boy history, and following it from cover to cover is exactly the kind of journey this series is about. So let us follow the paper trail.
A licence in four colours
The Game Boy comics were published by Valiant Comics as a licensed adaptation of Nintendo's games, and they appeared in both English and French. That bilingual detail is worth dwelling on for a moment. This was not a fan project or an unofficial cash-in, but an authorised piece of Nintendo merchandising, part of the wider Nintendo Comics System line that spun the company's game worlds into newsprint adventures. Where the cartridges gave you the games to play, the comics gave you the same universe to read, in colour, at your own pace, with no batteries required.
The run was capped at exactly four issues. No more, no less. That tidy little number is part of the charm for anyone who collects them: this is a finite series with a clear beginning and a clear end, the sort of thing you can genuinely complete rather than chase forever. Finish the fourth issue and you have finished the story.
Where the comics sit in the collection
In our catalogue the Game Boy comics are filed under Publications, the same broad family as the strategy guides, the magazines and the other printed matter that grew up around the console. It is an easy shelf to overlook. The hardware gets the glass case and the spotlight, while the paper gets a folder. Yet these fragile, colourful things are often the hardest survivors of all. A plastic shell can take a knock and shrug it off, but a thirty-five-year-old comic that has been read, folded, carried around and loved is a small miracle every time one turns up in good shape. That fragility is a big part of why edition and condition matter so much here.
The four-issue run
The trail opens with Game Boy #1 in its 1990 first print, the issue that introduced the licence to the comic racks. From there the story carries on through Game Boy #2 and Game Boy #3, both first printed in 1990, before arriving at Game Boy #4, the fourth issue and the last of the run. Four covers, one continuous story, and then the presses fell quiet.
There is something appealing about a series that knows exactly how long it wants to be. Plenty of licensed comics sprawl on for years, but the Game Boy run says its piece in four issues and bows out. For a collector that means the finish line is always in sight. Track down all four first prints and the original 1990 series is complete, sitting in order on the shelf like the four chapters of a very short, very colourful novel.
First print or reprint?
Here is where collectors lean in a little closer. Every one of the four issues was reprinted in 1991, and in the museum both editions are catalogued side by side. The reprints arrived in neat monthly succession: issue #1 in February 1991, issue #2 in March 1991, issue #3 in April 1991, and issue #4 in May 1991. Same stories, same covers, roughly a year after the originals.
To a casual eye a first print and a reprint can look all but identical on the rack, which is exactly why the distinction matters so much to the people who care about these things. In the museum's cataloguing the two editions even carry different product codes: the 1990 first prints are grouped under 1049-1473, while the 1991 reprints share 1049-149X. First prints tend to be the ones enthusiasts prize, being the original pressings, but a thorough collector often wants both editions of all four issues. That quietly turns a set of four comics into a set of eight, the whole paper trail laid end to end.
And a reprint, in its quiet way, is a kind of compliment. Publishers generally bring an issue back around because the first run found its readers, and the fact that all four Game Boy comics returned within months of the originals hints that the little handheld's fans were showing up at the comic shop as faithfully as they showed up at the toy aisle. The Game Boy was a phenomenon on the screen, and it is rather lovely to think that some of its owners wanted its story on paper too.
Whether you hunt only the 1990 first prints or chase the complete set of eight, the Game Boy comics are a happy reminder that a handheld's story was never told on its screen alone. It spilled out onto paper too, in two languages and two printings, and it has been waiting patiently on the comic-shop shelf ever since. You can browse the whole four-issue run, first prints and reprints together, over at the Game Boy Museum.
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