After Fairground Nonsense, I still felt the comics itch, so I decided to forge ahead with one I wasn’t too interested in while I was up for it. So here we have Wave Race Raiders, one of the few Club Nintendo comics not covered by Mario Wiki, because Mario is not involved. As in the Donkey Kong comics, this one features just the one franchise and is set in that world. It’s an interesting case because, seriously, Wave Race. I guess it was the only thing going in mid 1997? But it’s not exactly a character driven series.
Anyways, this comic posits that the four playables in Wave Race 64 are in some kind of crime-fighting jet ski club together. It can’t decide whether they’re called Wave Racers or Wave Raiders, so I think the title is a good de facto team name. They have to save the duaghter of their fictional town’s mayor. Our heroes are not named at all, though (except Ayumi), so I’ll tell you here that Ayumi Stewart is an American, the young black-haired guy is Japanese Ryota Hayami, the older black-haired guy with the prominent chin is a Canadian called Miles Jeter, and the fat guy is the American Dave Mariner.
The comic is ultimately a little anticlimactic, but it’s amusing to think that just like Captain Falcon, when the characters in the jet ski game aren’t racing they’re fighting for justice off the coast of their hometown. That’s not exactly what Falcon does but yeah. The comic is also much less silly and funny than the usual, although there’s a few humourous touches. I like that they felt able to change up the genre and the franchise every now and then. I’d also like to imagine there’s a small diehard community of Wave Race superfans who will be overjoyed by this comic.
By the way, the original German uses the phrase “Water Bike” to describe our Raiders’ vehicle of choice. I assume they were trying to avoid saying “jet ski” because that phrase is actually trademarked by Kawasaki but has become the de facto standard name for that type of craft, much like Band-Aid or Zamboni. However, Kawasaki actually sponsored the game and so it was probably fine. I went with “jet ski” anyway in the spirit of the game.