More rare Benimaru Itoh comics for you, this time from Shogakukan’s Wonder Life Special guidebooks for the first three Picross games from Jupiter (Mario’s Picross (GB), Mario’s Super Picross (SNES), and Picross 2 (GB)). Again they are in full, vibrant colour and read left-to-right and with sound effects in English already, so they’re very accessible. Also I translated all the text from Japanese into English.
Also included are all the unique artworks that Itoh drew for the books, collated and cleaned up. I love his style! I also love Peach’s outfits, Wario’s absurd villain portrayal, and Picross puzzles being an integral part of the comic’s plot.
Thanks again to Ragey for the scans, and it’s worth checking out the raws because these books also contain a wealth of unique Picross puzzles in their pages. There are solvable puzzles during the comic, but some of them had been filled in already by the book’s previous owner. And I didn’t bother translating any text explaining how to solve Picross that appeared in the comic sections.
The comic scanlations from Mario guides keep coming, thanks to Ragey’s scans and Borp! The guides done by Ape Inc in particular are excellent, and have lovely comics like this one, drawn by Benimaru Itoh. Itoh, also known as Ashura, Benny, or Mitch, has done many Nintendo comics including the Mario World guide’s comic and a full Mother 2 manga, as well as the Star Fox and Super Metroid comics for Nintendo Power. His art style is distinctive and fun, especially when the comics are in full colour like this one!
The comic is also read left to right, so with this translation into English it’s very accessible. It tells the “story” of the original Mario Kart game in vignettes, with plenty of gags along the way. And look out for a whole bunch of cameo appearances on the first and second-last page by Mother, Zelda, and F-Zero characters among others!
