Inspired by the recent release of Picross e5 to the 3DS eShop, I wanted to translate this Mario’s Picross-themed comic from the official German Nintendo Magazine, Club Nintendo. I say Picross-themed, but it just borrows the vague setting of the game without any reference to picrossing.
So Mario’s taking a turn as a pop archeologist: robbing tombs, desecrating important cultural sites, offending the locals. As someone in the comic points out, he fancies himself the Indiana Jones type but he’s really just in it for personal gain. It’s kinda reprehensible but I’m pleased to once again see Mario not as the good guy.
Anyway this comic happens to be the next on Opentrain’s speculative list, if their past releases are any indication. But they’re doing Spanish and French comics now so I felt able to take this. Besides, it’s actually the last regular non-reprint non-special non-N-gang Club Nintendo comic to come to the English language. Woohoo! That actually is quite a milestone, despite my qualifications. For more information, please see my helpful resource, the Club Nintendo comics database.
Of course, there’s still more to be done. A scant few special editions, a few comics to redo with better cleaning and translation, and N-gang if I ever get around to it, but having most of the run available for English readers is something to celebrate.
Oh and by the way, I realised my Dropbox links may not have been working in the past. This one’s actually in my public folder so should be downloadable, and I’ll update any older links for other comics. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you soon with more comics!
After a bit of an absence from comics, I’ve translated this one because it’s nearly Halloween and it was the magazine’s Halloween special. It ran in two parts, in the nominal Halloween issue (September/October) in 1996 and 1997. Both parts are here for your convenience.
This comic seems like the turning point for the magazine, where things start getting really crazy. It introduces a few running jokes that are used in subsequent comics, including the made-up greeting “Holerö” which gained enough prominence to be a central plot point in a later issue. Now I post these out of order so it may not be obvious, but I invite you to check out my handy spreadsheet to see where each comic fits in.
The idea of this comic is that a bunch of Nintendo characters live together in a Brooklyn apartment building (although we only see 7 of them in the comic). Their night is ruined when Wario conspires with a demon to infest the place with monsters straight out of horror movies (see if you can spot all the references). Mario, Link, and Kirby team up with the aid of Van Helsing’s vampire hunting gear, and later the Necronomicon itself to fight them off. It’s spoooooky! Well, it’s whacky and weird, which is exactly what we love about Club Nintendo’s comics.
I hope it gets you in the mood for Halloween or whatever, and please spread it around. Like a vampire!
So remember that Yoshi double feature from a month ago? Well the scans I mentioned in the N-Gang release also included better versions of some scans I already had. To my surprise, the Yoshi’s Island Special had almost a dozen extra pages compared to the version that had been hosted on nintendo-power.de. They were very quick to translate, although there was also word art-type stuff that my wife very kindly helped me recreate in English. I updated the download and added the new pages to my gallery (at the same time, I deleted the old ones because I renamed them, so sorry Leona I lost your favs). So if you already checked out the Island comic or downloaded it, go back and do it again, there’s extra content this time. It’s like DLC for your comics!
Like manna from heaven, we were recently blessed with an abundance of new scans. On the German Boerse forum, user hatehagen and others have been working together to upload the remaining scans of Club Nintendo (Germany’s official Nintendo magazine) that were not yet on the Internet. Thanks to their diligent efforts, I now have access to excellent scans of almost every comic they ever printed, including a few I’d never seen before.
N-Gang doesn’t get a lot of attention, it’s not as well-liked as the earlier CN comics. It’s the result of the new management that took over production of the magazine in 1999. Art was no longer outsourced to Japan and the format changed to the serialised adventures of gamer teens, solving problems in their lives with the help of characters or concepts from Nintendo games. It’s like, symbolic, or something. The comic lasted for 2 years (12 issues).
This marks the return of my collaboration with Caramelman, who found the scans for me. We went with this one because it’s previously been unseen, and is very topical for Easter. Otherwise we’ll try to keep them in order, because they seem to build off previous installments, with characters, relationships, and concepts being assumed knowledge. To help you out in this case, I’ll explain that the armadillo was introduced in the last issue, being shipped from South America. He thinks in Spanish sometimes. The bully who is encountered in this issue is part of a nasty rival group of teens that the N-Gang clashes with. The Reproducer is a machine that VIP invented to bring game characters to life. The idea is that later, when all issues have been translated, it will be natural to read through them in order.
This issue is about Easter, a time of celebration. Easter is about Jesus dying for our sins and his resurrection, showing his power over death. Apparently it’s also about eggs. In order to make nice eggs for school, the gang enlist the help of Yoshi and Cranky Kong. Everything turns out fine in the end. So enjoy the comic this Easter, whether you’re painting eggs or at church or whatever (although it’s hard to read comics while doing those things).
Who likes Yoshi? If you’re like me, you’re looking forward to the release of Yoshi’s New Island next weekend. We don’t know whether Arzest’s work this time will be as flawed as Yoshi’s Island DS, but either way I’m getting excited for it. To celebrate the first new Yoshi game in 8 years, here’s a huge comic release from my scanlation division, the first English release of these previously German-only comics.
These two comics were published in 1995 and 1998, for the releases of Yoshi’s Island and Yoshi’s Story, in special edition supplements to the official German Nintendo magazine, Club Nintendo. The first, Yoshi’s Island, is a directly game-inspired primer for how the gameplay works, although obviously with a lot of chatter and humorous moments. If you’ve read my DKC2 translation, you should know what to expect (although there’s even more explanation of game mechanics in this one). The Island comic also includes a little preview page from the magazine before the main thing starts.
By the time of the Yoshi’s Story special, the comic supplement style had changed to include multiple short comics that, in this case, are pretty tangential to the game itself. More silly and surreal, closer to a lot of the comics printed in the magazine itself.
Story is the stronger package, because it’s more amusing and has new, wacky storylines. But Island is still good and focuses on the singular main Yoshi and his reactions to the various challenges that crop up on his journey. They’re an interesting contrast on how the style changed over the years.
This was a lot of work to put together. Both comics are quite long, and were done over a period of time (with a break in the middle). But I knew I wanted this done in time for the new Yoshi game. My old collaborator Caramelman started to help me translate Island, but got busy and I struggled through the rest. Later I got in touch with the coordinator of the awesome Supper Mario Broth, who is familiar with German. They translated Story very well for me, and even provided fresh, high-quality scans! They also provided some tips for improving Island. As always, my helpful wife did a spot of proofreading and drew the credits page art for Island. A part of Story also calls back to a previous Club Nintendo comic, which had been previously translated by Opentrain (now at opentrain.theyear199x.org). I pulled their translation pretty much verbatim for that part, so thanks very much to them.
Said part brings up some inconsistencies, like how the Yoshi in question was an adult but is now a child(?). Bet hey it’s just a comic, you should really just relax. You may also notice if you’ve ever played Island that the Chatterbox that plays the role of secondary character who advises Yoshi spouts some blatant lies about game mechanics. You can’t grab floating coins with your tongue, and coloured eggs won’t just break on a wall and release items! So don’t listen to him all the time.
If you’re playing the Holerö game at home, look out for a couple of examples here. It’s the secret word for these comics, essentially a kinda made-up greeting that is often said by various characters. If you haven’t noticed it before, look out for it.
Well that’s it, this is the biggest translation project I’ve released so far. A gift for Yoshi fans everywhere. If you like it, send me some appreciation here or at my twitter, twitter.com/Miloscat. Also check out www.suppermariobroth.com for some sweet Mario (and spin-offs) content. Thanks to them, and to Caramelman and Opentrain for making this possible. Share it around and enjoy!
UPDATE: I found new scans of the Yoshi’s Island comic. They’re not massively better quality so I’m leaving the originally translated pages, but there were also extra pages not present in the first scan. So now there’s 11 extra pages in the YI special!
I’ve been sitting on this for a while, because I’ve been trying to gradually track down the final Nester comic that was missing. But thanks to a generous Retro Mags member, the colleciton is complete! And so I present to you, the Internet, the ultimate Howard & Nester collection!
This is the only place where you can find the entire Howard & Nester run, the Nester’s Adventure run, and the special mini-comics from other sections of the magazine in one place. The otherwise excellent Howard & Nester Archive at hn.iodized.net/main.htm lacks the Nester solo comics, as well as a few particulars and the most recent anniversary comics.
I decided to take this concept and ramp it up to its final conclusion: putting together these main comics with any and all appearances of the characters elsewhere in the pages of Nintendo Power, along with coverage of Nester’s appearances in Pilotwings 64 and Nester’s Funky Bowling, and Howard’s more recent revelations and projects. That makes this collection the best source currently on anything textually relevant to the characters of Howard and Nester. I don’t have quite the personal experience to go into detail on the context, but that’s beyond the scope of this project.
For example, within this collection you’ll find out all about Howard and Nester’s adventures together, their parting, and their solo projects afterwards. You’ll meet Nester’s whole family: his mother, father, twin sister, and even his son eventually. You’ll also see their association with the magazine itself and something of their roles at Nintendo.
I’m sure what’s in here will be far more than most people will care to know about, but that’s me. I love to see things to completion, find every scrap and collect it. If you just want to read the main comics, they’re here. But if you’re bored and want to see a few further shenanigans with the public faces of Nintendo of old, you can go deeper.
Please enjoy this, whether you remember the 80s, or 90s, or just want to know what your weirdo elders were exposed to. Share it around. And keep playing those games!
Haha! Surprise, suckers! Who loves Donkey Kong? Who’s excited for Tropical Freeze in a few weeks? Me, that’s who! In honour of said game, I’ve retranslated this weirdo little comic, one of the few to prominently feature the Kongs. It starts with a similar premise of unnatural cold, but quickly veers off the deep end with a trip to Washington and then to outer space. Add this to the list of Kong space-travels, along with Jungle Climber, Barrel Blast, and… sigh, Jungle Beat. Also the whole moon-punching thing from Returns.
Anyways, this comic is a good one, and I’ve tried to do it justice. There’s a metric barrel-load of text squeezed into those little bubbles, but I couldn’t bear to cut any. I tried to spice it up where I could, while staying as true as I could to the original. For instance, there’s a few very deep German cultural references, which I’ve kept intact and tried to explain with annotations.
So enjoy this comic, and let it get you in the mood for Tropical Freeze! We even have Diddy, Dixie, and Cranky tagging along here, just like in the game! Unlike the game, however, Kiddy Kong is also here. We still love you Kiddy!
Special mention to Twilight Vestige, who ages ago translated this comic for the DKvine forums. I thought it deserved a high-quality scanlation though, no offence Twi! She just got the drop on me by a few years. And thanks for the likes!
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.
Another Mario-centric comic from the good people at Club Nintendo Germany. I don’t think this is quite as good as some others we’ve seen but it’s straightforward and amusing enough. I mean, Mario gets pooed on by a bird and Luigi gets peed on by a pack of dogs. Juvenile but there you go.
Same process as last time so nothing new to report. I’m just ticking them off the list. Actually there’s only a few left to go! Of the non-N-gang CN regular comics, the ones that haven’t been translated to English are the Halloween special, Wave Race, some reprints, Mario’s Picross, and Terranigma (which is a sample of the Special Edition comic). Some others were done kinda amateurishly and deserve redoing, frankly. As a reminder, you can see a list of said comics and details at this handy Google Docs spreadsheet I compiled (hopefully that link works).
So here’s a little comic about Mario going to a fair and being sold a demonic Game Boy Camera. How they thought this would sell them I don’t know… This is actually a good one for Mario haters, as he gets punished something severe in this comic.
Well, I was between games so I took the time to translate another comic. As with Yoshi/Blast Corps, my translator is still busy so I did this as best I could by myself, using a few online translation dictionaries and services, as well as needing to research a couple of songs that they sing in the comic!
This one, from mid 1998, has Mario at his home in New York (!), being interrupted by Bottles from Banjo-Kazooie, who takes him to Hawaii. Then they play golf. It all ends in disaster, of course. I do love crossovers.
There were two instances in this comic of characters singing songs that would be well known to Germans but unheard of elsewhere. This is a challenge as a translator/localiser. In one case, Bottles is singing a traditional German folk song, “Schwarzbraun ist die Haselnuss”. Apparently it was popoular in the Wehrmacht and the Hitler Youth, but just taking it as a random song a character happens to be idly singing, I replaced it with the first English equivalent that came to mind: “She’ll be coming round the mountain”. Not very imaginative but there you go.
The other song was a famous show tune from the early days of filmmaking. In fact, the writer is known as one of Germany’s most famous lyricists, Bruno Balz. The song in question is “Das kann doch einen Seemann nicht erschüttern”, loosely translated “That won’t shake a sailor”, from the 1939 film “Paradies der Junggesellen” or “Bachelor’s Paradise”. I left this one but translated the words, as it’s important to dialogue and they replace “sailor” with “plumber”. Plus it’d be much harder to localise.
Oh I also forgot to change that one thing where the Americans say “rubbish collector” instead of “garbageman” or something. Oh well, just pretend they’re tourists.
Not much else to say, really. Please enjoy! Links for web gallery and download version are provided.
That was quick. After my last scanlation I started a conversation with Cryomancer, of Opentrain (opentrain.199xchan.org, hopefully his site will be back up soon). As a result I resolved to perform a scanlation by myself, without the need to rely on a translator. This is because I have a lot of free time, being on holidays for two weeks. I wanted to test how feasible the process is, and it seems pretty good. My only concern is possibly missing cultural references that only a native speaker could pick up on, but I think I did fairly well on this one, despite that.
I picked this comic for the crossover aspect, which I always love. It has Yoshi, the Blast Corps, and Dr. Light against Kamek as the villain and a runaway truck of Yoshi’s Cookies. Of course some details are a bit distorted: the cookies are generic rather than actual Yoshi’s Cookie cookies, Dr. Light is referred to as “Dr. Lightningbolt” (I blame Yoshi being ditzy), and the Blast Corps team featured appears to be some kind of B-team, with a female lead named Netty, and four similar-looking men, one of whom is apparently named Crusher—instead of Amber, Spike, Wesley, and Clark. They have mostly the same vehicles though.
Oh yes, this is fairly par for the course for the German Club Nintendo. It’s crazy, and that’s why we love it. The panel of the people going wacko on page 4 is especially amusing. My favourite part is (spoilers) the characters repeating a line the narration just said. Oh yes, and I have no idea how Netty already knows what “Bang Cookies” are.
Well just a little comic I suppose, but we’re closer to the dream of having all of Club Nintendo comics canon available in English. Special thanks to Supper Mario Broth, and Time Q of Super Mario Wiki, who had already done partial or rough translations. As usual, find the image gallery and .cbz download below.
It’s been too long! Scanlating (translating a scanned comic) is a minor hobby of mine, and I’ve enjoyed the ones I’ve done in the past. Now I’ve finished another, with the help of a new collaborator, Kasplat from the DKVine forums, who is a great guy and very easy to work with.
Some background for the comic: it’s by no means an official comic. In fact, Spain got a little bit shafted by Nintendo of Europe, which focused mostly on Germany and France. That’s my understanding, anyway, who knows if it’s accurate. Anyway the magazine Hobby Consolas covers Nintendo, Sega, everything, and has been doing so since the NES days. At some point they started running a comic contest: their readers would draw some pages, send it in, and they would pick the best ones. The first contest focused on Dragonball, which was absolutely huge at the time. Later annual entries expanded into general video games.
This comic comes from the 1997 1st Grand Concurso of “Mangas & Videogames”, the name of the contest and also the book that many entries were printed in, that the magazine sold separately. The comics are so wacky and crazy, no rules at all. Some even have gratuitous nudity, swearing, violence. Anything goes with these Spanish teenagers. I picked this one because it was centred around Zelda I guess.
It was done by Jose Luis Platero Pérez. Watch out for the many cameos, and some of the jokes of course have to be explained, thus ruining them. I hope you enjoy it anyway.
Incidentally, I found the Hobby Consolas comics generally through the Opentrain scanlation group. Their website is down right now, but Cryomancer told me they were working to fix it. If you like this insane crap, go give them a look and a nice comment. (EDIT: It’s back at a new URL.)
You can either download this scanlation in .cbz format for comic readers (it’s really small this time), or view a web gallery on Flickr (probably not the best image site just for viewing, but I like it, it’s easy to use). Thanks for reading and spread the word!
A while ago I posted a scanlation I had completed with the help of Caramelman for translation:
http://miloscat.tumblr.com/post/39620620143
Well, that post is obsolete now. I got my hands on some way better scans (higher quality, larger, no watermark), and when I found them I decided to redo the whole release. There were a few other issues I corrected as well, with small typos, some additions to the credits page since I’d also got the original comic’s credits, and a much better speech bubble technique that resulted in better looking speech bubbles. This new blanking technique that I’d discovered also dramatically sped up the pace at which I could do this: doing it the original way all over again would have been a daunting task. As it is, I pretty much breezed through it.
So here, now I present to you, version 2 of the DKC2 comic! I won’t repeat all the background and details, check out my original post linked above for all that stuff. I’ll just link to the new one.
I want to try using Flickr instead of the new Google pictures thing. It seems very good so far. The pictures look a bit small, but by clicking on them to zoom, there’s then a button called View All Sizes and you can see the original. Also for those interested in quality or archiving or more convenient viewing, there’s the cbz file download. A cbz is easy to work with, it’s just a zip file renamed so you can easily extract the images or use comic reading applications (CDisplay is apparently good for Windows, I use Simple Comic on Mac).
This time, both sources use the highest quality pngs exported straight from my working files. Who knows if that is the right thing, they’re a little big but after seeing the text artifacts on my previous jpgs I don’t want to compromise on quality. Also Flickr scales them down anyway so I don’t think size is an issue if you don’t want it to be.
Well, I’m very excited that I was able to improve so much on this comic. If you’ve already read it, it’s basically the same but if you want to reuse it, cut out panels or whatever, it’s now much better for that. Also if you previously downloaded it, delete the old one and get this one. Trust me. Ok here’s some links:
I’ve been working on a rather large article for a while now, and it’s finally ready! I’m not posting it here though, because it’s hosted over at my favourite Donkey Kong fansite, DKVine. It’s a rundown of all the printed comics ever published that are DKU (provided they are available on the Internet, otherwise I don’t know about them). It’s got descriptions and highlights and then, you can even view the whole comics themselves under each paragraph! It’s amazing!
I should take a step back though. First, anyone who’s read this blog for a while will know I like video game comics. They’re a great way to expand on a game world, and while I like comics fine, they’re way better when they involve the established characters and worlds of video games that I’ve played. They also are an easy form of merchandise to collect and appreciate digitally.
Second, I like lists, spreadsheets, categorising and organising things. This article started as a rough list in TextEdit and a series of links to where you could find these comics on the Internet. I decided to expand it inot a hopefully-interesting to read article, in the hopes of helping anyone else who like me was on the hunt for DKU comics.
Third, some background if you are unfamiliar with the DKU. It’s a concept that describes a shared universe of video game characters, starting with the Donkey Kong Country series. Diddy Kong Racing expanded the Universe to include Banjo Bear (and all subsequent Banjo games), Conker the Squirrel (and etc), and Tricky the Triceratops (who makes all following Star Fox games DKU because it’s the same guy in Dinosaur Planet and DKR). That’s the basic gist of it but it makes for some interesting hypothetical interactions as it expands. The DKU is the guiding principle of the site DKVine (which even used to be called DKU itself, and before that Donkey Kong’s Jungle Vine).
The article really became a thing though when Matt (Waddle Dedede on the forums) asked me to follow through on a suggestion I made in a comic thread. It’s thanks to him that it got published and that it looks so damn sexy. Seriously, check it out, it’s got flippy tags and subheadings and expandable images and everything! He made it all happen and I am very grateful to him for what seemed like a lot of work.
Why are you still reading this? Have you read the article? I’m really happy with it, I’d like for you to read it. It’s got a wide range of crazy and weird comics, most of them in English. Yep so that’s that.
Who likes Yoshi? If you’re like me, you’re looking forward to the release of Yoshi’s New Island next weekend. We don’t know whether Arzest’s work this time will be as flawed as Yoshi’s Island DS, but either way I’m getting excited for it. To celebrate the first new Yoshi game in 8 years, here’s a huge comic release from my scanlation division, the first English release of these previously German-only comics.
I’ve been sitting on this for a while, because I’ve been trying to gradually track down the final Nester comic that was missing. But thanks to a generous Retro Mags member, the colleciton is complete! And so I present to you, the Internet, the ultimate Howard & Nester collection!
Haha! Surprise, suckers! Who loves Donkey Kong? Who’s excited for Tropical Freeze in a few weeks? Me, that’s who! In honour of said game, I’ve retranslated this weirdo little comic, one of the few to prominently feature the Kongs. It starts with a similar premise of unnatural cold, but quickly veers off the deep end with a trip to Washington and then to outer space. Add this to the list of Kong space-travels, along with Jungle Climber, Barrel Blast, and… sigh, Jungle Beat. Also the whole moon-punching thing from Returns.
A while ago I posted a scanlation I had completed with the help of Caramelman for translation:
