Meat Monkey's House of Weirdness: comics

Back in the 80's and 90's before there was an internet to speak of, the way we learned about new games was by reading about them in these things called "magazines." For you kids out there a magazine is sort of like a website, but printed out and stapled together like a comic book, then sold in stores every month. They're handy for swatting flies.

Anyway, the coolest of these gaming magazines was ~~Electronic Gaming Monthly~~ Gamepro. The bright, dynamic covers seemed to squeeze in every video game mascot ever, while the cartoon character personas the game reviewers took on appealed greatly to the 12-17 year old crowd. A lot of other video game mags also featured a comic (Howard and Nestor from Nintendo Power comes to mind,) but The Adventures of Gamepro seemed to step it up a notch with excellent artwork and a story that mostly didn't suck. It was popular enough to eventually be collected and published in it's own three issue series.

Now when I say "mostly doesn't suck," I mean "mostly doesn't suck for an 80's comic about video games," which is to say there's a healthy amount of all American goofy cheesiness to keep it just silly enough to be entertaining, but still cool enough to make it interesting.

So what the hell is this about? A guy named Alex West who is of indeterminate age (old enough to have a job at least,) gets magically sucked into his TV and into the "Video Dimension." Turns out every video game you've ever played was just a portal to another dimension where video games are actually real. So all those hookers you beat up and robbed in Grand Theft Auto? Real hookers. I hope you're proud of yourself.

Apparently, some space demons called "the evil Darklings" have invaded and nearly conquered the Video Dimension, and are planning to use it as a staging ground to invade our normal ordinary non-video game dimension. Yes, they're called "the Evil Darklings." Not just "Darklings," or any other kind of adjective except "Evil." We know that's what they're called because every time somebody mentions them they always say the full "Evil Darklings."

Like Here.

And Here.

And Here too.

And again.

So anyway, there's a group of good guy wizard types called The Council, who are like the rulers of the video game realm. The only one who gets a name is called Zardoth, who is also the only one to figure out the Evil Darkling's dastardly plan. Unfortunately for him the Evil Darklings show up and blow all the other good guy wizards to kingdom come, leaving Zardoth as the sole survivor.

This leaves Zardoth no choice but to recruit somebody from Earth to act as his champion, and become "the Gamepro," the final hope for the video game dimension. Which is kind of strange, since pretty much every game out there has some kind of hero who kills monsters/shoots enemies/blows up spaceships/etc. You'd think he'd go around to each game world and recruit an army of video game protagonists to fight back against the Evil Darkling invasion. Even though this comic debuted in 1990, there were still a ton of decent game protagonists to choose from - Super Mario, Alex Kidd, Shinobi, the Double Dragon brothers, the guy from Altered Beast, etc. That would be a pretty cool story actually.

Who says video games are bad for you?

Nope, nothing as cool as that happens here. Instead Zardoth makes the only logical choice for a comic featured in a video game magazine that had to buy the rights from different game companies if they wanted to feature their characters, and go with a guy from Earth. Hence Alex West gets sucked into his TV, gets the magical wand-lasergun-staff thing, and becomes "the Gamepro." Even though this is 1990 his superhero outfit still rocked a funky 70's disco collar.

Some things never go out of style.

The first issue explains the backstory, and has Alex traveling through a couple of video games ferreting out the Evil Darkling's influence. Some pretty good games are featured in this issue - Castlevania, Blaster Master, Ghouls and Ghosts, California Games. It starts getting a little obscure in Issue #2 with some lesser known titles like Temco World Wrestling. The Adventures of Rad Gravity, Captain Skyhawk, and Psyco Fox (which was Sega's answer to Super Mario bros. 2, because this was several years before Sonic came out.) These stories revolve mostly around the games, and do their best to work in game play hints without sounding too forced. It was a comic about playing video games after all.

It's a little known fact that all monsters in the video game dimension were required by law to have their weakspots plainly visible, and to blink rapidly red and white before they die. The blinking was also applied to dynamite, or anything that was about to explode.

It picks up a bit once an original villain shows up by the name of Stalker, who kinda looks like budget Iron man with minimalist Boba Fett's helmet. Stalker uses dirty tricks to capture Alex, but gets his behind handed to him later on when they throw down.

Other characters include Dr. Ssyth, the Evil Darkling mad scientist cyborg with a derivative name. To be fair, this came out years before Star Wars Episode One made "The Sith" a thing.*

As well as The Evil Darkling Supreme Overlord, who is this huge purple guy with spider legs. If Zardoth is Obiwan Kenobi to Gamepro's Luke Skywalker, then this guy is the Emperor to Stalker's Darth Vader. He does the usual evil dark lord things, like scream madly when he loses and murder underlings for no reason.

Truth be told I was a little disappointed in his design. They hype him up a bit, and when we first see him it kinda looks like maybe he's all purple because he's like hidden in the shadows or something, but later on we see him in full light and he still looks the same. It would've been nice to get a bit more detail on him.

Issue three features more games such as the excellent Bonk's Adventure and Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. Apparently this is supposed to be the "real" Michael Jackson, like he's somehow capable of also transporting himself to the video game dimension

Some of these panels may not have aged so well.

Issue three focuses more on Alex and his battles with the Evil Darklings in the real world. We get two more throw-away characters named Technos and Seeker, who are admittedly pretty generic and go down without much of a fight.

One pretty funny gag has a disguised Stalker ordering them to use their cloaking powers to accidentally disguise themselves as Captain Kirk and Spock from Star Trek.

At first glance I thought that Alex just had a photo of Kirk and Spock laying around his apartment, but then I realized Stalker is holding another one of those "magazine" things. Shit, even I'm starting to forget what they look like.

Stalker gets away. Gamepro takes out Technos and Seeker and saves the Earth from the Evil Darklings. However (spoilers - as if anyone cared, but still) his traveling to the video dimension does something wacky to his cellular structure or some shit so Alex has to go back or he'll die. Thus the stage is set for further adventures that sadly were never to be. The comic never got past three issues, so we never got to see Gamepro destroy Stalker or the evil purple Overlord once and for all. Which is too bad really, because even though the comic is as cheesy as they come I was kinda getting into it.

Overall The Adventures of Gamepro is a good read through. The story is goofy enough to not be taken too seriously, with a big helping of cheese smeared over a veneer of 90's radical extreme-ness. Issues can be found pretty cheap on Ebay, or can just be downloaded if you google hard enough. Fans of old school video games might get a kick out of it, and the wacky storylines never turn into an excuse for an overbloated advertisement.

The Adventure Continues!

*Somebody out there is probably going to be a nerd and tell me that George Lucas got the word "Sith" from John Carter on Mars. I write this because you're too late, nerd.