Leveling up to Volume 2: When Video Games Hit the Splash Page
If you love video games and comics alike, then there’s a good chance you’ve picked up a video game comic adaptation (say that three times fast!). I certainly have, and there’s plenty out there. But is it a good idea, or an over-the-top, crappy one? In my latest article for RadNerd, I take a look at what’s worked, what’s stunk, and if there’s any hope for the genre. Here’s a preview:
Dark Horse recently released a preview of the Mass Effect: Redemption comic book, born from the creative minds and hands of Bioware’s Mac Walters along with John Jackson Miller and artist Omar Francia. Pixels will turn to sweet comic goodness with a story that precursors Mass Effect 2. But Mass Effect isn’t the only video game on the line-up for translation into hilarious sound effects of the huge and dramatic variety. Sci-fi writer Orson Scott Card’s (you know, that guy who did Ender’s Game in 1985, and some other stuff) adaptation of Dragon Age: Origins will hit stands this January from IDW Publishing.
Video games are being laid out on the 2D page more and more these days. Good or bad, everything from Army of Two, Halo, and Dark Space to Silent Hill, Resident Evil, and Perfect Dark, and Super Mario Brothers to Sonic the Hedghog have graced or splattered on the page in triumph or a messy pile of pretty-colored gore. Lately I’ve found myself exploring the lovechild of the two mediums with strange and perhaps voyeuristic intrigue. Sometimes it works—Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Brothers comics have always been fun, and they’re everywhere from American comics to manga, which almost always makes our “detailed” pencil work look like the product of an Etch a Sketch. But Metroid Prime, Super Mario Bros., Legend of Zelda, and even Starfox were recurring features of ye old Nintendo Power issues, and thus a beloved highlight of my childhood. Actually, more my sisters’ childhoods that I relocated and piled together from the depths of that musky and frigid place we called our basement.
Continue reading the article here.
