As I write this, I'm two months and counting in my sabbatical from blogging, and have also spent two weeks watching my retro gaming parody/ fan novel not sell, and bought a new computer for good measure. In the midst of all this, I got to thinking more about something I mentioned once before, a traumatic experience that scarred an entire generation. I speak, of course, of Captain N: The Game Master, a show even kids who were several years/ eons away from Batman: The Animated Series knew was kaka. And what really brought me back to it wasn't writing a 100,000-word novel, or buying a Samus figure for three times its retail price, but finding out there was a comic book. And by reputation, it is actually... good? Okay? Tolerable??? Clearly, I was going to have to investigate first-hand.
So, to back things up, I did indeed watch Captain N first-hand during its run, and as usual, I have some very distinct recollections that I now know don't line up with the actual run of the show. I'm sure I saw it first during a vacation that could have been before I had a TV at home, a story arc I assumed was the pilot that I figured out would actually be episodes 4 and/ or 5. It could easily have been a year or more before I watched it again, on the same network affiliate where I first saw Darkwing Duck, in a slot that required getting up early to watch it at all. I can recall several of the more famed/ notorious episodes (including their Tetris one!), of which I'm sure all were in a half-hour, single-story format. From the research that I did for this post, that means I only saw seasons 1 and 2, the last episode of which aired in very early 1991. However, I'm sure I was watching it well after that, probably into 1992 if not later. This fits with certain reports that it was in network syndication as late as 1994.
Now, with all the easy jokes already at hand, I'm sure everyone is expecting me either to destroy this show or defend it as a neglected classic. However, that simply isn't how it was. The now-storied clashes of titans that defined modern animation were all happening after school between Fox Kids and the Disney Afternoon. Even back then, it was obvious that Saturday mornings were the low end of the pool, the usually short-lived experiments, the outdated-on-arrival tie-ins, the reruns and reboots of shows you had thought you were too old for the first time around. If you accepted the ritual of getting up before 7 in the morning, then you were probably going to watch whatever they threw at us without complaining. And you could get lucky, with shows like Darkwing Duck or a good episode of Garfield And Friends. Then again, you could get the likes of ProStars, Karate Kid and Hammer Man, all of which I most certainly watched in the same timeframe if not the same network and lineup as Captain N. And in their company, yes, Captain N reached the proverbial high standard of mediocrity. We were already past the Dark Ages, into a time where even a low-tier cash grab could be expected to have some measure of technical quality and narrative coherence. If it came to that, when Mother Brain was competent, when Simon Belmont wasn't actively stupid, when Kevin and Princess Lana aren't vying to be both bland and irritating (yes, even compared to Simon and Kid Icarus), when they actually did something creative with the "guest" game characters no matter how little sense it made in relation to the game, it could be entertaining.
And then there is the comic, which I had absolutely no idea existed until noting a few passing mentions in connection with Metroid. This one was published by Valiant, also responsible for a Super Mario comic I'm now sure I encountered in the wild sometime in the 1990s. The first issue was published in May 1990. Alas, the run ended in September of the same year after only five issues. In its short run and after, it gained a reputation as both more faithful to the source games and far better in quality than the TV series. Unsurprisingly, copies are scarce and quite expensive. Fortunately, the real-world heroes at Captain N.net have assembled a library for all the internet to read, for the moment.
Meanwhile, what brought me to this comic was its chief claim to fame or infamy: Unlike the entirety of the TV series, it featured Samus Aran as a major character. In fact, she was introduced as a "guest" character in the last of several storylines in the first issue of the comic, and continued to appear at least once in every remaining issue of the run. In the first appearance, titled "Money Changes Everything", she was set up as a neutral bounty hunter willing to consider an offer from Mother Brain. By "The Happy Zone" in the following issue, she was already established as a member of the "N Team" and a rival to Princess Lana for the affections of Captain N/ Kevin, which admittedly wasn't a big deal in the TV series. After appearing in a single panel of "The Fabulous Powers of Captain N" in issue 3, she got a full protagonist treatment in "Breakout" in issue 4, where a corrupt judge sends her and Princess Lana to a prison planet from which they must escape. In issue five, she got not one but two appearances. First, in "Garbageworld", a time travel mishap sends her to a future where Kevin is finally willing to reciprocate her interest, but also is reduced to leading the remnants of the resistance to Mother Brain from an interstellar garbage dump. Then in "When Friends Fall Out", Princess Lana discovers evidence that the bounty hunter was responsible for the disappearance of the old king of Videoland, in a story that was obviously meant to be finished in the announced but never printed issue 6.
So, with that out of the way, is this comic any good? Having read the Samus story arc, and skimmed a few more storylines, I can certainly affirm that this is vastly better than the TV show. The unavoidable punchline is, this is pretty much like saying the show was better than the Battletoads pilot. We aren't just comparing two different things, but two things in very different stages of development. The relative strengths of the comic come down to the fact that it is trying to establish its world and characters, but there was a point when the show made some effort to do the same. Whether the same level of quality could have been maintained over a longer run is unknowable at best. What can be seen all too clearly is that this is far from a top-notch comic for its own or any other time. The artwork is no better than average for a newspaper comic, and particularly weak when called on to establish a larger setting, the one thing that the show was undisputedly good at as long as it was trying at all. The stories serve up several duds, notably "Breakout". The real bottom line is that the comic is still everything the show was reviled for, a middling to low budget cash-in built around references to niche pseudo-mythology, though with the difference that it gets said mythology mostly right.
And then there is Samus, the one thing that made this at all memorable. As with many things, you can see where they were trying, not so much where they did this right. Sure, she's a developed and sympathetic female character with a "dark" side that isn't simply waved away by the power of love (yet...). However, while her open infatuation with the male lead isn't exactly "stereotypical" as such, it is quickly magnified to a level that can only be regarded as either actually disturbing or wholly contrived, to the point that she seriously goes through with accepting the garbage world timeline. Given the general intelligence of the material, it can be allowed that this really is meant to show her conflicting emotions and very gray morality. The deeper problem is that the story arc never pushes its own point. Every time she is presented with a choice between her mercenary ways and the good guys' ideals, the story always throws a softball rather than making her admit to past misdeeds or ongoing flaws. It's by all means a step forward, especially for a video game tie-in (Hell, the show wasn't afraid to show the dark side of unrequited "love" either), but it's the kind that shows just how far we still had to go. Oh yes, and this could all look far, far worse if we actually knew how the Hell old our "hero" is...
So that's Captain N, the show and the comic book. So, was this worth it? Considering how notorious this has gotten, it was definitely worth a rematch, and I'm more than happy to have dug up the comic book. For myself, I hope I have at least given some perspective. By my standard rant, this wasn't "good" by any means, but anyone who thinks this is the "worst" we got is either too young or suffering from repressed memories. (Hey, sometimes, I wish I could come down with that...) All in all, a weekend isn't too much time for a trip down this rabbit hole. That's all for now, more to come!
Image credit valiant.fandom.com.
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