Talk:Super Mario Bros. (Valiant Comics)

Story Listing

The story listing had been simplified, but I think it was actually better in the previous version. There you could look for stories in specific issues, but now it's just a list with hardly any order. --Grandy02 14:34, 18 October 2008 (EDT)

Me too... ^Plumber 23:49, 22 December 2008 (EST)

No kidding. Let's revert! Any opposition? Stumpers! 19:00, 23 December 2008 (EST)

Scans

TRSRockin is gone, but for anyone still interested in reading some of the comics, here's another site that has a bunch of them. -- Sir Grodus 19:16, 19 July 2011 (EDT)

Rocky Wrench

Did Rocky Wrenches or Monty Moles even appear in one of these comics (the Nintendo Adventure Books which are inspired on these comics did feature Rocky Wrenches so I am wondering if these comics ever had Rocky Wrenches at least once)? MontyMoleLoreMaster (talk) 14:37, December 4, 2021 (EST)

Should the page really be named "Nintendo Comics System"?

This has something that has been bugging me for a while and with me planning to rewrite this page, I may as well bring it up: I'm not sure having "Nintendo Comics System" as the catch-all title for Valiant Mario's comic as we currently do is entirely correct. That's indeed how the first half-dozen publications were called when the comics had a grab bag of Mario/Zelda/Captain N/other stories. When the book got more Mario-heavy, the titles shifted to "Nintendo Comic Systes featuring Super Mario Bros. and when the non-Mario/Zelda titles were dropped, Valiant shifted to reprinting those stories in standalone volumes, with the Mario ones all featuring some variant of "Super Mario Bros.". As such, I believe "Super Mario Bros." (or Super Mario Bros. (Valiant Comics) for the purpose of the wiki) would be the more correct title.

Now, there a lot of asteriks here. First is that the chaotic way Valiant released and rereleased those books make it difficult to figure out the exact timeline of their publication. Insight about the industry context or the creative process of the book either does not exist or was not well-archived- for all I know Valiant still referred to those Mario books as "Nintedo Comic Systems" on some retailler incentive sheet or internal audit even if the cover says otherwise. There would also still be value in having a page for the "Nintendo Comic Systems" umbrella brand as the Game Boy comics are very much a separate thing from the main Mario title, as are the Captain N comics (whose Donkey Kong appearances I'm not sure yet are substantive enough to warrant the comic its own page)

But yeah, thoughts? Corrections? --Glowsquid (talk) 08:32, April 18, 2023 (EDT)

The impression I get from looking at pages we have for standalone Mario comics that include their covers is that once the placement of “Nintendo Comics System” shifted from the top of the cover to the bottom (as with Super Mario Bros.), it was no longer referring to installments of the specific series using that name but was akin to calling Spider-Man a Marvel comic or Batman a DC one (especially since after the shift in placement, it’s still more prominent than Valiant’s own logo), so separating the Mario ones makes sense to me. Mario4Ever (talk) 13:27, April 18, 2023 (EDT)

Relation to The Super Mario Bros. Super Show?

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Going off a few pieces of concept art, as well as some other small tidbits of information, It would seem this series might be based on an earlier version of what became the Super Mario Bros. Super Show!. Sounds a bit speculative, I know. And to be fair, it probably is. But I do have some evidence that might suggest this is more than just a theory.

Firstly, some character designs resembling the ones used this series appear in early promotional/concept art for TSMBSS, such as the early Mushroomers, and a blonde-haired version Princess Peach Toadstool, as seen in the images below.

They aren't identical, of course. In the comic, Luigi, Bowser King Koopa, and various others use designs more closely resembling the final version of the show, and Princess Toadstool and Toad are stylized a bit differently from both their appearances in the concept art. But this could also possibly indicate that not everyone's designs had been finalized yet.

Secondly, it appears this comic had started development while TSMBSS was still in development.

While it only ended up releasing around a month after the show concluded its original run, The production timeline still appears close enough to the show's development period that Nintendo could have, hypothetically, given Valiant Comics some resources from the cartoon at that point in development as a basis for the creation of the comic.

Lastly, according to this very page, the series explicitly calls itself an extension of both Super Mario Bros. and The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! Which sounds like the closest thing we're ever going to get to official confirmation that this was, at least in part, based on the cartoon. It also wouldn't be the last time a DIC cartoon received a comic tie-in based on an early version of the show. (Archie's Sonic The Hedgehog has a very similar origin.)

Should any of this be noted in the article somewhere? Or am I simply drawing connections from coincidences? Wandering Poplin (talk) 02:13, January 1, 2026 (EST)