Mini Adventure Comics #1 - The Dungeons of Doom

 

Welp, it turned out I had a little more time in-between chores for a bit more scanning, so here's the first of the eight Mini Adventure Comics.

You can find the file for the first issue here, or in the column to the right.

Preceding the Legendmaker series by up to a year, Mini Adventure Comics were released two at a time, and were available to newsagents in till-side display boxes, much like the packs of trading cards and bubblegum-cards with which they shared their size, and were meant to be a similar impulse purchase at the cash register.

They're only A6 in size... I imagine they're made up of four folded and cut sheets of A4 or something like that. They're fun and innovative for their size and price. 

As a comparison, it looks like The Beano (weekly) was also 35p at this point.

The last two issues (#7 and #8) were getting more ambitious, and added extra pages for the same price. Not coincidentally, those were the issues that advertised the upcoming release of Legendmaker #1, as the concept outgrew the format.

Issue #1: The Dungeons of Doom: The Master's First Challenge is a typical dungeon crawl. Goblins, golems and giant spiders, invisibility rings, wizards, spells, Arthurian knights and cryptic riddles... it really packs the storytelling in.

It's also the first of a trilogy within the series, which breaks down as follows:

#1, #5, #8 - The Master's dungeon crawl Challenges

#2, #6 - SF space marines with Galactic Command

#3 - Seafaring intrigue with pirates

#4, #7 - Pulp adventure with a historical twist, with Mississippi Smith

The standalone #3 was the weakest, for my personal tastes, but I always thought it a shame there wasn't more Mississippi Smith.

Anyway, back to the issue at hand! If you play strictly by the text as printed, you'll never get to meet this chap. A typo in Panel 20 directs you to 10 instead of 11, so there's a whole skeleton guard scene that you'll never see unless you cheat.

Unlike the meta-gag in #6, I think this is an honest mistake (like the 'Go to' command in Legendmaker #4 that was printed black type on black background - I've switched that to white for the .cbr edition), so I've made the archive edition fully-functional...

 

As I mentioned in the post on Legendmaker, the Mini Adventure Comics must have had an exceptionally small distribution. It was only because I was on holiday in Cheltenham (and the Lake District, later? Fuzzy memory) that I stumbled across them in my newsagents. Legendmaker had nationwide WH Smith distribution, by comparison. It was only thanks to mail order that I was able to complete the set.

Hopefully now a few more people will be able to discover, or rediscover, these little gems. 

I think the only way you'd be able to bring them back into print would be as a limited-edition box set - or perhaps as a single book volume, with each issue tabbed out in some form at the page edge?

Or Michael C. Watson, if you're out there... how about a Kickstarter commemorative edition collecting the lot? :D

Update Out of the Blue...

So... not entirely sure why I've spent my first free afternoon in many a month finishing off the first wave of this project - started four years ago, geez - but there you have it. All four Legendmaker issues are at least now available as .cbr files.

I've switched to Sendspace for the hosting, given that Megaupload are now under all kinds of legal troubles... and the follow-up two issues are also now available for download. (Edit: the files are now hosted on Dropbox.)

In the intervening years, I've still not found out anything more about Michael C. Watson, which is a shame. The internet footprint for these titles is vanishingly small, and mostly recursive links back to this blog, which isn't very helpful!

I stumbled across this post on the Alchemy Gaming blog when I was idly googling Legendmaker the other day (part of the reason I popped my scanner out again): http://alchemygaming.blogspot.co.uk/2013_04_01_archive.html - so apologies to Tom for taking my own sweet time to bring these titles back online!

I do have the full set of eight Mini Adventure Comics, so I'll turn my attention to those, next. There's an order form page with all the covers on in the cbr file for #4, in the meantime. Hopefully it won't be four years before they're available...

(I also have to remember which entry to fix in the first MAC - there's a loop of story you can't reach unless you cheat, because of a typo in one of the panel numbers. I remember 'house ruling' it to make it work back in the 90s, but I'll have to re-work out which number to change when I scan it in)

That's it for now.

First Update

Depending on how you look at it, I've either had a very productive weekend or wasted some time, but the first two issues of Legendmaker are now available to download as .cbr files - just click the links to the right. I'll look into making them available as a torrent file once the whole lot are compiled.

As far as I can tell, Adobe Acrobat allows the insertion of hyperlinks into PDF documents, so I should be able to create clickable versions of all the issues after I'm done scanning, restoring and optimising. For now, scanning in all the pages and making them look as good as they first did - if not better - is the aim, and compiling .cbr files is the easiest way to show these off.

#2 was the first issue of Legendmaker I picked up, and it's still the best of the lot as far as I'm concerned. I was on a house-swap holiday in Cheltenham, I was eleven, and picking this up in the newsagents blew my tiny little mind. I got the last two Mini Adventure Comics at another newsagents, too - they were sold in boxes like trading cards at the tillside, but I never saw them in Newcastle - they probably had very limited distribution outside of the south.

As soon as I got home I ordered all the back issues and settled in for what I thought was going to be a long monthly run of awesome... Little did I know, of course. :-)

I'll probably have a look at some of the reasons the comic wasn't successful in a later post, but I'd be interested to compare the pricing and frequency with other major comics of the time. £1 doesn't sound like much now, but it was probably three times as expensive as, say, The Beano, and most British comics of the time came out weekly. The fact that you could read a Legendmaker ten different times and never read the same thing twice is heavily in its favour, of course, but you'd have to be a fan in order to get that...

Aims of the Game

Hello and welcome to another blog aimed at fanning the flames of childhood nostalgia!

The comics produced under the Mini Adventure Comics banner in the early 90s are still titles I look back on fondly, but, aside from entries at the Gamebook Database here and here, there's nothing else about them on the internet, especially not reproductions of pages or fully readable issues.

So, as I've got a full set, a scanner, and occasional portions of downtime here and there, I thought I'd make a side project out of collating and restoring the comics for other readers to enjoy. They may not be the most original approaches to the fantasy genre out there, but they're colourfully illustrated, solid chunks of well-constructed fun and it's a crying shame they and their high production values weren't more successful. It's certainly a format I'd love to see resurrected now - if only for the iPhone generation.

At the moment I'm planning .cbr and .pdf collections, as well as attempting to yoke together some kind of hyperlinked format that you can 'play' as originally intended. Given that I don't own the copyright on the materials, an iPhone app seems rather out of the question, but it would be a fantastic way to showcase the adventures in a perfectly suited format...

Along the way, I might also see if I can find out anything more about the creator of the comics, Michael C. Watson. If anyone stumbles across this site with additional information, or details on similar comics from across the years, I'd love to hear from you.

In the meantime, look forward to sporadic updates until the 8 Mini Adventure Comics and 4 extant Legendmaker comics are completed!