Whatever Happened to “Super Mario Bros. in Neo Bowser City”?

“Super Mario Bros. in Neo Bowser City” is dead.

That much has been plainly obvious to anyone who’s bothered to visit the website we had set up for it eight years ago. For me, however, it’s been something I’ve been struggling to admit — to not just admit, but to say out loud for years now. I’ve been trying to make this post for literal years, and every time I think I have the words, it all becomes a jumbled mess by the time I reach a keyboard.

But there it is, plain as day. Something about today being “the day Mario dies” has helped to make this a little easier for me to write.

For me, the whole of what would become “Super Mario Bros. in Neo Bowser City” (“SMBNBC” for short) stretches all the way back to my childhood. Or my adolescence, at the very least.

The idea first came about when several magazines, including Nintendo Power, were showing off demo screens from their then-upcoming console, code-named “Project Reality”, which would in time wind up as the Nintendo 64. The images of several Nintendo characters, Mario characters most prominently, occupying a modern-looking city sparked my imagination. With no further details of what to expect from Mario’s 64-bit debut, I began to imagine what kind of game could facilitate this setting, and came up with what I called “Ultra Mario Bros.”, so named after the earlier title for the platform, the “Nintendo Ultra 64”.

I had a lot of the basic outline early on, but it fell by the wayside as time wore on and stuff happened. High school, getting into wrestling, getting married, moving to another country… you know, life.

It was some time around the time that Ian Flynn had taken over writing duties for Archie’s Sonic the Hedgehog comic book that I began to have new aspirations. I wanted to be able to do for Super Mario Bros. what he had done with Sonic.

The question was, how? Nintendo had become rather tight-fisted when it came to letting others play with their properties over the years.

Earlier on, I did have one idea. As I was doing some review work for Nintendo Power, I was hoping I might be able to work my way up to the point I could pitch a new Mario comic within its pages. To be clear, this was not going to be SMBNBC, but something a little truer to the games’ timeline, if I could pull it off. That is, unless I found myself in a situation where they wanted something that wasn’t so similar to the games — it was “Plan B”, you could say.

Regretfully, Nintendo Power didn’t last long enough for this ambition to be realized, as the axe fell in late 2012 and it ran its last issue at the end of that year. From what I’ve heard after the fact, the odds of it working were slim, anyway, but it was something.

Something which led to another “Plan B”. As the sun was setting on Nintendo Power, I was approached by one Nicholas J. Fury about joining the Avengers Initiative Lucas M. Thomas about joining a new magazine that would act as a spiritual successor to that publication. I was all in, and already had one idea of how I could contribute.

I pitched doing comics in the magazine, just like how Nintendo Power once had Super Mario Adventures, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, and Star Fox (plus Metroid Prime and others some years later). He agreed, reached out to an artist, and we got to work.

Inspired by some of Flynn and others’ pre-professional work, the comic would ideally serve as a way to demonstrate and refine my comic-writing capabilities as well as an artist’s ability to work in the medium, padding out both of our portfolios in the process. And hey, hopefully tell a good Mario story, maybe get our name out there with it, stuff like that. And I would finally get to tell the Mario story that had been in my mind for all these years, albeit refined from a video game concept into something more suited for serialized short chapter comic storytelling — and a little more contemporary with the series (such as the story’s namesake; when that was introduced in Mario Kart 7, it was such an obvious change to make in order to bring it more in line with what people know).

The month following Nintendo Power‘s final bow, the first issue of Nintendo Force came out, and it was a hit. We immediately got to work on a second issue, and it was around this time that the hammer fell. You know the one, I’m sure.

Turns out, Nintendo liked the magazine, but there had to be a couple of small changes. One of those changes, of course, was that we couldn’t run SMBNBC in the magazine any more. We could have comics, sure, but nothing like I was doing, i.e. a serialized comic based on Nintendo’s IP. I did have an idea for a different sort of comic in its place, but I guess the interest just wasn’t there.

Since we had a strong start and I’d become passionate about the project, I figured I’d take the next logical step and put it online as a sort of webcomic. After going to the trouble of getting the site all set up and everything looking all nice here, it turned out that my collaborator wasn’t as invested in the comic as I was, due to the work involved. They’d taken on all the visual tasks: pencils, inks, colors, lettering, and I’d tried before and again here to try to spread the duties out a bit — it would help turnaround time as well as easing the workload. Communication had already slowed considerably, but I never got a response after that, and finally decided to leave it.

A bit later, I would eventually put out the call, looking for those who might be able to help make the dream a reality. In time, I would indeed find three volunteers, and so the aforementioned chores were divided up among four of us.

Since the story only got two chapters in, the decision was made to redo those first two to maintain a consistent look and feel throughout (Personally speaking, I’m not big on when the art in a comic changes mid-story, for better or for worse). I’m not going to lie, I loved how the first few pages we got done came out.

So here, for the first time ever, are the first five redone pages for “Super Mario Bros. in Neo Bowser City”:

Sadly, those would also be the last five redone pages of SMBNBC. The penciller would go on to work on their own comic stuff, and never got back to us. Some time later, another artist came to me and expressed interest in doing art for the comic, and after saying they were going to work on the design specifications I’d given them, just never responded.

I’ll admit, this wasn’t a paying gig — I couldn’t afford to, and I was hoping there might be some way to parlay this into one, or at least maybe find a way to get money elsewhere to eventually be able to pay. But as it was, this was more of a “build a body of work/portfolio” thing, for me as much as anyone else.

In any case, I felt I had no right to hassle them about “where’s the stuff you said you’d do?”, because they didn’t really owe me anything. Still, it kind of hurt. After all, I didn’t approach them; they came to me.

After the third time, I was ready to give up this venture. Among other things going on, it was kind of soul-crushing and, if I’m being honest, heartbreaking to have my hopes built up and dashed. Like I said, no one owed me anything here, but it still hurt to go through. I still think back to a comment I saw on GoNintendo years ago about someone and their kid loving the comic in Nintendo Force, and it kills me to think of how I’ve disappointed them after promising a comeback I couldn’t deliver.

On that note, I do want to apologize to one Gavin Dragon, who approached me in the comments with interest in working on the comic. I said I’d keep them in mind, but never really followed up on that. Being completely honest here, I just wasn’t ready to risk trying again and winding up disappointed.

Beyond that, I’m just… I don’t know if I have any interest in continuing the project now. I’ve seen this and other dreams of mine trashed — I’m pretty sure at this point that there’s no way an official Mario comic is ever going to be made, and even if one is, I look at the direction the Mario franchise has gone over the years, I’m not sure if they’d want me to, or if I’d even want to write the book they’d want.

It’s hard to think about. The passion I once had for that just isn’t there any more.

That isn’t to say that I’ve given up on the idea of writing comics, though. I’ve got something else in mind that I’m hoping might be viable if I shop my ideas (some of which are carried over from my non-SMBNBC ideas to varying degrees) around to the right people.

As for whether the rest of the story of “Super Mario Bros. in Neo Bowser City” will ever be told? I don’t know. I’ve got all the broad strokes of the remaining ten parts planned out, it’s just filling in the details and dialogue.

I’ve had suggestions that I could just write prose and put it on FanFiction.net, but that kind of runs against my original purposes for it. Maybe I could host it here. Or both. Will anyone still care? Does anyone still care? I don’t know.

Thanks for reading. And if you read “Super Mario Bros. in Neo Bowser City”, thank you for reading that as well, and I really am sorry.

The names of those who had offered and/or participated have been withheld, as I just want to get what’s happened since this started off my chest and move on, and I don’t want anything said here misconstrued as smearing. If you’re someone who’s worked on the comic at any stage and want to be named here, you know where to reach me.

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David Oxford is a freelance writer of many varied interests. If you’re interested in hiring him, please drop him a line at david.oxford (at) nyteworks.net.