Various (Multi-publisher) · Sendai Media Group / Ziff Davis · From 1992
The gaming magazine comic strips of the early 1990s — running in Electronic Gaming Monthly, GameFan, and related publications — were a form of short-form game satire that reached millions of readers monthly and served as many players' first encounter with games-adjacent comics.
The major gaming magazines of the early 1990s regularly published comic strips and illustrated humour features as part of their editorial content, supplementing game reviews and previews with short-form satire aimed at the same adolescent readership. Electronic Gaming Monthly, with a peak circulation of around 1.5 million monthly readers, ran comic strips including "GameFool," a parody series, and featured illustrated humour pages that riffed on current game releases, industry events, and the habits of game players. GameFan, published by Sendai Media Group beginning in 1992, had a more visually experimental aesthetic influenced by Japanese gaming and anime culture and featured comic content that reflected this sensibility. The strips were not adaptations of specific game properties but original satirical creations using the shared vocabulary of contemporary game culture — specific games, consoles, publishers, and the social rituals of gaming. Characters were often thinly veiled archetypes of game players (the obsessive completionist, the rental-store cheat, the Nintendo versus Sega partisan) rather than game characters themselves, and the comedy emerged from recognition of gaming's social context rather than game narrative. The humour was self-aware in ways that the games themselves were not; gaming magazines assumed reader knowledge that allowed a comic strip to reference the Sega-Nintendo console war as a given without explanation. The magazine comic strip occupied a cultural position that has no direct contemporary equivalent: a short-form comics format read by the game-playing population as part of their regular information consumption, produced at low cost and replaced monthly. The strips's ephemerality was their defining characteristic — they were current, topical, and discarded — and this has made systematic study difficult. Most magazine comic content was not collected or preserved, and the strips exist now primarily in physical back issues and the memories of readers who encountered them.
The most widely distributed game-adjacent comics of the early 1990s, reaching millions of readers monthly through gaming magazine inclusion before dedicated game comics had established a market.
Magazine comic strips occupied an unusual position within gaming journalism: they were the editorial content most likely to criticise the industry that the magazine depended on for advertising revenue. Reviews could be softened by commercial pressure; a comic strip about the absurdity of yearly sports game updates or the cynicism of launch hardware shortages operated at a satirical distance that made the criticism harder to object to commercially. Whether editors used this latitude deliberately or simply because the strips were low-stakes content is unclear, but the gaming magazine comic was often more pointed about industry practices than the feature coverage surrounding it.
The strips also served as social mirrors: they reflected the demographics, habits, and anxieties of the gaming audience back at that audience in a way that review content could not. A strip about hiding console purchases from parents, or about the specific social pressure of being beaten at a fighting game in public, addressed the lived experience of game playing in ways that hardware specifications and score tables never could.
The monthly publication cycle of gaming magazines meant that comic strips were produced at a pace that precluded the craft investment of standalone comics. Artists working in magazine strips produced content in days rather than weeks, and the quality variation was significant. The strips that were remembered — and the few that were reprinted in annual collections or special issues — were outliers in a volume of content that was mostly functional rather than distinguished.
The Video Game History Foundation and independent collectors have archived substantial runs of major gaming magazines, preserving the comic content alongside the reviews and features. The strips' historical value is not primarily artistic but sociological: they document what the gaming community of the early 1990s found funny, what they recognised, what anxieties and pleasures defined their relationship with the medium. As primary sources for the culture of early gaming, they are as valuable as the review scores and hardware comparisons that were their neighbours on the page.