Hi everyone! I’m Chris Osborne, and I take full responsibility for this show.

I was sitting around with my wife one day watching some Marvel cartoons and we started talking about how the shows were condensing story lines and characters when I had a realization. I’d grown up playing all of these video games about super heroes without reading much of the comics. So being the giant dork that I am, I decided that I needed to go back and look at the games I’d grown up on and see how faithful they stayed to the source material.

Then I figured I should take it further. Instead of just looking at the games I’d grown up on, why not look at everything? So the idea for Play Comics was formed.

In this podcast I’ll be looking at video games based on comics that fit the following criteria:

  1. The game had an American release on a home or handheld console. So anything strictly on phones or computers doesn’t count. Neither do arcade games, unless they had a port to a home console. The American release part is because I don’t want to have to translate anything.
  2. The comic property existed first. Be it a traditional Marvel/DC release, newspaper comics, manga, or whatever, as long as the comic was the origin of the property I’m cool with it. I wanted to skip over things like Sonic the Hedgehog that had comics made based on an already existing franchise. And yeah, I’ll be calling them all comics on this page. I’ll get it right for the work when I talk about it, but here it’s just easier to call everything a comic.
  3. Doesn’t matter where or when the comic came out. Tin Tin started in 1929, didn’t get English releases until the 1950s, and didn’t have a game that we’ll look at until 1995. And it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t even matter if the game appeared here in America before the comic, the comic was still source material for the game and that’s good enough.

It’s really pretty simple I guess.