Artrix's take on Super Mario

Originally, I was going to name this "Artrix's Super Mario universe", but it sounded too egotistical, so I went to the old moniker of the "Artrix's take on" series.

Back in the early 90s, there was a young boy who got his first computer (as far as you consider it to be a computer). Upon opening the box, he found a cartridge with this pixelated figure on the label. "Do you know who that is", his father asked, "I think I heard of him once, but I dunno". Oh boy, if he only knew what he was getting into.

So he embarked on his first journey to go save the princess. He didn't really give a shit about the princess, though, after all, he's only 8 years old. It was the adventure that caught his attention. He progressively got better at the game, and eventually he was victorious as he defeated the giant turtle-lion-crocodile thing and received a peck on the cheek by the digital damsel in distress. Well, end of story. Or is it?

Then there was the sequel that was pretty much skipped. As it turns out, it wasn't a real Mario game, but little did he know, after all, people could not even begin to conceptualize something like Wikipedia.

Many adventures were to follow, exploring exotic worlds and fighting even more exotic enemies. He gained new abilities that allowed him to fly, to throw stuff and... to turn into a stone statue. He gained help from a dragon-lizard-dinosaur thing that eventually took him on his own adventure. With his skills, he was able to delight his cancer-ridden neighbor kid by beating that oh-so difficult star level, completing the whole star realm. Unfortunately, natural selection decided that he was not allowed to play with Mario anymore, but the memory, and the Italian plumber, still lives on.

As the boy grew into a teenager and testosterone was starting to alter his thinking pattern, he moved to more violent games. The SNES that he got for Sinterklaas was starting to collect dust as the guy started to explore other realms of the digital world. There was a moment where he was one of the first in his country to explore the Mushroom Kingdom in 3D, but by then, it was too late, he decided not to invest in a Nintendo64. A 19" CRT monitor was a more pressing concern.

The Internet came along and the now young-adult student develops a game for a school project. In his spare time he managed to get Super Mario 64 to run on his computer, the very first game of choice. It was a moment of severe nostalgia. The fat Italian continued to follow him wherever he goes. They fought against friends in Mario Smash Brothers, threw shells around in Mario Kart and on the Internet there's an abundance of fan generated Mario movies and games.

The little boy is now a 26-year old illustrator living in a moderate apartment in the big city. One day he decides to position his Cintiq, pick up his stylus and draw the hero he grew up with.

Hey, what can I say, like to write dramatic stories. Consider it bonus content.

And thus, Mario and his silly fiends are the next to be hit by the monstrosity that is the "Artrix's take on" series. I really went all out on this and hopefully it shows. Everything is done digitally, which allowed more freedom in setting up the composition and saved a lot of time on the line art.

I'll close by noting the few things that irk me, before someone else does. The most important one being that the image may be a bit too crowded. Not particularly for the characters, but the background and the several realms it represents.
There's also this thing where Peach's umbrella (which actually appears to have a name) is oddly positioned, mainly because of laziness. For Bowser, in retrospect, I would had posed him differently, showing more of his shell and the shape of his head. And lastly, and you won't hear this from many men, but I think Rosalina's breasts are a bit too big compared to her original design. Let's just write it off to- um- perspective!

Tldr; cute story, artist praises himself, artists whines about little insignificant things.