I’m not a full-time comic book guy, but I certainly have my favorites. And hellboy Possibly my favorite of all, so decades without knowing its creator Mike Mignola was working on one final fantasy Comic ripped my weekend wide open.
Famed comic book writer Kurt Busiek, best known for his superhero work on things like superman And The AvengersHe shared a story on Twitter over the weekend about a comic he and Mignola teamed up to create in the early ’90s. “Every time someone starts talking about the unreleased FINAL FANTASY comic I wrote years ago,” he says“There’s a flood of online news articles and discussions, and everyone seems to get the story wrong.”
I didn’t know that at all was a story, I enjoyed Busiek’s narration so much, which for some will be a correction to older stories that got it “wrong”, but for me it’s one of the coolest “what if” stories in the history of the Video game adaptation.
Busiek’s retelling spanned a number of tweets, so I’ve included the full text below (with a few capitalization changes), but if you’d like to read it as the site intended You can start here:
Mike Mignola did great looking covers for it, but he didn’t draw the interiors. Dell Barras did, and he finished about a spend and a half before the plug was pulled. I think I wrote three (out of four) issues.
It wasn’t an adaptation of the game. The project started out as an original adventure set in the world of FINAL FANTASY I, but after Disney Comics approved my draft for it, Squaresoft decided they wanted to tie into the upcoming game now known as FINAL FANTASY IV. That made me a little bit sad because… I liked the story I came up with and I liked that it was about low level characters who were basically trying to survive and the new game was about high – Classify people who were in charge of armies and countries and so on, which was more restrictive, but that’s the way it goes.
So they paid me a launch fee for my first draft, and I made a new draft that used the characters from the upcoming game but told a new story in this world instead of adapting the game. They liked that.
Some people have said that I clearly haven’t played FFIV, or I wouldn’t have wanted to make changes they didn’t like. That’s true, but that’s because FFIV wasn’t ready yet. This was before it was even released in Japan. I have worked out a comprehensive bible and character design art.
I’ve seen it get reported, I said it was a bad comic and it’s a good thing it didn’t come out. I’m pretty sure I said it wasn’t my best work (I had to rush it for the reasons above), but it was a solid story. And I said FINAL FANTASY fans wouldn’t… like it if it were released today because they would bring all their knowledge of the FF lore that has been built up over the past 30 years, and it would does not fit; it seems like heresy. But I could have liked it if it had come out then.
I’ve seen people say I wanted to change the character names because I didn’t understand who they were. The stuff they say I didn’t understand wasn’t in the character descriptions I was given, and as far as I know, didn’t exist yet. Maybe yes, maybe no. But I…asked SquareSoft for the names and they encouraged me to change them with a view to using the new names in the US release of the game. So you can be thankful the comic never happened, or Cid might have been called “Lord Blast” for the last 30+ years!
SquareSoft started talking to me about hiring me as an in-house “Americanizer” because they liked my job. But I had just moved to a new area, and the job would have meant moving to the Seattle suburbs, and I was ambivalent about that. Maybe they were because for some reason we didn’t talk about this job very long.
But if it had come up in 1991, it would have been part of the whole thing; If it were done today, it would be this weird out-of-continuity thing that makes everything “wrong.”
A console booklet
Since the Xbox Series S is $30 off, you can use that $30 for storage, an extra controller, or Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.
The idea of these three guys (Barras is perhaps better known for his animation work, all from the original transformers To Spiderman) could have worked on a final fantasy Comic is of all things interesting enough. The fact that we could have had Busiek act as a sort of localization guy, naming and renaming characters, is even wilder. Mister Blast!
If you want to see some of Mignola’s covers, Issue #4 is herewhile another shared by Busiek is below:
