The Silly and Short Super Metroid Manga
Super Metroid introduced many features to the franchise, not only was it the first to allow you to aim diagonally, carry more than one kind of beam at once, and have a map, but also the first to have the story of the game inside the game itself, as well as having a recapitulation of Metroid and Metroid II.
The fact that the story no longer lives in the manuals alone like in the previous entries might have been one of the reasons for the “Super Metroid” (スーパーメトロイド) manga to not follow the same pattern of the previous one — which basically story-fied a strategy guide and had Samus “live” through the game—. Instead, it went with a slapstick comedy that used elements from the game.
This manga was made by 3 authors and is comprised by a mere 16 pages, it follows a 4-Koma format, which means that each story is made up by four panels arranged from top to bottom, with all but the first page containing 2 stories each, and most stories being entirely episodic.
It features scientists from the galactic federation studying the Metroid hatchling, which would have happened between Metroid II and Super Metroid, enemies and bosses from Super Metroid, that in the case of Crocomire includes the spikes found in the room we fight it, and has Samus wearing both the power suit and casual clothes. Curiously, among the clothes she’s shown with, one resembles what she’s shown with in the best end of Metroid II rather than how she looked in Super Metroid.
Besides the difference in art style, each author portrayed Samus’ personality differently to work with their set of jokes. One author has her be happy-go-lucky and a bit of a procrastinator, as well as having an obsession with spheres, another shows her to be short-tempered, and the last portrays her as a bit clumsy. Though, with this being a gag based comedy manga, these were never meant to be taken as canonical.
Interestingly, both this manga and the Super Metroid comic seem to be the first sources of lore to hint that Samus’ power suit can materialize and dematerialize at will — specially in the manga, where she’s seen going from plain clothes to morph ball instantly — even though this isn’t referenced in the game itself, the manual, or the official strategy guide which dedicates a double spread for the Power Suit.
Like the previous Metroid manga, this wasn’t licensed outside of Japan. However, there is a fan translation available that you’ll need if you don’t know Japanese, because, while a few stories can be understood even without knowing the language, that’s not the case for the majority of them.
So this is just a short but fun manga for metroid fans to spend a couple of minutes on. Feel free to try and guess the next topic.
