Yars' Revenge
Some comic books weren't meant to hit this hard
The theme of this Substack is to highlight the superhero comics that made a big impact on me. There are many, many non-superhero comics that have just as deeply affected me as the X-Mens, Batmans, Hellboys, and Invincibles of the world, but they’re not the subject here. Which is why it might seem a little weird that I’m about to wax rhapsodic about an eight-page comic that was tucked into the packaging of a video game cartridge. That book, of course is Yars’ Revenge.
Yars’ Revenge was a fixed-screen shooter developed for the venerable Atari 2600 game console. It came out in 1982, during the halcyon period when Atari could do no wrong, and about two years before they would glut the market so bad with their own product that they would nearly destroy themselves and the rest of the video game industry.
The game began as a port of Star Castle, but the developer, Howard Warshaw, took it much further—creating a game where you fly an alien bug through a neutral zone to attack a shielded enemy so you can then trigger an energy cannon from the other side of the screen. With a ominous-sounding soundscape and the “eventually you die” gameplay that made sense in an era preoccupied with nuclear war, Yars’ Revenge was a pretty decent hit. It ranks 20th in all-time sales for the Atari 2600…until you realize it’s in a 10-way tie with a bunch of other games that are all credited with selling 1 million units, revealing a certain hand-waviness on Atari’s part.
While programming the game, Warshaw went down a Mantlo-esque world-building rabbit hole, coming up with a backstory for the Yar civilization, who they were fighting, and why. The game tested well, despite its somewhat weird design, and Atari leaned in hard to market it, even going so far as to commission a small comic book to explain Warshaw’s backstory and also serve as a narrative instruction manual. It was a really innovative step for the time, and as much as I loved playing Yars’ Revenge, I loved the comic book even more.
A big part of it is the artwork. For as blocky as their games looked on screen, they did not kid around when it came to producing fine art around them. Yars’ Revenge was done by Frank Cirocco two years before he would blow my mind as the lead artist on Alien Legion—still my favorite comic ever. Outside of Alien Legion, I spotted Cirocco’s work throughout the 80s and 90s on video game cabinets and packages. But his Yars’ Revenge comic was the start of it all, and I just loved it.
While not about superheroes per se, the Yars had an awfully superheroic origin story, beginning as humble houseflies that hitchhiked on the food supply of an interstellar spaceship. When that ship crashed on an alien planet, the flies survived and mutated into graceful humanoids who could fly between the stars, eat any matter, and convert it into powerful energy blasts they fired from their mouths.
When attacked by a faceless, interstellar menace, they suit up in gleaming silver armor and take to the stars to defend their home. Sure, they looked like monsters, but they were cool as hell. And if one of them showed up in a Marvel comic explaining that they were a space cop whose beat included Earth, I would have gladly accepted it. If ROM the Spaceknight, of all things, could support a 75-issue run, then I can only imagine how far a Yars’ Revenge book would have taken us on the coattails of a million-cartridge campaign.
Yars’ Revenge was the kind of ephemeral marketing collateral like the one-pagers of Larry Bird and Dr. J that appeared on comic-book back covers to sell Spalding basketballs, or the delightful half-page micro-adventures by Bill Willingham to sell me on Dungeons & Dragons. They were never meant to be seen as great art, but they had a unique vibe and charm. And even if they never actually sold me anything (I was already hooked on D&D, I sucked at basketball and one of my brothers got Yars’ Revenge for Xmas that year), they claimed a piece of my imagination forever.
As a writer, every time I designed an alien for something and started running through options in my head, I invariably imagined the gleaming Yar in space—or more often, its fellow, utility-suited recruits training for their big day. And believe it or not, this crazy little book made me look at comics themselves differently, too. I had read all kinds of non-superhero comics before…humor, war, police, horror, even the occasional Classics Illustrated left out for patrons by some wildly naïve barber. But I had never read a comic that wasn’t the star of its own show. It made me wonder why there weren’t more Yars’ Revenge comics. It made me ask why there weren’t more video games with comics in them. And it made me realize that if you could make a comic about a housefly that somehow becomes an interstellar superhero, then you can probably make a comic about anything.
My original copy of Yars’ Revenge made it with me all the way to college, when my entire comic collection mysteriously vanished at the end of senior year. (I suspect my long boxes were accidentally packed up by a housemate’s family and when they discovered the error, they simply threw them out rather than figure out how to return them. Alas.) For years, I lamented that loss, especially Yars’ Revenge. The other books I could replace, but a wonky little ashcan about space bugs? Not so easily. That is, until the internet let me know one day where I could find it. At long last, I had been restored. Enjoy.
