Nerding Day: Clobberin' Time! The Marvel OverPower Game Guide

Many months ago, I wrote at great length and at great personal expense about Marvel OverPower, the Marvel Super Heroes trading card game from the mid-90s. Indeed, such a sentence could only have been conjured by the 1990s. The specter of those words could have haunted no other decade.

As you may remember, in the middle of ranting about the game’s bulging and sinisterly erotic artwork, I mentioned that Marvel released a series of special promotional comic books teaching readers how to play the game. I also mentioned that each book was “written” by a prominent character from the mighty Marvel universe, like Sabretooth and Jubilee. Presumably Big Wheel could not contribute an issue, because his hands remain forever lashed to his vehicular prison. Although I suppose he could’ve dictated one. Or wait, maybe I’m thinking of the guy from Twisted Metal. Anyway, Big Wheel didn’t write one.

I bought the OverPower guide written by Benjamin J. Grimm, aka The Thing, because I have never been good with money. The Thing is a classic Marvel superhero, a gigantic rock man with a heart o’ gold who used to murder people in a gang. He spent the nights of his youth prowling Yancy Street searching for any opportunity to push his thumbs through the neck of some hapless citizen and then rip their wallet out of their jeans. For some reason, Reed Richards brought him to space. I guess to strangle aliens. But I digress.

A wave of these tutorial comics hit shelves in the summer of 1995, months before OverPower was actually available in stores. Asking kids to pay money for a loose instruction booklet was already a bold maneuver. But an instruction booklet to a game you couldn’t even play yet? That’s like bitcoin for sixth graders with multiple Game Boy accessories. It’s an investment opportunity for kids with a rock collection. Which incidentally is what The Thing calls his underpants.

The point is, selling gameless instruction manuals for two dollars apiece seems like a marketing strategy devised by someone like Benjamin J. Grimm, a man who is accustomed to chokin’ da life outta his problems and who maybe doesn’t need to be making publishing decisions.

Normally, I would only come to the Thing for instructions on body disposal, and not Marvel OverPower. Which may mean I was playing OverPower with the wrong people. Or that my personal criteria for role models was “dangerously generous.” Probably, both things are true.

But the Food Lion near my grandmother’s house only had one OverPower comic, and it was the one penned by the ever-loving blue-eyed poet himself. So that’s the one I got. And look, I know we’ve had a lot of fun in these last few paragraphs, but I have never regretted my decision for an instant. The Thing’s OverPower instruction manual won’t win any awards, or be preserved in the Library of Congress, or even successfully teach you how to play the game. But I haven’t stopped thinking about it since the summer of 1995, and call me old fashioned, but I think that counts for something.

The pages of CLOBBERIN’ TIME - OverPower Game Guide No. 1 are laid out like a Trapper Keeper designed by random select. It’s the feverish diary of a lighthouse keeper with a passing knowledge of graphic design. It’s like an issue of Nintendo Power written by the Zodiac.

You have absolutely no hope of learning how to play the game with this guide, although it may help you solve a murder from the 19th century. It is hands down the most ineffective rulebook I have ever read.

But I don’t give a shit about any of that, because the very first page begins with The Thing dunking on Reed Richards for not being asked to write ‘dis here intstruckshun mainyoowell, written with all the confidence of Daniel Baldwin accepting a role that all of his brothers have already turned down.

In that single unforgettable paragraph, this comic grabbed me by the collar and let me know that this wasn’t my grandaddy’s game guide. No, it was far more useless than that.

The book alternates between densely-worded paragraphs about gameplay, and rambling diatribes of varsity level Palooka Speak that is so over-the-top it feels racist against rock people. It reads like a retired boxer’s QAnon scrapbook, with pages that constantly ask me to retrace the trajectory of the bullet that killed JFK in order to figure out how to make the Hulk throw a bus at Professor X.

It shouldn’t take that many steps for a rage mutant to make a paralyzed man even more paralyzed. Especially not in a game being taught to me by a felonious boulder in hot pants who would rather eat books than read them. But I soldiered on, and each new page brought a delicious new revelation.

For instance, at the top of page 2, The Thing reveals that his Shakespearian prose has been “lightly edited” by da mooks at Fleer.

In case your brain has protected you from such knowledge, Fleer was a trading card company that was purchased by Marvel for half a billion dollars in the early '90s and then sold six years later for around five and a half percent of that amount. Because like me, '90s Marvel could not be trusted with money.

Fleer printed Marvel OverPower in its inaugural run, which is why they had final cut privileges over Benjamin J. Grimm. In practice, this means that every block of instructional text gets interrupted by the charming slashes of The Thing’s penmanship urging me ta buy boosta packs of Mahval OvahPowah. He also repeatedly asks me to submit “any questions, strategies, card combinations or hints ya think make sense” to Game Guide Feedback at a long-defunct address that is about to receive several thrice-stapled stacks of my own harried decklists, several of which included cards from other games, like Clue.

Apparently, the OverPower designers had so little faith in themselves that they were reaching out to the adolescent boy community to help tighten up their trading card game.

As he sherpas me through the rules of the ultimate Marvel fantasy card game, The Thing makes sure to devote ample time to shitting on every card that doesn’t utilize the Strength stat, and obliquely discussing the curvature of Spider-Woman’s tits.

I’ve never been less disappointed in a fictional character, because this is exactly the kind of guy I always pictured The Thing to be.

But far and away my favorite detail about this strange little comic that has no right to exist is that Benjy Grimm repeatedly mentions how easy the rules are, in an instruction booklet that is thirty fucking pages long. That’s not easy, you gravel-palmed slapnuts. It’s the very opposite of easy. There’s no way The Thing has the kind of patience required to sift through two dozen pages of fantasy gaming minutiae.

I guarantee that had The Thing actually written this comic, he would’ve killed everyone in the Baxter Building before he reached Page 3. By page 5 he would be attacking abstract concepts, like “trading card games” and “the English language.” Although to be fair, he regularly wages war on that second thing.

Eventually, it became clear to my middle school brain that this “game guide” was really just a glorified advertisement, a theatrically embellished version of those fold-out perfume ads you’d find in your parents’ copy of Cosmopolitan. I essentially paid two dollars for the privilege of reading an extended commercial about a game that I wouldn’t be able to play until well after school started. And it worked perfectly. I was instantly obsessed with Marvel OverPower, and I remain obsessed to this day.

But as I re-read this comic for the first time in nearly three decades, a question emerges – would I have become so irrevocably hooked by this dumb little trading card game that barely existed had I not been indoctrinated by Mother Grimm’s blue-eyed boy? Possibly. Although Sabretooth, who looks like a sex crime in a skiing outfit, probably wrote a fascinating instruction manual. Maybe I should’ve bought that one.

Tom Reimann is da co-foundah udda podcast an’ streamin’ netwoik Gamefully Unemployed, where he is busy throttlin’ losahs and swipin’ deyre wallets.

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