Comic back cover ad #1

So, there we were, walking to the railway station. In the rain. And kind of in a hurry. Almost at the corner, there’re two green environmentally friendly shopping bags, their contents covered in cling wrap with a small sign with my favourite word on it: “Free.” After spending a day in the city, we return to explore the freebies. Under the layer of moist cling wrap lay two foot-high piles of comic books, ranging from this year’s latest obscurities to some Teen Titans comics from the early ’80s. Also, some “mature aged readers” arthouse comics (read: badly inked porn) and the instruction manual for an iPod.

Atari Lynx. It consumes food, apparently. I remember the Lynx.I remember it being gigantic, yet, at the time, beautifully designed and executed. The screen, capable of displaying approximately four crudely coloured pixels (and capable of draining approximately six AA batteries in the time it takes to turn the power on) was amazingly crisp compared to the Sega Game Gear, and the ability to rotate the device to play games vertically was awesome. Even though there were virtually no games made that exploited this gymnastic skill.This advertisement was on the back of a comic from the early ’90s. The alarming brown stains on it are probably just water marks, but I chose not to delve further into their origins. Atari made a brave choice in comparing the Lynx to the Game Boy in the advertisement, considering the original Game Boy (as displayed) was little smaller than a housebrick. Here, the Lynx galumphs over the Nintendo handheld, threatening to crush it like so many a teenage knee. In the centre, Steve Irwin attempts to outrun the Game Boy by surfing headlong into a game of mastermind. I vaguely want a Lynx, now. I’d buy one on eBay, but the postage charge for something the size of an arcade table would be phenomenal. I miss the ’90s.