Today, May 4, is Free Comic Book Day, the annual event that takes place on the first Saturday in May in hopes of promoting local comic shops and comic book reading. During the event, comic fans, new and old, can pick up special free issues of comics from a variety of publishers including Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, and the like. Sometimes the comics are reprints or excerpts of a larger comic, or sometimes they are standalone stories or issues, as was the case with this year’s Dark Horse Comics release of “Stranger Things.”
As a fan of Jody Houser’s recent “Stranger Things” series, which retold season one of “Stranger Things” from Will Byers’ perspective in The Upside Down, I was excited to hear she would be helming an original story for Free Comic Book Day 2019. Sadly, my excitement was short lived and when I got home and read the comic I was nothing short of disappointed.
The story, titled “The Game Master,” picks up on November 26, 1983, and is described as taking place “mere weeks” after the events in season one of the Netflix Original Series take place. The comic tells the story of Nancy Wheeler and her concern over the events that took place and their impact on her brother Mike. The end result? An eight-page pep talk where Nancy and Steve Harrington to try and cheer up Mike who’s camped out in the basement bummed about his inability to make contact with Eleven.
The comic is called “The Game Master” because in the end, Nancy convinces Mike he needs to play some Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) with his friends in order to regain some normalcy in his life, and the story ends there.
Unsatisfied with the story I, of course, had to look for another way for the comic to give me satisfaction, so I shifted focus to at least trying to understand how it fits into the timeline of the “Stranger Things” story. While we see Mike camped out in Eleven’s hideout in season two, the events of season two take place in 1984, so the comic didn’t fit there.
Unable to place it, I revisited the last episode of season one to see if I could figure it out, and I think I have. My hunch is that this comic is the backstory leading up to the “One Month Later” scene at the end of season one, episode eight where the adventuring party gets back together and finishes their game of D&D. It would make sense as the comic takes place “mere weeks” after the major events in season one and this is the last time we see Mike and all of his friends playing D&D in the basement in 1983.
I had hoped the new story would introduce us to the new prequel series, which is set to debut later this month, or heck even give us a Barb’s story in The Upside Down the way we got Will’s in the original comic series, but instead we got a filler story that really doesn’t add anything meaningful to the “Stranger Things” storyline.
Did you pick up the “Stranger Things” Free Comic Book Day comic? What did you think? Let me know in the comments!
