11/12/2022 0 Comments Batman all in one pack![]() ![]() We actually made her more capable in the comic stories just for the expediency of being able to move the story along.” In the game, you get stuck, and you'd spend three or four days just trying to find the right thing. It might be defeating a foe, or being smart enough to find the right brick, within two pages rather than 20 pages. We had to make her a little more capable. In the comic, you couldn't have 20 pages of Lara searching that chamber to find whatever that magic device was. And invariably, the contest is she finds the magic brick to touch three times, and then it opens up to reveal the key or whatever, right? Somehow, she could always find the tool that she needed, the device that she needed to get to the next chamber. “Let's say Lara is in the first chamber of a pyramid, or something like that. According to Jurgens though, the challenge came not from the conventions of comic books, but from the conventions of gaming. Lara though is not a superhero, and with Jurgens bringing experience from the likes of Superman and Spider-Man, you’d expect there would be a challenge in writing for an underpowered heroine like Lara Croft. It needed figures like Lara, and other female superheroes like her, to shatter the glass ceiling. The reason people didn’t think female comic books sold well was because, historically, they didn’t. Of course, as Jurgens touches on there, Lara’s success in the gaming and comic book worlds was not just down to her gender. We probably just didn't quite realise it at the time.” She was highly capable, so what young girl or woman would not probably enjoy playing the game? I think it all adds up. And the other part of it is, it was a great game. “She was far and away the pre-eminent female property that would have been on the market at that point for games. “It's probably not, as we look back on it, that much of a surprise,” he says. Reflecting back, Jurgens isn’t sure there was ever that much to worry about. Lara Croft had been able to overcome that in gaming, but in 1999 when the first comic appeared, some doubted lightning would strike twice. In the ‘90s, far more even than they are now, the gaming and comic book industries were dominated by male characters, male fans, and male marketing. And then what really brings it home is even to this day, when I am doing a signing somewhere, be it in a convention or a store, there are people who come in, and they have quite a stack of Tomb Raider comics.” The sales on those issues really was health. “Lara Croft, number one, was the best selling book our industry had that year. “The year our first issue came out, it was the best selling book that year,” Jurgens says. Related: Original Tomb Raider Developer Gavin Rummery On Inspirations, Cut Concepts, And What Killed CoreWhile the world does not remember the Tomb Raider comics as well as Lara's excursions into other forms of media, that’s no comment on the comics themselves, which were hugely successful in their heyday. I still get a tremendous number of women who are bringing me their books, and they might have been young girls at the time, or their teens or college years or whatever, but they were definitely into that franchise.” And a lot of them would have been in that 13-17 year old age range when the games first started coming out. And that is not my typical experience with my other projects. The amount of people when they bring me their Tomb Raider comics, I'm gonna say probably 40 percent of them are women. And whenever I'm in a market that I haven't been for a number of years, I get books that go back quite a ways and people bring up to get them signed, and I had a lot of Tomb Raiders that were putting in front of me, and it was great to see and again, it never fails. “But when I was just at a convention in Detroit a couple of weeks ago, I had not been there for a long, long time. “It's weird because from a publicity standpoint or a press standpoint, people have forgotten it,” Dan Jurgens, the writer of the comics tells me. Unsurprisingly, she also had a successful comic book run, but unlike the Lucozade adverts, these don’t seem as firmly folded into her legacy. She had a string of successful video games, the Angelina Jolie-led movie was in the works, she graced the front of Time Magazine, and starred in a multitude of adverts for the likes of Visa and Lucozade. In the late ‘90s, Tomb Raider was everywhere. ![]()
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