Oh, that sounds like my jam, I'll have to check it out!

"My Life as an Explorer" by Sven Hedin is a great example.
www.theguardian.com/books/booksb...

I kind of assumed Oliver Twist was the main source of that trope.

Only partially related to S&S, but I've found it rewarding to read the first-hand accounts of real-life travelers and explorers that the pulpsters leaned on for local color and details of exotic places. Aside from the adventures themselves, it highlights just how big and still-unknown the world was.

I (in the US) had an Amiga and I was definitely the weirdo in my area, btw. I was shocked when I learned (much later) how widely adopted it was in the UK!

No outline Mario looks like he belongs in an arcade game or on some weirdo computer system like the Amiga. Not what I associate with Nintendo's consoles.

The gourmand metamorphosized into the voluptuary . . .

Thanks for the share!

Good old Kris K Kobach

Yes, white people have been so good for wild animal populations /s

I'm finally reading all the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories by Fritz Leiber. I read the first three books as a kid and then got bored or distracted so I convinced myself they fell off. How wrong I was!

That's one of the subtexts of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, imo (especially as it went forward in time). It's literary game-playing, of course, but it also satirizes comics' tendency to treat characters as action figures that can be thrown together in infinite combinations.