When former Nintendo of America spokesman and Nintendo Power editor Howard Phillips left the company in 1991 to work for LucasArts, his cartoon counterpart from the magazine's Howard & Nester comics was retired as well. As a farewell present, the Howard & Nester artists gifted him an exclusive racing-themed comic with scant amounts of adult humor that was not intended for publication, in which Howard, possessed by aliens, refers to Nester as a "little shit". Nester in turn calls the aliens "space bastards", and compares the situation to Howard having been a "junky for years and years", something that is not true of the real-life Howard Phillips. It's not known if this comic is meant to be themed around a specific game or not. The ending of the unreleased comic, where Nester discovers that Howard's tie is a clip-on after it falls off, somewhat parallels the published finale of Howard & Nester in Volume 25 of the magazine, where Howard gives Nester the tie as a parting gift. In the first two panels of its successor Nester's Adventures, Nester disregards the tie for being a clip-on and states that Howard was "too good to be real".