Star Blazers #9, 1996
1996 was the year I was waiting for.
My dependence upon Malibu Comics for employment was irrevocably in the rear view mirror. I finally achieved the impossible dream of adapting my favorite mecha anime, Armored Trooper Votoms, for CPM Comics. And I got my first taste of animation when I translated my comic skills into storyboarding for Wing Commander Academy. By the end of the year, I’d make the transition to full time animation work on Extreme Ghostbusters for Sony/Columbia.
But in the force of these huge tailwinds, I don’t want to minimize Star Blazers. The comic series for Argo Press was still an ongoing project for me and my two Studio Go! partners, John Ott and Bruce Lewis. Not a single day went by in which we didn’t thank our lucky stars for placing this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in our path. Watching that series back in high school and discovering the world of Space Battleship Yamato played a huge role in shaping our lives. We were determined to give it our best possible effort.
I completed the art for issue 5 in March (see it here), then our roles shifted a bit. John stayed with color/lettering/post production, but Bruce took over the “comic” portion and I took on the “magazine” portion (the 8 pages of articles in the back). It gave me my first opportunity to investigate the Yamato phenomenon in Japan, a research project so deep and fascinating that I’m still doing it today.
After issue 5, our adaptation of the 1979 Yamato film The New Voyage was over, and the next big story was 1980’s Be Forever Yamato. But there were some other things we wanted to do first.
In the Yamato universe, there’s a year-long gap of time between these stories that was never officially filled in Japan. Many things happen in that gap; when Be Forever premiered in August 1980, movie audiences quickly found themselves in the deep end of the pool with a lot of swimming to do. Over the next 16 years, our imaginations filled that gap with all sorts of ideas. Bruce got the extremely rare chance to turn his ideas into reality with a 3-issue story titled Icarus. It was partially set on the asteroid base in which Yamato was being refitted for its next voyage, tended by a small crew that included the rapidly-growing Sasha.
You can read all about the making of those issues (and see the finished versions) here, so I’ll instead move on to issue 9, which was something extra special. Bruce covered a lot in Icarus, but not everything. Many pieces still had to move into place on the game board, so this story (titled The Gathering Storm) was touted as our Be Forever prelude.
Here, our creative roles shifted again into what would become our “standard model” going forward. Bruce would write the stories and lay out the pages. I did some co-writing and turned his layouts into finished art with all the trimmings. I also handled the color and our friend Albert Deschesne stepped in for John Ott on lettering. (John was busy with other projects, but I don’t remember exactly which ones.)
My illustration for the interview; read it for context
Bruce’s story brought Captain Yamanami to Icarus base (simultaneously explaining why Kitano and Sakamoto didn’t rejoin the Star Force after The New Voyage) and introduced the EDF’s Automated Battleships. We also met a completely new character: Security Minister Aziz, who was to play a major role in upcoming issues. As if that weren’t enough, we even found room for cameo appearances by Desslok, Talan, and the slowly-reviving Captain Avatar. Basically, issue 9 was our personal wish-list of things that we would have included in Be Forever.
On the magazine side, I scored an exclusive interview with Producer Josh Kline, whose company TAE had recently licensed the live-action movie rights for Star Blazers. It began a long and frustrating process in which the rights passed through many hands over subsequent decades to no avail. The last word on it was published in 2023 and can be read here.
In my view, this outcome illustrates something that will always make comics more fun to work on than any other media: independence. Once we earned the trust of Voyager Entertainment, who paid us to make Star Blazers comic books, we never needed to “check in” with them on a creative level. We made 100% of the decisions that went into that story, and drew them to our own specifications. Our passion and respect for the source material was the metric for everything we did. That’s why I used the words “extra special” to describe issue 9, and I feel exactly the same about it today.
There’s more to say about our Star Blazers comics, but that’s for the future. Here now is this “extra special” issue.
