Posted on August 15, 2025

M.D. Geist Ground Zero part 2, 1996

As written in part 1, the heavy lifting of story development and design for M.D. Geist Ground Zero took place before I started drawing issue 1, so from the moment I began producing pages it flew as smoothly as could be. That’s one of the “magic keys” I discovered back in the early days; if you complete each task in the right order, you’ll never get overwhelmed. If I tried to write the story on the fly, it would have made everything slower and harder. It sounds self-evident, but any time I heard a story about someone hitting the wall (in either comics or animation) it’s because they didn’t follow this “magic key.”

Issue 2 was drawn in the month of December 1995 and issue 3 followed in January ’96. I generally took two weeks to rough and two weeks to do finished art. Roughing went a little faster, so it was during the “rough weeks” that I could fit other projects into my schedule. By this time it was like clockwork. I’d been doing it this way for so long I could look at a calendar and tell you exactly what pages I’d be drawing on what day. This is the kind of life you lead when you’re serious about being reliable. (And from various conversations I’d had in the comics biz, that was rarer than it should have been.) It served me well when I made the transition to animation in the approaching summer. But that’s another story.

Looking back at these two issues, one memory that pops out is the “Geist Cycle.” It appears only once, at the beginning of issue 2, but it’s got a story.

John O’Donnell, the president of U.S. Manga Corps (our client) wasn’t just an M.D. Geist fan, he was also a motorcycle jockey. He was pretty wealthy, so I’m guessing he had a few. One of them in particular was acquired because it looked like it came right out of the Geist world with a fiery skull painted on it. I think it was displayed at a few conventions, which couldn’t have been cheap.

Anyway, John gave me a direct order to include this motorcycle in the comic book. Since most of the action took place in a jungle, there was only one place to put it, and that was at the start of issue 2. It appears once, and then you never see it again. But John got his wish.


Another memory that pops out is of one really horrible moment.

First, I’ll remind you that I had two partners in Studio Go!, John Ott and Bruce Lewis. Bruce and I were mainly the artists and John was mainly the colorist, but we swapped work as needed. For example, John was coloring and lettering Project A-ko and Star Blazers during this time, so Bruce shifted over to do coloring and lettering on M.D. Geist. The horrible moment happened to Bruce, and I was sort of a witness to it.

It was late at night. We were on the phone comparing notes on things. He’d just finished coloring one of these issues. The whole thing. I don’t remember which one. All I remember is that he was working at his computer while we were talking and suddenly he said, “Oh, tell me I didn’t just do that.”

“Do what?” I asked, my heart skipping a beat.

“Throw it in the trash…”

That’s exactly what he did. He might have been distracted by our conversation. He grabbed a folder, dragged it into the trash, and clicked “EMPTY.” As he heard the CLUNK sound, he realized what folder he’d grabbed. The one containing an entire issue, all 24 pages colored.

He dug as deep as he could for solutions, consulting with everyone he could think of, but there was no rescue. It was early 1996, before Macs had a Time Machine function. Emptying your trash didn’t necessarily mean your data was gone, but the sectors it occupied on your hard drive were re-categorized as “writeable.” Professional data recovery was possible, but it was not within reach. There was no way around it. Those pages were dead and buried.

From there, Bruce had no other option but to go back to page 1 and start all over. The original scans were still available. It had taken about two weeks to color them, and it would take another two weeks to recolor them. Two weeks in which he wouldn’t earn a dime for the duplicate labor.

My rough design for the #2 cover, finished art by Koichi Ohata

Compounding the pain, I’m pretty sure Bruce didn’t enjoy what he was doing. He was all esprit de corps when it came to Studio Go! projects, but made no secret of not liking all of them equally. M.D. Geist was never my favorite either, but I was committed to drawing it, and I was always committed to myself not to phone it in. I’m still kinda stunned by these pages today, thirty years later. There are some things I draw better now, but not a lot. The quality represented almost ten years of non-stop comic work, and was certainly a high-water mark of that particular time.

This, on the other hand, is why I wasn’t satisfied with the finished product. Bruce’s coloring style was just fine on a Bruce comic, not so great on a Tim comic. He tended to go soft-edge, and this was a case where all the artwork was hard-edge. Plus, his monitor wasn’t properly calibrated (we were all wrestling with that), so the colors in general were paler on paper in the end.

My rough design for the #3 cover, finished art by Koichi Ohata

He also wasn’t as experienced with lettering (which was done in Adobe Illustrator, if I remember right), and it ended up looking quite mechanical. He didn’t add bold italics when they were needed, and every word balloon was a uniform oval that didn’t conform to the word shapes. This is not the Tim Way. Never was.

This isn’t to say Bruce didn’t do good work, he just wasn’t the right fit for my art on this comic. If you want to see the right fit, look at the Armored Trooper Votoms bonus feature. I did all of my own coloring there, and got a very experienced letterer (Albert Deschesne) to take on the word balloons. You’ll see a world of difference if you compare them.

Unfortunately, neither Bruce nor Albert is with us any more. They’ve both moved beyond the horizon and can’t speak for themselves here, so I will say no more. But my next project after this one – and the swan song for CPM Comics – was Armored Trooper Votoms. To this day, it’s still one of my favorite projects, and it was the best possible way to finish this chapter of my career.

See it here.