Of all the Star Wars comics I created back in the fanzine days, this one is my absolute favorite. It was effortless to write, as if it came together all by itself, and had just the right balance of light and heavy moments. Rough edges notwithstanding, it seemed as solid to me as anything Marvel was doing. Plus, it featured a bounty hunter. I loved those guys.
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As spring approached summer in the year 1991, Emeraldas arrived to even the odds against the Deathshadow and help get Harlock back to the captain's wheel of the Arcadia. With the playing field growing ever more complex, Alexander Nevich reveals the next phase of his vendetta: taking down the Illumidas occupiers of Earth!
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When I was a kid in the 70s, building stuff with Legos was one of the ways I got my creative brain thinking about how to draw things. When I was looking for work in 2002, a studio named Creative Capers hired me to draw Legos. How does that click together for ya? This was only a brief storyboarding assignment, amounting to just 4 minutes of screen time, but it fun enough to make me wish I'd done more. See the whole movie here and my storyboard for comparison.
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Two more projects I did for DISC Distributing were calendars, one for 1997 and another for 1998. The '97 calendar featured the DAD character in various everyday scenarios. The '98 calendar had a movie theme with DAD participating in scenarios from 12 favorite and iconic films. The only concession to advertising was that each image had to somehow incorporate the company's 800 number. So it was fun to figure those out.
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Armored Trooper Votoms is my favorite mecha anime of all time. It's one of the things that made me what I am today. I participated in its import to the US and various other projects, but never got the chance to take my fandom online...until now. This right here is a website-within-a-website that will explore Votoms like never before. Keep watching as new content is added!
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Rebel pilots must escort critical supplies from a planet's rings down to their embattled base on the surface, forcing them to thread a deadly needle to avoid Imperial attacks. How will they do it? And what valuable lessons did this story teach me about the craft of storytelling? Find the answers to those and other questions in this article.
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Cut off from the Arcadia, thought lost by his crew, Harlock prowls the corridors of the Deathshadow to learn how this powerful ship came back from the dead, and the secret agenda of its cold, calculating commander.
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While we worked on season 4, one of the MCU films that came out was Civil War, which featured the debut of Black Panther. His first solo film was already in pre-production. Someone in one of the executive chairs decided that this gave us enough momentum to shift gears and turn Avengers Assemble into a Black Panther TV series with the Avengers as supporting characters. The new title would be Black Panther's Quest, and we were all there for it.
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This third and final set of cartoons for DISC Distributing, drawn in 1997 and 1998, puts their mascot character ("DAD") through some more weird and wacky paces, and also gives him a sidekick. In fall '97 the company introduced their own branded credit card, and I learned what it was like to articulate a character with a 1-dimensional body.
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If I had one super power as a teenager (outside of writing and drawing), it was the ability to conjure up a Star Wars story from just about anything. Here's what happens when you pull a story out of a magic combination of Star Wars toys.
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By the time I began this project, making comics had been my full-time job for about year and a half. Starting with Deathshadow Rising, I would be penciling and inking a comic for the first time. It's a little odd to say that since I started out as my own inker back in the kid comic/fanzine days. But it's worth drawing a distinction, because true comic book inking is a whole separate animal.
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A gang of Egyptian mummies is revived in the modern world to protect the 12-year-old descendant of their pharaoh from an evil sorcerer on a quest for immortality. Rather than stumbling around as dried-up zombie husks, they draw power from Egyptian gods that turns them superhuman guardians against villains and evil spirits. See my storyboard for one episode of this series, drawn in the last days of the pre-digital era when TV cartoons changed forever. And not entirely for the better.
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As time went on, my clients at DISC Distributing got more and more inventive with the cartoon scenarios for their DAD character. I don't know whose responsibility it was to think them up, but every couple of weeks I would get another unpredictable request. One by one, I'd whip up a new cartoon (or several) that put DAD through his paces. Here's round 2, mainly from 1996.
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This one is LOADED with memories for me. First and foremost, it's another bounty hunter story. As my record will attest, I was fascinated by the bounty hunters since the first sighting of Boba Fett in 1978. When that rogue's gallery appeared for the first time in Empire, it was like Uncle George was handing me story ideas. There was a tale to be told about each of them, and this comic was one of those tales. ALSO: lucky special bonus comic inside!
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The invasion of Independence Colony has placed its citizens between two rival forces, but neither is what it appears to be. As we get closer to the truth, the line blurs between ally and enemy until they become indistinguishable. When all is revealed, nobody will walk away as the person they once were.
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Season 4 was truly packed with major events. After the original team goes missing, Black Panther brings together the "New Avengers" until the others can be found/rescued. After some more crazy adventures, everyone is transported to Battleworld where the Beyonder makes them his pawns in our version of Secret Wars. Boyoboy those are trigger words for me. Find out why in this article.
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I don't exactly remember how I got involved in this particular arena, but it lasted a good long time and I've got a LOT to show for it. The arena was computer hardware. The job was cartooning. The client was a company named DISC Distributing. It went to some silly places.
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This was my fourth Star Wars comic written and drawn for a fanzine in April 1982, when I was 16. It was published in Crossed Sabers (Vol. 2, issue 3) in 1983. At the time I drew it, Return of the Jedi was a little over away, so in my head the rebel alliance was still in a Battlestar Galactica scenario, creeping through space toward whatever was to come. And space is always full of weird hazards.
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Independence Colony is a smoking ruin after a surprise attack from planetary orbit. Two survivors run into what appears to be a platoon of alien soldiers who easily overpower and imprison them. Against all hope, a heavily-armed team arrives from Earth. But what seems to be a rescue looks more like a second invasion!
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The universal gaming system developed by Steve Jackson worked for martial arts scenarios, and this book contained three of them. Each of the three was illustrated by a different artist, and I was assigned one titled Dark Arena. Imagine a Kung Fu movie in which fighters are abducted and forced to face each other in the ring and you won't be far off.
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