After a gap of almost two years, I returned to the space heroes I didn't know were inspired by anime robots and threw everything I had against them in two brain-shattering comic book epics that shook the universe! Don't worry if you missed them, they've been waiting for you to catch up ever since!
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We begin this issue with a changing of the guard on the enemy side. When the effect of this hits our rebel group head on, help comes from an unexpected source and a major step forward is taken on the path to the shatterpoint. In the real world, it was June 1990 and my first few comics were in stores, so I should have been flying high. Instead, I was working harder than ever.
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Getting to contribute to the 2nd Edition of West End's Star Wars RPG was an honor. It was also my first and only color assignment for them, and I tackled it with gusto.
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At last, I got to work on an animated TV series with EVERYTHING I liked: sci-fi, action, robots, and a big, sweeping story. Plus, it would be my first step into the new world of CG. But for every one of these blessings, there was also a curse. And some of them were deadly.
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Here's the second set of political cartoons from my days working for Cadence, a locally-based newspaper in East Grand Rapids, Michigan. The paper's editor-in-chief Susan Lovell was the originator and I was her art monkey.
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The way other Gen X types are nostalgic for 80s pop music, I'm nostalgic for 80s SF mecha anime. It's my absolute favorite genre, and there are books aplenty to explore the topic with a big crossover into modeling and games. Here are over 100 titles that keep the golden age of Japanese mecha alive and rocking!
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My first graphic novel! Ever since 1977, the Rebel Alliance had been firmly planted on the moon of Yavin, but as The Empire Strikes Back approached in 1980, we found out that was going to change. As this story opens, the exodus has begun...and is about to get significantly more urgent.
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Revolution! This is the halfway point in the story, in which a major event pivots Broid's rebel group into a new paradigm. And it wasn't even one they planned. All it took was one oversight on the enemy side to shift the ground under everyone's feet.
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Kathol Outback was part of something called the "DarkStryder Campaign," a series of connected adventures that took players into new and remote regions that didn't necessarily fit into the established Star Wars aesthetic. It's a big galaxy, so anything goes.
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Like all red-blooded American boys growing up in the 70s, one of my greatest heroes was a Japanese lizard. It was interesting for all of us at Sony to "graduate" from Ghostbusters academy into this new project. It gave us a unique vantage point of the movie as the buzz was rising and everyone was imagining the best outcome. We saw a lot, we learned a lot. And I remember plenty about it, so let's get started.
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At the tender age of 19, I got a graphic arts job at a weekly newspaper. I was the only one on staff who actively drew, and when the editor in chief discovered this, she added "political cartoonist" to my job description. Here's the first of three time capsules from back then.
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One day in early 2008 I was contacted by a fella named Bob Sipchen about doing what he called a "graphic novel" for an issue of Sierra magazine. I'm always up for something fresh, so I said sure. I don't do a lot of "real world" comics on my own, so it was a good way to find out I still could.
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Planetes wields the predictive power of hard science-fiction by "borrowing" a story from the future that illustrates the probable outcome of today's neglected problems. This is what science-fiction excels at, and it's what lands Planetes on my top ten list of favorite stories to come out of Japan.
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Sometimes I spontaneously took on a project to see if it could be done. Using a cassette recording taken off the TV, I would draw a comic book version of the ENTIRE FILM. Every scene, every line, exactly as spoken. It was going to be a Christmas gift for my sister, and I had less than a month to get it done. You MUST be wondering how this crazy plan worked out...
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This early Star Wars novel is a curio now, but when it was brand new, nothing was more important. And one day in 1979 (when I was 14) I took it upon myself to turn it into a comic book. It taught me an unexpected and really valuable lesson.
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When we last checked in on Aaron Broid and his gang of human trash, they had just secured a valuable alliance and taken custody of an enemy hell-bent on destroying them all. And he'd do it, too, if not for that amnesia standing in the way. Thanks to the new intel that has landed in Broid's lap, he now has the initiative to take a bigger step forward. And with that step comes bigger risk.
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This project from West End Games came to me in a time of significant transition in my approach to art production. When I learned what Photoshop could do, I started playing a game of Jenga with my art. What parts of the process could I eliminate before the whole thing came toppling down?
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Five years after The Real Ghostbusters wrapped, who were ya gonna call? The new batch? The next generation? Nope, the Extreme Ghostbusters. When this series went into production, I was lucky enough to be on the ground floor and it changed my life forever. What I thought would be a lifetime of making comics turned into a lifetime of making comics and TV cartoons. This is where it truly got started.
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Here's some more from the vault of unsuccessful bids to seek out work. Sometimes it was a solo flight, sometimes an invitation, sometimes a determined effort to grab onto a speeding opportunity. They all resulted in work that didn't land me a job I was hoping for. But no matter what, they were always educational. That part was NEVER a dead end.
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When I became an anime fan in 1984/85, there were books and magazines aplenty to document past and present. What I didn't know then was that these efforts had been underway for less than ten years. I started collecting these books out of a desire to learn more, and it was fascinating to see how coverage and presentation styles grew along with the medium they covered.
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