Ready for some hard-hitting social satire? From the mind of a 17-year old? Well, look elsewhere. Because this story isn't that. I thought it was at the time, though. And nobody ever told me it wasn't. So maybe you decide.
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Pretty much since the beginning of my work for Eternity Comics, the editor of the Robotech titles was nudging me to consider drawing one. And pretty much from the first time he brought it up, I shot it down. There was a time not so long before that I would have said yes in a hot second. But that time had passed. So what made me finally relent? Read that story here, along with issues 1-4!
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Of the many TV cartoons I've directed and storyboarded, It's hard to pick one that was more fun to work on than Xiaolin Showdown. It featured four kids learning martial arts, racing villains all over the world to find mystical objects called Shen Gong Wu. It was like we stepped out of a jail cell, blinking in the bright sunshine as our producer handed us the keys to a hot rod and said to drive as fast as we wanted. I love it so much, I'm doling it out one episode at a time so you can see exactly how much fun it was.
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Like every anime fan with artistic proclivities, I took my turn at the fan art wheel. Most of what you'll see in this collection was done for one APA or another, but there's some other stuff too. If you're an anime fan but still completely baffled, remember what stretch of time this represents, and what the favorite shows were back then. If you recognize all of them, we're automatic friends for life.
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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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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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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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