When I got involved in drawing Robotech comics, it initially felt like being trapped. That's how it was for the first four issues. To my surprise, the next four set me free. Find out what I mean by that and see all these issues from cover to cover!
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I've spoken before about "magic scripts" in the cartoon biz. At least once on any given season, I get a script that I can see play out like a movie in my head the first time I read it. Then the storyboard flows out of me with seemingly no effort at all. That's what this one was like. The art was sharper, the gags were funnier, and more personality made it into the finished show. In many cases, the storyboards were better than the finished animation.
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This oddball project comes from an APA I was involved in from the late 80s into the late 90s. I got an idea that a bunch of us could participate in. One of the writers would come up a short script (any concept, any genre) and all of the artists would draw their own version of it. I thought it would be fun and interesting to see how many different directions we could take it.
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Splinter of the Mind's Eye presented the irresistible concept of a super-crystal that embodies The Force. Such a thing would grant God Power to its user. With this fanzine comic, I decided to take that idea across a line of no return.
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Captain Harlock and Christmas might seem like odd bedfellows, but they were actually combined in Japan before we did our thing. There was a Christmas episode in the 1982 Endless Road SSX TV series that remains a fan favorite for its blend of sweetness and tragedy. When writer Robert Gibson decided to retread this ground, he used it to weave some signature tropes together.
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Tutenstein was based on a comic by Jay Stephens and produced by Porchlight Entertainment for Discovery Kids. I drew six storyboards for the series in the spring and summer of 2003. And despite being completely outside the intended viewership, I enjoyed every minute of it.
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Somehow I wound up with an odd, sporadic history with the Men in Black franchise when it became the only IP that I encountered in both my comic book and animation careers. Afterward, any time I was asked what I'd worked on, eyes often lit up when I listed the MiB opening title. More than one viewer said it was the coolest opening they'd ever seen. I will go as far as to say it's the coolest opening I ever worked on.
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In Volume 1, I explained the genesis of these drawings as something to share with fellow members of anime-themed APAs. But there were other purposes, too. Here's more of the same. Hope you like Fist of the North Star!
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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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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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