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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In 1978, Boba Fett wasn't much more than a costume and a voice. But that costume was such a slam dunk, you could have left out the voice altogether and our imaginations would have done the rest. Since we weren't going to get anything more until he showed up on movie screens in 1980, I did what my brain directed me to do: made my own Boba Fett comics.
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I wish every one of my comics had gone as well as this one. The editor agreed to it right away, I got to write and draw all of it without interference, every issue got published, and - amazingly - I got one of the best inkers I could ever ask for. It's rare, but once in a while, things line up just right. See all five issues and some extras.
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This assignment from West End Games came at the peak of my freelance comics career. Star Wars game illustrations were getting rare, but looking better as a result of all the time I'd spent honing my skills. The concept for this book was for gamers to visit several different spaceports in the Star Wars galaxy and get into all sorts of fun trouble.
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2011 was the year I made the transition from analog to digital drawing (a requirement to continue being employable), and it was like transferring from one airplane to another while both were in flight. On the other hand, 2011 was the year of some pretty great assignments. Avengers EMH and Ultimate Spider-Man on the Marvel side, and Young Justice on the DC side. I didn't do a lot for Young Justice, but I enjoyed every minute of it.
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What do Judge Dredd, Aliens, Ren & Stimpy, The Terminator, Bubblegum Crisis, The Rook, and X-Wing Rogue Squadron have in common? I didn't get to work on ANY of them! But I definitely gave it a try. Here you'll see my fruitless attempts at these and other projects from my comic book morgue.
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