Posted on March 22, 2025

Cyber City Oedo 808, 1995

Three career criminals are given the chance to reduce their life sentences by taking on the hardest techno-crime cases the future has to throw at them. The catch? They all wear explosive collars that will detonate if they fail.

I thought I knew a lot about anime in 1995, but Cyber City Oedo 808 was a new one on me.

In the course of Studio Go!’s work for Central Park Media, our operating procedure was to draw whatever comics our client wanted. The choices were dictated by (A) which titles CPM Prez John O’Donnell liked most and (B) which titles he’d acquired publishing rights for. Neither John Ott, Bruce Lewis, nor myself were participants in that process, and we didn’t need to be. All we knew going in was that Project A-ko 2, Gall Force, and M.D. Geist had been secured for launch.

Then, one day out of the blue, we heard that our next project would be something called Cyber City. Created by Japan’s Studio Madhouse and directed by anime auteur Yoshiaki Kawajiri, it was a 3-episode OVA (Original Video Anime) series. The episodes had been released June 1990, December 1990, and October 1991. They were accompanied by three novels and a video game, and I had somehow lived my life without hearing about any of them.

Japanese promotion

That’s not really a surprise; I was still into anime, but wasn’t collecting everything under the sun the way I used to. By this time, underground VHS tape trading with other collectors had been largely supplanted by legitimate imports (from Central Park Media and its rivals), so most of the new stuff came through that channel. And, to be honest, a lot of it didn’t catch my eye. The OVA format was born in late 1983 when home video rentals became profitable enough for anime productions to bypass film and TV and go direct to tape. As you can guess, this set the table for some very special projects. OVAs were still being made into the 90s, but were a lot less special than they used to be.

Cyber City was a prime example of what could be done on home video; a short series with high production values. But it came and went. There were plenty of other works that explored similar ground and the field was pretty well saturated. Central Park Media sent us tapes of the episodes, and when I watched them I sorta felt like I’d seen them before. The designs were cool and the filmmaking was effective, but cyberpunk was getting tired. Nonetheless, it was going to be my job to adapt all three episodes into comics so Central Park Media could drum up some more video sales.

Japanese VHS and laserdiscs

As you can tell, there wasn’t a lot of passion at play here. I really wasn’t sure what made this a top pick for John O’Donnell. Maybe it was just one of the few that he was able to secure publishing rights for. I don’t remember any conversation where motivations were expressed. But Studio Go! was set up to make comics and CPM wanted this one. Off to the races.

It was self-evident that I wasn’t going to get much out of this creatively, so I decided to get something out of the work itself. I was going to make it a production experiment. I’d been using Photoshop for a couple years now, and was ready to take the bull by the horns. I had thought about different ways to make comics with this amazing tool, and Cyber City would be my test bed. I was lucky enough to have someone willing to pay me along the way.

Japanese soundtrack “Remembrance Command” and CD Rom

The first thing I wanted to try out was getting rid of inking, which took up a lot of time and energy. It just occurred to me one day that if I could get my pencil lines sharp enough to be picked up on the scanner, I could use Photoshop to make them look like ink lines. The obstacle against this in the past was needing to scan art in bitmap mode so the lines would have a sharp edge. For that, they had to be rendered in ink. But Photoshop was evolving and these parameters were no longer absolute. I could now draw in pencil and manipulate a greyscale scan for the results I wanted.

And just like that, my workload was chopped in half. I didn’t have to buy ink or brushes or bristol board any more, and I didn’t have to deal with with wet media. By Grabthar’s Hammer…what a savings.

VHS tapes from Central Park Media/US Manga Corps

The second thing I wanted to try was forced upon us by an unfortunate lack of reference material. There were no art books or print media available for Cyber City. All we had were the videos themselves. So I revived an idea I’d pitched when I was on staff at Malibu Comics; video capture. I now had the hardware to patch a VCR picture directly into my computer, pause the tape, and screenshot a frame. This would be my reference material.

Moreover, this would become my rough. I thumbnailed page layouts based on the video scenes, then dropped the screenshots directly into it. This made sure everything could be drawn accurately. When a page of screenshots was done, I printed it in black and white, put a blank piece of paper over it on my light box, and started drawing (in pencil).

DVDs from Central Park Media/US Manga Corps

I differentiate this from “tracing,” because the screenshots didn’t give me 100% of what I needed. I extended lots of figures and filled in lots of missing backgrounds. Working directly over the screenshots was how I learned to draw the characters from head to toe so I could construct my own panels when I couldn’t use a screenshot. This was a process that had never been available before. Without it, Cyber City would have been much more difficult and time consuming.

I dove into these new techniques on day 1 of issue 1, and finished three pages of art by lunchtime. An amazing pace! I called up John Ott to tell him what I’d discovered and he said, “I’m glad you’re on MY side, Eldred.”

The third thing I wanted to try out on Cyber City was to depart from the old page format that had been used in comics since before I was born. This takes some explaining.

Later releases and UK soundtrack

For reasons I never understood, American comic books fell into a page size all their own: 6 5/8″ wide by 10 5/16″ tall. I can’t think of any other publishing format that uses those dimensions. Maybe at one critical moment a large volume of paper was available at that size, so that’s what some publisher went with. And that size has been locked in ever since. There have been variations, but it’s still the standard.

For more reasons I never understood, the common “live area” for an American comic book did not match those proportions. From the start, I was taught to draw in a block measuring 10″ wide by 15″ tall, which then got photographically reduced (by 60%) to fit inside the standard comic book page. That left thin margins on the sides and thick margins at the top and bottom. It never made sense to me, and now I had an opportunity to depart from it. So I did.

For Cyber City, I just measured 1/4″ in from the page edges and marked that off as my “live area.” Right away, it gave me more room to work with and actually matched the page format. I won’t claim to be the first one to try it, but it’s interesting to me that within a few years, I saw many other artists doing the same. Maybe we all just woke up to the same idea one day and that was that. So long, 10″ x 15″. You had your time in the sun.

The biggest experiment on the comic was for me to do all the coloring for the first time. This was another case where using the video as reference was critical. Once I had all those screenshots stored up, I could sample colors directly from them rather than trying to recreate them in a Photoshop palette. This turned out to be educational in a way I didn’t expect, since video processing affects certain colors. Yellow, for example, wants to skew toward green because white wants to skew toward blue. This explains why certain skin tones have a greenish tint in the comic; it’s something I didn’t fully understand until it got all the way to paper (too late to fix). I did address it on the covers though; I colored all of those too.

The freedom to create layered effects work like this made me a Photoshop stan forever.

Doing the color myself also led me to truly grasp the value of splitting the artwork into multiple layers. The main layer was the one I drew in pencil, but there were always “effects layers” that involved lighting or special backgrounds. Drawing them separately and compositing the layers in Photoshop made them much easier and quicker to color, since they didn’t have to be extracted from the main layer.

For example, if the background was a cityscape with lots of lights, I would draw that separately (in ink) and convert the black into color. Presto; city lights. Many other elements got this same treatment: gunfire, starry skies, highlights, electricity, etc. Anything that would glow, pretty much. It was a lot of fun to see it all fuse together into a finished image. It meant that there would be no single sheet of paper with the entire drawing on it, but it’s not like I would ever sell it to anybody, so who cares? A sane workflow was what mattered.

Running all these experiments on Cyber City allowed me to establish my production pipeline for future comic projects. I’ve occasionally gone back to ink, but today I do all the drawing in Photoshop, so there’s no “original art” at all, at least in the traditional sense. These days, the ONLY stage that happens on paper is the thumbnail. It’s 100% digital after that, and I haven’t seen any compelling reason yet to change course. Maybe when there’s no more electricity in the world. But I don’t think many people will be reading comics at that point.

After the first two issues were done, I pulled back to drawing only. Bruce Lewis had finished his work on Gall Force, so he stepped in to take over the color. At one point, we pulled in our friend Albert Deschesne to assist for a single issue.

Each 45-minute episode of Cyber City adapted comfortably into two comic books for a total of six, published monthly from September 1995 to January 1996. During that time, I was alternating it with Star Blazers, using the same technique on both.

I don’t remember the series doing that well in video sales, but in the decades since it has become fondly remembered. When it was subcontracted to Manga Entertainment in the UK, they did their own dub and composer Rory McFarlene wrote a new music score, and this version endured as something of a cult classic. Watch and compare them here:

After Central Park Media folded, the anime was license-rescued by Discotek Media. It can now be found on Crunchyroll and Pluto TV. Get some more details at the Wikipedia page here.

Presented below are all six issues as published. I didn’t keep any of my original art, so this is the limit of what I can share.