Posted on December 18, 2024

Star Blazers #0 and #1, 1995

Reading Marvels in the 70s made me want to make comics when I grew up.

Watching Star Blazers in the 80s made me want to make cartoons when I grew up.

The growing up part is still in progress, but I achieved both of those goals along the way.

I watched Star Blazers so obsessively when it first arrived on TV (in 1979) that it nearly supplanted Star Wars as my personal religion. It was on every weekday at 4pm, perfectly timed for when I got home from school. I was 14 years old in the 9th grade, dead center of the target audience.

I’d seen Speed Racer and Battle of the Planets in younger years, but this was the first anime I watched that actually told me it was anime. Right there in the credits it said, “Originally produced in Japan under the title Space Cruiser Yamato.” I lived in Michigan then. Somewhere in Texas, the same thing was happening with a guy who was exactly my age (like, only 3 days apart) named Bruce Lewis.

Star Blazers had exactly the same effect on me as it did on those who grew up watching Yamato in Japan. It filled me up with creative energy, inspiring me to somehow document what I saw so it wouldn’t be forgotten when it went away. (We didn’t have VCRs yet.) I had a wild notion to capture every episode on audio tape and transcribe them into script form, then attempt to draw what I’d seen on screen. I took steps to prepare for that project, but never actually launched it. I had loads of other things to draw back then (as seen in the Kids Comics section) so I settled on simply being a consumer of Star Blazers. For the time being.

Comico series 1 (4 issues) by Phil Foglio and Doug Rice

In another couple of years, I met up with others who had stepped past TV viewing into the cutting edge of VHS trading. As it turned out, Yamato was a massive hit in Japan with many more animated stories and a boatload of merchandising. I spent the next two decades catching up with that boat and scooping up as much bounty as I could find (meeting Bruce Lewis along the way). I watched an American Star Blazers comic series come and go from Comico (1987-89) that was fun in concept but disappointing in execution. I approached Comico about reviving it in 1992, but they were under new ownership and no longer had the rights.

Comico series 2 (5 issues) by Markalin Joplin/Phil Foglio and Harrison Fong/Bill Anderson

Then came my move to L.A. to join the staff of Malibu Comics. I got them to hire Bruce as well, which unknowingly put us both on a collision course with the opportunity of a lifetime. As I explained here, landing the deal to create a Star Blazers series was our ticket to independence. It allowed us to quit Malibu, join up with our mutual friend John Ott, and band together as a 3-man unit specifically built to write and draw anime-based comic books under the name Studio Go! (with the exclamation point). That brings us to the summer of 1994 when everything came together at last.

Our projects for US Manga Corps (under their new CPM Comics label) started earlier, but our first three books were published in March 1995 and Star Blazers #0 was one of them. The other two were Gall Force #1 and the Project A-ko graphic novel. Of those, Star Blazers was closest to my heart and since Bruce was already drawing Gall Force I got to take the lead. It felt like one of those moments I was made for. Star Blazers was in my bloodstream.

I can’t remember the exact date production got started, but our deal with Voyager Entertainment was secured in October ’94 so it must have been soon after. As much as we would have loved to adapt every episode of the first TV series and then move on through the entire saga, the marketplace for indie comics was not friendly to such long-term plans. In order to avoid an unfinished journey, I thought the wisest approach would be one-and-done. We’d put out a self-contained issue #0 and if it didn’t take off at least no one would be left hanging. Voyager agreed, so I got started on the script. Covering 26 episodes in 24 pages was going to be quite a feat.

It opens in the year 2200. Shortly after the cleansing of Earth by the Cosmo DNA, the monument to Captain Avatar is dedicated on the day before Derek Wildstar is to embark on a year-long patrol on the Argo. The prospect of leaving Earth so soon puts him in a dark mood, which is lifted by a reading of Captain Avatar’s logbook about the journey to Iscandar. It would be a retelling of the entire story in Avatar’s words. This alternate perspective allowed me to explore well-trodden ground with fresh eyes.

Once I finished the script, Bruce and I took different parts and produced rough layouts. I did the opening and ending, he did everything in between, I modified some of his pages, and then took it to finished art. We hired another Malibu expat named Albert Deschesne to do the coloring, and John Ott would handle lettering and print-prep. As Albert did his work, he gave me a whirlwind tour of Photoshop, for which I am eternally grateful.

Everything I’d worked on before then was “single layer.” In other words, all the art was drawn on a single page like every other comic book of the analog era. But now we were in the digital sphere. Photoshop was the software of choice for coloring, and Albert explained how much easier the coloring would be if the art was split into multiple elements to be scanned and layered in Photoshop. This wouldn’t just make coloring easier, it would allow for all sorts of special effects. I could skip drawing some things completely (like space backgrounds) since they could be dropped in as a layer. Linework could be converted from black to color. Things could be made to glow. The more I considered all of this, the more effects I could plan for. It was a major leveling up that put new tools in my hand and made the job much more exciting.

Layers for a sample page from issue 1: overlays and separate art. These days, I’d break it up even more.

The only downside was that a “finished” page of art no longer looked finished because a bunch of things just weren’t there. For example, the real star of the story: the ship. It was immediately obvious to me that I didn’t have to draw it every time it appeared. If I drew it from different angles and built up a library, just like the animators did, it would save a ton of work down the line. Custom drawings would be done as needed, but for the most part I could just indicate where to put an image and Albert took it from there. I wouldn’t have a “sellable” page of original art in the end, but this was never a consideration to begin with, so…meh.

I still have the space backgrounds and all those ship images to this day for use wherever they’re needed. It’s one of the best gifts I ever gave myself.

What’s more, I could even make good on an idea I’d had the year before at Malibu; to capture video images and use them as comic panels. I tried to sell them on it as a way to launch more anime and film-based projects, but the technology wasn’t quite ready for it. However, it was entirely ready to capture a still and turn it into a reference drawing. In this way, I could do a much better job of nailing the characters and make the whole project look more authentic.

Barry Winston, our client at Voyager Entertainment, was delighted with our work. And the comics were only part of it; in addition to the 24-page story there would be 8 pages of articles that allowed us to call it “The Magazine of Space Battleship Yamato.” He looked at it as a way to promote Star Blazers and the Yamato movies on VHS, so he could categorize it as advertising. We issued our solicitation to comic shops via the distribution companies (there were three at the time), and when the orders came in for well over 20,000 copies, we knew the project was here to stay.

Issue 0 shipped out in March ’95, and Barry gave us the green light in April to start up a proper series. Bruce was still working on Gall Force, so it lined me up to take the lead again. Since the format of issue 0 worked so well, I used it again, this time adapting the second Star Blazers series into a single issue with Desslok as the narrator. It was a great way to examine his growth from an arrogant despot into a fully-rounded, multi-dimensional personality; still one of the most fascinating anime characters ever created.

After the battle with the Comet Empire, Desslok pens his memoir, reflecting on the gift of compassion he was given by Wildstar and Nova. He recounts his experiences from the end of Series 1 all the way through to the present moment, then addresses his surviving troops about the path they will now take together in the scene that kicks off The New Voyage.

I did the script and art myself for this issue in April/May ’95, then turned it over to Bruce for coloring. He moved slower than he should have, getting us into trouble when we were supposed to deliver the finished pages to Voyager in early July…and they weren’t finished. The book got done in time for its shipping date, but there were some prickly moments on the way to the finish line. Mistakes were made. I was disappointed by the color, but there was no time to fix it. The comic came out on schedule in August ’95 and I got going on the next issue. With this, we’d already moved past what had been broadcast as Star Blazers into new material that hadn’t come to American TV. And I was so there for it.

Presented below are various stages of production up to and including the final editions of these two comics. I’ve also talked about them at Cosmo DNA, my Space Battleship Yamato website, but the material here goes much deeper. So dig in!