Posted on April 18, 2025

Star Blazers: The New Voyage, 1995

Issues 0 and 1 of Star Blazers: the Magazine of Space Battleship Yamato, proved two critical things for their publisher, Argo Press (an imprint of Voyager Entertainment, Inc.). First, they proved that my Studio Go! partners and I were capable of delivering on our promises. Second, they proved that an audience was ready and waiting for Star Blazers comic books. Which put a TON of wind in our sails.

In America, it had been a good ten years since Star Blazers closed out its life in TV syndication to be revived on home video (VHS). In Japan, where it debuted as the first true “anime” series in 1974, Space Battleship Yamato had become a legacy property with occasional hints at a comeback. In both countries, an entire generation of viewers had been converted to lifetime fans, who were always excited to see the torch being lit again. Bruce Lewis, John Ott, and I counted ourselves among them. And now we were the lucky ones who had been selected to light the torch.

We didn’t just have access to the Star Blazers stories, we could also adapt the Yamato stories that didn’t get imported back in the day. For an uncounted number of American fans, they made for a perfect on-ramp into the wider world of anime. We’d watched Star Blazers over and over to the point of memorization. That meant we were instantly comfortable with a Yamato movie, even if we didn’t know Japanese. The storytelling was clear and easy to follow. Watching it reduced the intimidation of the language barrier and made us want to see what else Japan had to offer.

Japanese laserdiscs, 1984 and 1989

We never forgot our old favorite, so anything new with the name Star Blazers on it had our attention. For example, the Comico comics that popped up from 1987-89. They were wholly original stories, which instantly polarized their audience. If they were going to be invented by Americans, they had to show their bona fides and measure up to Yamato quality to pass muster. In my opinion, they did not. But their fate served as a valuable example.

Japanese laserdiscs, 1993 and 1998

I would have enjoyed creating an original Star Blazers story after issue 2, but it still felt a little too early. The next adventure in the continuity was a Space Battleship Yamato movie titled The New Voyage. Broadcast in July 1979, it was tailor-made to bring in a fresh audience. It was the first one we all watched after seeing Star Blazers, so it was the obvious choice for the next arc of the comics. And I was going to be the one to adapt it.

American DVD (produced by me), 2003

After my video capture experiment proved successful on Cyber City, I decided to apply it on this project next. The process was too efficient NOT to use, since it saved me days of layout time and ensured greater accuracy. But it wasn’t going to be like turning The New Voyage into a simple film comic. For one thing, video resolution wasn’t nearly high enough back then to pull it off. For another, video frames wouldn’t supply 100% of what I needed, more like 75% (tops). Many frames had to be extended to fill up a panel, others needed modification, and some simply didn’t contain what I wanted to show. So rather than being a slave to what was in the film, I used the parts that worked for me and created the rest on my own.

Japanese Blu-ray, 2013

It was important to me that the comic had something to offer that the film did not, and that came in the form of deleted scenes. In addition to its 95-minute run time, The New Voyage had several minutes of scenes that were cut before they could be fully animated. This became public knowledge back in 1980 when stills appeared in a book on the film. A video version finally appeared on a laserdisc released in 1993. Since these scenes hadn’t been fully animated or scored, they took the form of a slideshow with subtitles. But that was good enough for me.

Manga by Akira Hio, 1979

This was where I could add some real value to the adaptation, incorporating the deleted scenes back into the story and presenting them seamlessly in comic book form. One other artist had this opportunity before me. His name was Akira Hio, and he drew a manga adaptation of the film back in 1979. Since he started his work before the film was broadcast, the scenes weren’t “deleted” yet and he could present them in full. But my version would be in English and in color, so there was plenty to distinguish them.

The overall story split effortlessly into four issues (following the trend that a 24-page comic is about equal to 20 minutes of screen time), so I determined where each issue would start and stop, then got on with the work. This didn’t include the prologue scene, since I’d turned it into the epilogue for issue 1.

My first step was to thumbnail each page, working out what stills to capture and where dialogue would be placed. This would later serve as a guide to John Ott for lettering. Based on my thumbnail, I created a full-size page and divided it up into empty panels. I scanned that into Photoshop, collected the video frames I needed, and put them all in place. This is when the limitations of those frames became obvious, since the gaps appeared right away. I printed out that draft and started converting it into drawings.

Owing to the need for scanning and printing, I couldn’t draw pages as large as I used to. The biggest paper I could use was legal size, so I scaled everything to that. It had been the same on Cyber City, so I was accustomed to drawing tighter details. I was also drawing in pencil instead of ink (a BIG timesaver), and since it would have to be scanned in greyscale I had to be very careful about smudges and erasing. Every little flaw would be picked up by the scanner, and if I got bogged down in a bunch of cleanup, I wouldn’t be saving much time at all.

Since this was a space story, there were a LOT of special effects to be added. As with Cyber City, they all had to be drawn in ink on separate pages to be composited and colored in Photoshop. This expanded wildly on Star Blazers to include laser beams, explosions, spaceships, planets, space backgrounds, special lighting, video screens, etc. I created an enormous amount of elements for each issue, and since I couldn’t expect John Ott to figure them all out, I did the compositing myself. As the layers piled up, the file size expanded. These were still the days when RAM was measured in Megabytes, so big files meant slower processing times. But I wanted these pages to look as good as possible, so the needs of the comic always came first.

Effects layers for issue 3. Almost every page had something extra going on.

Organizing this mountain of material gave me a taste of what animation production was like. I was essentially making cels to be layered on top of each other in front of a camera lens. Since it was digital, I could add as many layers as the computer could handle. The more I tinkered with this process, the more I enjoyed it. Photoshop was a phenomenal tool for enhancing my art in ways I’d only ever dreamed of in the pre-digital era. Six years after getting into the comics biz full time, that power was at my fingertips.

Instead of delivering art to John Ott on paper, I could now give him fully-composited, layered files that were ready for coloring. Every space background, most planets, and the spaceships from my re-use library were already colored, so he could spend more time on lettering and special effects. We were all very happy with the results, and (more importantly) so was our client.

I gotta say, being paid to create the Star Blazers comics of my dreams wasn’t a bad way to make a living.

Below you will find my construction materials for each issue (except for the effects layers, which were CRAZY) and a PDF of the finished version. These were issues 2-5 of our continuing Star Blazers series, which lasted through issue 11. So…more to come! Meanwhile, learn everything I have learned about Star Blazers and Yamato at Cosmo DNA here!

Postscript

After The New Voyage, Bruce Lewis took over the writing and drawing of the next three issues with John Ott on lettering and color, and some pinch-hitting from me (I drew the covers and helped out with some interior color).

Read all about the making of those issues (and see the finished versions) here