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Movie Special Issue 1


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Movie Special Issue 2

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Doujinshi Desperados

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A Brief History of The Ozone Commandos


by Dave Merrill

Back in the days of the C/FO's Atlanta chapter, we had a newsletter. Like all good anime club newsletters-well, okay, like the C/FO San Antonio newsletter, we decided to write a silly fan story starring the club's personalities. This was called "Ozone Commandos," because it sounded kind of like what a typical anime show would be called (it was the 80s and all the shows had names like "Zeta Gundam" or "SPT Layzner" or "Metal Jack.")

After the Atlanta club quit publishing newsletters, I decided to make a silly comic story out of the silly fan story, and since I had a group of friends who were either costuming as anime characters or hanging out with people who were costuming as anime characters, I figured that I'd just draw, say, Matt as "Captain Hardluck" or Lauren and Leslie Forrester as "Key and Wooly, the Tricky Pair." Those of us without costumes could just rough it.

The early Ozone Commandos stories established that the Ozone Commandos were a loosely defined team of adventures who flew around in a Matsumoto-esque space blimp. They were on a mission to Candler Park (where my girlfriend at the time lived) to retrieve a special VCR that would foil the efforts of video pirates (who were the bane of our existence at the time). Leading the video pirates was Space Detective Shadow Rollins, a name that strangely enough came from a prank call. Or rather the response to a prank call. Anyway.

The "Star Blazers" theme continued with the third story, in which the Ozone Commandos faced the Floating Con. This giant structure, clearly ripped-off from the "floating continent" seen in an early Star Blazers episode, was drawn by C.B. Smith and xeroxed over and over for use in the comic. Loosely plotted and haphazardly inked, both Matt and I spent several months on the artwork. Several other people contributed artwork, including Jeff Tatarek, Grant Goggans, and Robert S. Haynie Jr.

It was with this story that things began to come together; I started to take more time with the artwork, the pacing and script was clearly more ambitious than the previous efforts, and the nonsensical plot elements and sight gags began to come to the forefront.

All in all it's a story that was a lot of fun to write and draw and remains a lot of fun to read. I still don't know if the Ozone Commandos ever made it to Candler Park; like so many things from the early 90s, it's still a mystery.

At any rate, the final issue of The Ozone Commandos has been at long last completed as of 1/15/07, and is also up for viewing right here. Read away, because there'll never be a movie version of this one.

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