|
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. |