In mid-1999, a half decade before Sonichu, a twelve-year-old version of Yours Truly began his work on what is known as the Z-Comics. The plot centers around three friends who collectively refer to themselves as THE Z0NE, who all aspire to work in the video game industry, but must first earn eight video game gym badges à la Pokémon. This plot doesn't stick for very long in the series, and the story's focus constantly changes to whatever I thought would be cool during the drawing of that particular issue.
I always liked making comics growing up, having previously created a few based on Sonic The Hedgehog, Super Mario, and Secret of Mana. Inspiration for this series came from my friend Dustin, who created the main characters: Coopersville, Yarcofin, and Yodéréko (later revised to Yodariquo in later issues). Dustin himself had already made a couple of comic strips featuring THE Z0NE before this series was even a twinkle in my eye.
The first half of 1999 was kind of rough for me. North America's education system was riding the Columbine hype train, and quirky children like myself were now under suspicion of becoming the next school spree killers. My bitch seventh grade teacher, Ms. Jones, after humiliating me in front of the class, and threatening to call the cops on me on several occasions, had my ass thrown into counseling, which in my young mind made me think I was about one more step or two away from spending grade eight in a mental institution. In an attempt at damage control, I destroyed a lot of my art that could have been considered overly violent; I began spending most of my time locked in my room, and I made a habit of barely ever speaking to my family. This has probably made me look even crazier over the years, but I just wanted to fly under the radar.
By June 1999, I had to blow off some steam, so I got to work on an edgy comic that had cute characters that liked to swear and kill things. I kept the first two comics hidden under some old furniture in my basement so that my parents wouldn't likely find what I was drawing. It didn't take me more than one page to get tired of drawing Coopersville's complex initial design, and then I began adapting Dustin's characters to my comic instead.
This comic didn't take me too long, maybe a month tops. The Z-Comics originally were definitely more about quantity over quality, as I finished the first two issues before August was over. Issues 3-9 progressively took more time and effort, needing between 6-10 months per comic usually. Issue #10 took something like three years to get done, then finally we have issue #11, which I have procrastinated through for like eight years now.
Anyway, I could write about this for hours, but I should save some of that for later issues. Behold the horror that is the early Z-Comics. I promise they get better later?
The plot of the first issue roughly apes the Pokémon cartoon. It doesn't take long until I start introducing characters from other video games, like Mario, and Karen from Harvest Moon 64. Several of the speech bubbles went through multiple edits over the years to correct spelling errors and such. Eventually I stopped trying, as there are much worse things with this comic than spelling.
"Nintendo's Wrestlers" from left to right (top row): Stone Cold, Scotty 2 Hotty, The Rock, Triple H, (bottom row) Grand Master Sexay, Rikishi. The two gym trainers are Phil Guerrero and Sarah Bywater, who hosted a Canadian video game and comic book show on YTV in the late 90's called "Gamerz".
The air combat test is a combination of Star Wars: Rogue Squadron and Starcraft.
Coopersville's rant here doesn't really make much sense without context. It was just me writing about my first world problems at the time: The games I wanted to rent being out, and my file in Harvest Moon 64 screwing my farm over.
Part 1 and Part 2 happen on the same page. Breaking the story up into parts was just something I felt I was suppose to do, because that's how Archie does it. Of course, this comic wouldn't truly be the brainchild of a kid in the late 90s if it wasn't ripping off Dragon Ball Z.
This part of the story, if anything, is a mixture of Wolfenstein 3D, Goldeneye 007, and Doom. I break the fourth wall and scrap a bunch of pages because drawing a bunch of action frames in anything other than mostly empty fields is hard.
"But this is a video game, there's no reward" is probably about the deepest thing you'll see come out of the next eight issues.
Time Freeze is a good plot killing technique that I'm pretty sure Coopersville never uses again.
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| The girl on this last page is Melody from Pokémon: The Movie 2000. |
2 comments:
autism
I'm fucking loving this shit.
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