cwmodels

Yes, the design work is amazing. Not many have the skill to pull of technical drawings like that. To be proficient at character designs at the same time is even more rare!

I look forward to your work!

Thank you very much!

After writing up the first draft of the script in the past few days, I have determined that there will be music and a (not-so-conventional) love triangle in the story. Though by adding in those 2 elements the comic ballooned to about 40 pages.

The type of music to be featured in the story will be Boy Band Songs:

FLAME OUT BOYS - Macross Aurora's Zentrandi Teen Pop Idol Group. They help bridge the cultural gap between Humans & Zentrans with their ultra popular singles like "You, Me, Lovin' like a Flame", That Deculture Feelin' Wit' You" and the war winning emotional mega hit "My Love Will Not Flame Out For You"!

These following 10 pages were originally produced during the time when Antarctic Press briefly had the Robotech License from 1996 to 1998. That was around the time when I just completed working on "Robotech: The Movie" comic adaption for Academy Comics. The Robotech License were transferred from Academy to Antarctic right after the book was published, so I paired up with the same writer who did the adaption to submit some material for them. Since Antarctic seemed to be doing a lot of "in-between" stories filling (unnecessary) gaps between the episodes, we crafted a short story featuring the encounter between Roy Fokker & Milia. We worked on it very quick and turned it in to them, but the work never got used or published nor did I ever get paid for it. It sat around in my art drawer all these years and at this point will probably never get any official use in any way what-so-ever.

I finally decided to make some decent scans and put it online for viewing. So thanks for reading and enjoy!

Character height comparison chart with some more color tests.

Here is the BLACK SWAN SQUADRON MEMBERS

CAPTAIN QUDAMAA - Zentran. Age N/A. Genetically bred commander type Zentradi with greater physicality and intelligence. The Flight Leader of Black Swan Squadron.

Looking good!

They're new, they're plays on old words and terms from previous Spider-Man comics. Gwen is the drummer for the Mary Janes, Mary Jane is the lead singer. So the songs and song lyrics will pull from or rhyme with sayings Mary Jane has used in past Spider-Man comics a lot of times. A real all female band actually did a mini-cover of the lyrics from the comics just to show it works decent as real music too.

Okay, cool! I'll put it into consideration.

And here are a couple of color tests for Mahlie Fung.

Great work! I like the spiky look of the Macross Aurora NMC city ship.

Thank you, I figured if I am going to spend the time of drawing a comic, I might as well put some effort into making the visuals unique. Plus every time you see a different colony fleet in the Macross series it always have some kind of variation.

Have you seen the Spider-Gwen comic Marvel has out right now? They manage to pull off inserting music and lyrics via the dialog pretty well.

Have not seen it. Are they creating new songs/music in the comic or using existing ones?

Nice!

Are your story gonna abide to the other two Macross pilars? (Love Triangle and Music)? Because those two are very interesting characters

Since the script is not yet fully written, there is still consideration for those 2 elements. But due to it being a comic, getting music or lyrics across would be somewhat difficult, "would it work to enhance the story?" is a major thought for me right now. The story is set to be around 20-25 pages, so I am not sure if there is enough room to put a developing love triangle, if there is it can only be slightly touched upon or hinted at.

Love the idea and i like storys about normal soldiers, not just the elite ones. Look forward to it.

Thank you, I hope it can turn out to be an interesting story.

Well, some canon comics apparently do talk about the grim side of colony ships (M7 Trash? that prequel about Sheryl, whatever it is called?). Which just means you are going with canon tradition. I really liked the design and the idea, and hope to see the comic sometime

Maybe she'll have "brushes with fame", like a glimpse of Basara or a one-night stand with having-fun-away-from-home Isamu?

Well, not sure if I would call my story "grim", probably more along the line of "shin a light on a different aspect of colony ship life".

When I originally had the desire to do this short story during the broadcast of Macross Frontier, I had the idea of actually setting it on the Frontier ship (making it a pure fan-doujin). But that show has since ended long ago and the new Delta series takes place on a planet, so it was just easier to place my story in a brand new setting so it won't get tripped up by official continuity.

WOW! I really love your design work. It looks amazingly detailed!

Thank you, I figure due to the nature of being a comic book, more detail in art tends to look better on the page.

Look forward to it.

Thanks, hope I can get the project done sometimes in the future.

That is some nice design work. I like what you've done so far. Story idea sounds pretty good too.

Thank you, right now I'm still just running design concepts to help flesh out some more ideas further.

Way back while I was still watching Macross Frontier during it's initial broadcast, I had some loose ideas running in my head of doing a small fan comic. It would be some sort of side-story focusing on a low ranking female pilot and featuring another side of life-style on a long distance space journey. As with most Macross series, the stories and visuals tends to showcase the beautiful, fun, exciting aspects on a colonization ship, but I wanted to go the opposite direction and show the down-side and the unglamorous part of it.

But then I got busy starting a comic book company and running a retail store shortly afterwards, so the ideas were just thrown into the basement part of my brain... until I started watching Macross Delta recently. It sparked the interest again and I decided to finally start to try and connect-the-dots on paper to see what would come out of it.

This is what I have so far:

MACROSS CYGNUS - The story takes place aboard Macross Aurora, a long distance colonization ship that is currently traveling through the Cygnus constellation. A low-rank, low-pay half Zentraid female NUN pilot will be the main character. She makes a meager living serving as the recon pilot of the Black Swan Squadron and lives with her human father in a military dormitory near the poverty districts of City Aurora. Despite taking a different approach to the mainstream Macross stories, there will still be touches of humor and romance as well.

Below are concept sketches done in the past few days to flesh out some of these ideas visually. I want to play by the established rules of Macross so I am running with visual design cues found in all previous series. In the end, the hope is that this little fan project will still feel like it could very well happen and fit as a piece of the puzzle in the vast Macross universe.

Hum... after this episode I'm beginning to think Macross Delta is a fairy tale story, with Freyja being a lost princess of the Windermere Kingdom. Red Hood , Apple, winter kingdom are very symbolic of fairy tales.

And Hayate's necklaces reminds me of Lone Starr from Spaceballs.

Macross Delta looks like it's going for the current idol pop group anime trend of Love Live! & Idolm@ater- Cinderella Girls.

An hour long video following a step-by-step building of a life-size moving and singing Miku Robot! Fascinating to watch and totally in awe of the fact that all of this is achieved by ONE MAN! From conceptual, design, body sculpt, installation, wiring, sewing clothes, and attaching hair took him 5 years to accomplish. What makes it even more remarkable is that he's done it all before and this is a new and improved UNIT TWO!

Masked BitcH

Oh yeah! It's that time again! MMD CUP 10 kicks off TODAY!

8hit

Battlefield idol Haruka!

Not to get into a heated debate..so I will summarize my thoughts as quickly as possible. Its weird to me for china to have anti japanese sentiment at all. Sure the Jap. were brutal but to be fair the chinese emperors were equally brutal to their people. Mao more so in the great leap forward years. And now in modern times having lived in china briefly and married to one. I find a huge river of apathy towards the plight of their own. At any time one can benefit from the misfortunes of others, some turn their heads for their own gain. Sure Captain America is jingoistic. They had to be in WW2 The Russians and Chinese died many times over and on a small hill the Americans were humiliated by a ill equipped chinese army. Hence the bravado. Having one wrong doesn't make both right. And Yes Cap USA and Cap China (with a red flag-knowing full well of the abuses we see today by the communist party) are both equally wrong. But descent is often trodden on and I really am sad to see that one cannot openly discuss his opinions on the topic because when you boil it down it is discussing the comic, about its content. I know this wasnt brief but this is the last comment I make in this thread

Edit: just one question Why not something else? What inspired you to a nationalistic character. Why not a character with no clear national identity?

Let me speak from my own personal experience, maybe this can help clear up a few things... My grandfather, who passed away at the age of 91 just a few weeks ago, was a fighter pilot during WW2 and fought the Japanese. His contribution and acts for the Chinese air force is even recorded in history books. He was stationed in Okinawa during the 1960s so he is not unfamiliar with the Japanese culture after WW2. But I grew up with the anti-Japanese sentiment in my family and that was something he passed on from that generation. It's impossible to ask people to remove that kind of understanding because they lived through it and it's going to trickle down no matter how much time has gone by. The anti-Japanese attitude is not only in China but also in many other Asia countries as well with Korean being the other strong opponent. Most westerners also don't know that Japan (unlike Germany) never paid for any of their war crimes (in monetary or attitude) and to this day do not recongize the horror they created in Asia during WW2. The Japanese killings of the Chinese is a piece of history that is only discussed more openly in America during the recent 15 years because of the rise of China (when I was in high school during the early 90's most Americans have never even heard of it before). But it's a chapter still wiped out from Japanese history book and that is a source which still stirs up anger for those countries that were inflicted. Compare to past Chinese rulers who also causes great numbers of death, at least those are recorded in history books and the fact that people know Mao killed millions means it's also recongized. That is the main difference.

Now to answer you other question- "Captain China" first came about only as a title. I thought it was catchy name and originally intended to produce it as a spoof comic book to satire American super hero genre. To flip the American ideals on its head and have a Super hero running around telling people that in order to fight for truth and justice you need to go about it the communist way!

BUT... after my trip to China in 2008, I realized that if I were to go about it in that fashion, I would be perpetuation a stereotype which no longer applies to the current cultural & social structure of China. That itself would make it an outdated and racist concept. I still wanted to keep the name "Captain China", so I began to think about how to use it and play into what can be done as a comic book with that title. The answer seems obvious - A hero that is a symbol who represents the modern China, his backstory parallel the recent history of China, and use the comic to give westerns a real insight into the what communism has transformed into over there.

Peter, this isn't a topic about the real world. It's about a comic book.

I (and I suspect a bunch of other people) are getting fed up with posts that not only have nothing to do with the topic, but continually say the exact same argument that was posted last April. We get that you have rage. This is not the venue to vent it.

Cwmodels, keep up the good work, and your posts on the challenges and success of getting this out there are always entertaining.

One question: this latest cover strongly reminds me of the Japanese sentai hero "Kamen Rider". Have you been continuing in a sentai-styled approach to villain design, or have you gone a different route, say something reminiscent of the legendary Chinese hero/villain designs, like iHong Kong's Legend of Emperors (天子傳奇)?

Captain China was designed to be an American-styled comic book from day one. And the reason is very simple, there is still a strong anti-Japanese sentiment in China, and using Manga-style comics to sell entertainment to them is the wrong way to go about. Most people do not know this fact, and that is China in the past used to broadcasted American cartoons as children programming, that to me means their culture as a whole is actually more acceptable to American entertainment than Japanese ones.

One of the things I generally hate about most Chinese entertainment is the outdated images we tend to present to the rest of the world. Kung Fu, sword fighting, people in flowing robes, jumping around on tree tops - these are things that most people cannot identify or relate-to anymore, but yet that is what we continue to push onto the rest of the world as "Chinese culture or tradition". I am not saying that I dislike Kung Fu films, but that is the only focus when westerners think about Chinese movies, TV shows or comics. We continue to perpetuate that stereotype over and over, and I want to break the cycle with Captain China. I want to present a Modern China that is not so different from the rest of the world nowadays. If China now has KFC, McDonald, Starbucks, youth in T-shirt & jeans talking on an iPhone, why not have an American-styled super hero running around as well? I believe that is something people can relate to more than some Kung Fu hero. And the fact that the entire world reacted to the launch of this no name, no budget, small press comic book tells me that I am probably on the right track.

As for the character on the cover of Volume 2- that is just my way of poking fun at all the traditional Chinese stereotypes (or what most people think a Chinese Super hero should look like)!

To be fair they've stopped writing the Cap as this ridiculous caricature of American jingoism. He hasn't been written that way in years...but you can sorta make that argument about Ultimates Cap I guess...

But Cap needs to be written that way, otherwise there is no point and you lose the essence of the character! I'd rather read about a flag-waving Captain America that kicks ass than one that cries and moans about how this country is no longer the same America he knows.

I agree with Sketchley's thoughts but from the other side of the coin.... I love the patriotism of Captain America but think it is important to defend an individuals' effort to advance their business and creative ideas.

This is a case of fix what you can fix and ignore what you can't.

Glad to see that #2 has come along.

Thanks!

WOW!!!!

Have a Vol. 2 XD

Crossover with Ultiverse?

I originally planned to have the second volume of Captain China released by August 2012, but a lot of unforeseen events delayed its production. But it's finally out and here is the cover!

Captain China Volume 2: "I am China!"

A mysterious man from Captain China's past reappears to challenge him! Two super-powered beings from the Enhanced Soldier Project must now fight for the honor of becoming China's Greatest Super Hero!

Captain China is a propaganda-styled comic series aimed at capturing the main-stream consciousness of China. The stories will reflect and give insight into China's current political stance, social environment, and cultural differences by combining complex characters, historical information, geographic locations, comic satire, and over-the-top explosive action!

The comic book is presented in full color for Amazon's Kindle Devices. But for those who do not own a Kindle or any other digital readers, you may download either "Kindle Reading App" or "MobiPocket Reader" for FREE to view the book after purchase from Amazon.

Captain China volume 2 Purchase Link:
http://www.amazon.com/Captain-China-Volume-2-ebook/dp/B00BD2394S/


Kindle Reading App
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000493771

MobiPocket Reader

http://www.mobipocket.com/en/downloadsoft/default.asp?Language=EN

Story sucked! Why bother.

Crappy Bootleg copy with English subtitles can be seen here!

http://www.animefave.net/evangelion-3-0-you-can-not-redo/

Damb! I wish I had seen this sooner. I was just in Orlando but..... you just got the models so would have missed out anyway.

Congrats. Will have to stop by next time.

Thank you! Next time you stop by we should have even more model kits.

Congrats! Next time I'm in O-town I'll definitely check out the shop!

Would you be able to do online ordering and shipping to Miami? I'd rather give ya my business. Right now looking to buy a VF-171EX Nightmare...pm me

We're too small at the moment to take any preorders for online. Maybe in 6 months.

That's a nice spread of models you got there!

Thanks!

TFA Grimlock is 29.99

BTW, got more model kits in today!