#SHIFTY LOOK FULL#

#SHIFTY LOOK FULL#

Erik Ko (head of UDON) and I came up with the concepts, characters, and plot and then I scripted the comic, illustrated beautifully by, you guessed it, Omar Dogan.Įverything has kind of come full circle. The story for the anime and game are adapted from the Wonder Momo comic strip I wrote that’s been running on Bandai-Namco’s portal site ShiftyLook for the past two years. Yesterday in Tokyo, Bandai-Namco held a special event to unveil a new generation of Wonder Momo with a new anime mini-series and video game sequel to the original 1987 adventure game. If my 15 year old self could only have known… I hoped to work at Disney, or Pixar, or Blizzard.Ĩ years later, after lots of freelancing/life ups and downs, I joined the UDON studio and, over the next 10 years, had the chance to work with both Japanese and North American clients on an incredible variety of different projects. I knew deep down that I’d never be able to work in the Japanese animation industry and I kept my focus solidly centered on the North American market. When I went to school for animation I met Omar Dogan and we broke bread over our shared love of Japanese art and culture. In the years that followed I collected fan-subs and original Japanese manga, helped run an anime club, ordered anime stock for a local comic shop, edited anime music videos and sent them to conventions, created an anime lending library at my college residence, and started a fan page for one of my favorite manga creators. When he came home to visit he brought a slew of fan-subtitled animation filled to the brim with stories and characters like I’d never seen before. Joe was attending the University of Waterloo and gravitated towards the anime club that had formed there. I’d grown up watching shows like Star Blazers and Robotech but didn’t know much about the original source material behind them. When I was 15 years old my brother introduced me to anime. Momoko was a typical Japanese teenager with dreams of becoming a famous pop idol, until an alien powersuit transformed her into the spectacular Wonder Momo! This cosmic hero punches, kicks, and hula hoops her way through monsters, henchmen, robots, and her most dangerous foe… the dreaded paparazzi! If you enjoyed the Wonder Momo story online, please consider pre-ordering the upcoming print collection coming from UDON: Like any work for hire project you can only do what you’re assigned to the best of your ability, and that’s what all of us on the team did. In any case, these kinds of things are out of our control. I hope Wonder Momo carries on with the momentum we generated. I’m really proud that Erik, Omar, and I were able to bring Momo back to the masses and build it up into ShiftyLook’s most popular strip, which was then spun off into an anime mini-series and upcoming video game. Wonder Momo: Battle Idol will be wrapping up with strip #200 and it has a solid ending that’s been planned for some time. Even still, it was great adding to such a beloved cast of characters. Klonoa: Dream Traveler of Noctis Sol doesn’t wrap up with a definitive ending, so I hope Hitoshi Ariga and I are able to revisit it at some point down the road. I wish it had lived up to that more fully and hope the work created for it stays around in one form or another. The original purpose of ShiftyLook, a streamlined way to reintroduce older Bandai-Namco IPs and put them in front of as big an audience as possible for a fraction of the cost of developing a new video game or anime, was forward thinking and had a lot of potential. We were well paid and well treated through and through. The gang at ShiftyLook were incredibly supportive and hard working, and gave the creative teams brought on board lots of latitude to create the stories we wanted to tell. Getting the chance to create new stories and characters for so many game properties was a blast. I wrote a plethora of strips for the site at different points in its development: Wonder Momo, Klonoa, Sky Kid, and Dragon Spirit.

I’ve known for some time, but the news is finally percolating to the surface publicly: ShiftyLook will no longer be producing new webcomic content by the end of this month.

Shifty look