MEGAZEEN #15 THE SCI-FI ISSUE

    The Sci-Fi issue is probably the longest awaited Megazeen of all time. This was originally planned as the 2006 convention special- until Wizard World decided to raise the table prices yet again, forcing Megazeen and many other small-press artists to back away from their progressinvely pricier and lamer cons. How many times can people come to the same show and meet Lou Ferigno? C'mon.

Anyhooty, the idea for the Sci-Fi issue came from the Christiancomics.net board. We presented a number of options and then voted on what the theme would be, and Sci-Fi won. I won't lie, I wasn't thrilled. I feared a series of lame, rehashed, corny analogies.

Part of the reason the book took so long to crank out was a lack of truly meaty pieces. There was no one story that really gave the book the punch it needed. Submissions came in slow and steady, and were also trickling in the same time as the "One Page" issue. The other thing that held it up was finances- as the book was being worked on, we started working on our print service and cranked out the Megazeen of Horror and the Color Issue, and later the Failure Issue, Angeldreams and Peregrination of the Deliverer.

I finally sat down after a long busy year to see what we had for the sci-fi issue, and re-read the submissions I had (a few had been misplaced over time). I started getting pretty excited. And when Jeff Slemons turned in the above cover, I got REALLY pumped up. It was time to pull it together.

Since the Comics Jam War contract had ended, we were able to finally reprint our award winning "Alien in the Comics Shop" story, by Joe Endres, Tom Hall, Jesus Marquez and Keith "Inkboy" Betancourt.

I remember one night Ben Avery and I were doing an online chat about the sci-fi issue and we both had a similar story idea about an astronaut stranded in space. I think we did a cyber rock-paper-scissor and Ben won, and recruited Mark Melton to draw it, with excellent results: Death Wish on Asteroid 14452.. Ben also emailed me to say he had a sci-fi story already written and drawn, but no place to put it. That's Child Rowland: To the Dark Tower Came, which was drawn by Mike Murphy.

Frank Humphris and Henry Chmielefski turned in The Origin of Spacelad, a spin-off from The Original TEA. It's a good old-school comic story.

Dan Barlow gave us a werewolf story. I'm not sure howhe manages to crank out such great sequentials with no script. Tom and I got to script it (MAN that was fun!), and I tried my hand at computones as I lettered it. We named it Hair of the Dog.

One piece that almost did not make it was Zero Percent Solution by Steve MacDonald and Veli Lonenon. Still not sure what happened there, but somehow in the time since the initial submission it had been misplaced. I'm glad they spoke up so we could get them in.

Jamie Cosley, always great on short notice, sent in His Boy Issac-Roy to fill out the issue. It's got some good familiar characters in it. We needed it to fill out the issue, now busting at 44 pages.

The back cover has an ad that shows some definite upcoming comics AND a few hopefuls that people have been taling about. It is my hope that the back cover prods the likes of Frank Gunn, The Amish Fury, Rosemary, Robot 13, Wolf and Colossians to all see the light of day very soon. These are all EXCELLENT concepts that should not remained buried. So artists, if you're reading, the pressure's on. Get crack-a-lackin'.

One last thing- the cover does bear the "#15" sign, though #14, the One-Page Issue, has not yet been printed. This is yet another example of Megazeen being edgy and bucking the trend. Or something like that.

Buy it here.

Now... scroll back up and gaze at that cover again.