Zub Wrote An Anime?

When I was 15 years old my brother introduced me to anime.

I’d grown up watching shows like Star Blazers and Robotech but didn’t know much about the original source material behind them. Joe was attending the University of Waterloo and gravitated towards the anime club that had formed there. 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. I was hooked.

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 I went to school for animation I met Omar Dogan and we broke bread over our shared love of Japanese art and culture. 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. I hoped to work at Disney, or Pixar, or Blizzard.

8 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.

If my 15 year old self could only have known…

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.

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. 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.

Everything has kind of come full circle. It feels totally surreal.

Read the Anime News Network announcement
Announcement on the Japanese news site Famitsu
A first look at the video game on Kotaku

Read the online comic for free
Pre-order the book
Keep an eye on the new Momo website

MOMOAnime

MomoScreenshot

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