Issue No. 3 - February/ March 2008

Welcome and hello reader. Long time no blog right? I'll spare you the boring details, and throw you right back into the past year.

Because February was such a short month, it came and went before I could get myself in gear to spit out a second issue. Therefore, issue No.2 actually came out at the very end of February, going into March. I was disappointed in myself because after just one lousy issue I was already behind the schedule I made up for myself of one issue per month. To accommodate for this I threw together issue No. 3.

Right off the bat you can tell this issue was a thrown-together, one-night's work effort. I literally came home on a Thursday night, laid out a sheet to generate a master copy, threw down a cover, whose design I shall re-use one of these days for an issue meritorious of its clever design, and then sat for ten minutes dumbstruck as to what I should include within its few pages.

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Dear Reader,
I feel badly skipping out on you, so here is a double issue of Ubbo for you this month! Collect them all! I've gotta be honest, I'm not married to the robot to the left over here, OR the layout, but a work in progress still takes work. Thanks for reading. - Z.A.

Fortune: A pleasant experience is ahead: don't pass it by.
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Boy was I wrong about that fortune...

Then an idea occurred... or I should be specific, RE-occurred.

When I was little I read comic books. I read mostly X-Men and Wolverine, with some Batman thrown in on occasion, especially after Bane snapped his back in the Knightfall arc. Yes, Azrael always sucked... Anyway, as a result of this reading I determined I would write a comic of my own. I recall all of my works back then (and in a lot of cases, even now) being extremely derivative. I made a Mortal Kombat comic, which I still think was better than the Malibu ones... I made Power Rangers comics, and of enough drawings and a few words to publish my own line of Uncanny X-Men. As confidence in my drawing ability waned however I abandoned these ideas.

Later on, in college I worked on campus during the summer entering my senior year, and spent a lot of down time in a house sans Internet or TV. I tried to write and doodle as much as possible just for the sake of getting ideas down on paper. Some of the stories you'll read in my zines come from this time period.

What absolutely came from this period was my first REAL attempt at creating some type of self-published comic strip.

I had since become a fan of Gothic and Victorian era horror, and wanted to attempt to combine those characters and other horror staples into a type of comedic story arc revolving around Great Old Ones, werewolves and vampires, freakish experiments, strange hauntings,etc., but all with an ironic twist and touch of dry humor.

My end result was dubbed Penny Dreadful (though I debated naming it Blood Book). If you're not at all aware of where I got the name, do yourself a little reading here.


I designed the characters, came up with a mildly humorous back story, and drew out a square frame panel. I then went into my job, and because it was dead there all summer, scanned the drawings and digitally edited them in photoshop in grey scale to give the colors a smoother finish for when I photocopied them.

I intended to publish a new page each month, and then gather them all as a final booklet once the story ended.

Then my idea went to right back to the drawing board...

My idea had been done before, twice.

Right down to my character designs, it had already been created.

One version was named Gloomcookie, and though it is now defunct, my main character looked like a cheap impression of theirs.

I even had her hair curling up beneath her chin and everything. Very annoying to say the least.

Though Gloomcookie was similar in its design, at least theme-wise I thought my comic was still original.

Then I did a little research and stumbled across this kick to the nuts: Little Gloomy.

Now to be fair at least MY idea didn't have gloom anywhere in the title. However, thematically this comic basically took everything I wanted to write about and made it its own, first.

Since then, I hadn't given much thought to good old Penny, until that night, stumped as I was for an idea, I thought it would be acceptable to chop up my one page strip, and toss it onto the pages of UBBO just for fun. I toyed with the idea of actually doing a spin-off zine just of the comic.

I can't emphasize how much I disliked the result however. It looks out of place alongside the other zines. The lack of any text in the opening scenes of the comic makes for absolutely NO story, whatsoever. In fact, all penny says is "Yog..." while another unseen character yells "PENNY!" from off panel. The goal was to establish her character as a brooding dark witch, young-ish looking, but prone to become a crone. Yes, I was planning on actually using those words in the comic. When she would get pissed or charged up with energy, her old badass self would wrinkle its way through. Like I said, not really the same ideas as theirs, but visually and thematically, too close for my creative comfort.

Eventually, I think I might give this a third try, and maybe do it right, despite its similarities to those aforementioned comics already in existence. I still have my own story to tell, and it isn't as if I'm trying to make a dime off of these characters.

The important result of this failed attempt at an interesting zine however was my beginning to focus on doing multiple issues per month, and because of their tiny lengths, numbering them as half issues, hence my 3.5 and so forth.

Happy reading if you have an UBBOZINE Issue No.3 in front of you. Please forgive the rushed approach.