2003 Smile era

 

I have heard the pleas and cries of the people to do Kyeombi, to do the stories once again. I didn't stop doing them. It's just that ultimately I do have to do other things before I get back to it. After I made a massive effort, that kind of basically was a lot of energy to do over years. No one seemed to understand the effort put into it. I see more people put more energy behind people who just make four panels and post on Twitter.

Why don't I post my stuff online? Because ultimately I don't want it to be trained by AI or something. Ultimately I gotta tell you I've been working on this in one way since I was 8 or 7. That's a long time. 2003 was a different time period. There were Saturday mornings and trust and faith in family, faith in America, and among many different things, faith in the future that you could have, that you could get married. These stories represent optimism.

Many people don't know this, but Zino is actually a spin-off of Faces, which is published work made all the way back in 2002. Ultimately the tone was initially supposed to be darker, but I changed it. Ultimately what is the true Zino? I'm not gonna get into the story beats so that someone else can take it or something, but ultimately the work is basically about Zino being a hero. That's it. Very simple, very generic, but ultimately the appeal of the character is that the Zino known today is not the same Zino of the past.

Ultimately, what started as robotic became an alien elf man. Why? There's much to say there. I just really changed it over time so that it became that. Maybe that dilutes the idea or something. It really doesn't.

The main characters and cast stayed the same all this time. I only added some characters to the lore. Mysterious and Changer actually was made in 2002, so it's way older than Zino by far. When I came to the great point of this story, it's not supposed to be like Batman or something. The characters are supposed to be like shamans. That story called Shaman King was the inspiration.

Originally they were just plain heroes, but ultimately I decided they needed something to separate them. That change happened in 2003, and that's the version of the story that has continued to today. Ultimately I may have changed it a bit. In 2005, for a minute, they were more akin to wizards or magicians, but it reverted back to them being shamans again.

Getting to Magma 109. This one is inspired by me and by an interest in France. It's a story that's inspired by France in some senses. Most of these characters have actually lost their original appearances that were distinctive and probably more marketable than the current art style, which tries to be a mix of this simplistic style and that. It actually worked out in the end; it just doesn't work out for the main character, June, to not have a mouth.

Magma 109 is basically about fighting an agency of empowered people as a young kid with probably no friends, but ultimately there are some friends. There are friends. Each of these series has an arch-enemy that can be memorable and interesting, but I'm not gonna get into that. You're gonna have to read the work to understand these things. It gives away too much and no one reads these things. Well, no one has read it.

Universe Express is about people who basically go into a spaceship and travel the galaxy. It's more about pondering the question of space travel and people having powers and it being the future.

This work, Zino, Mysterious and Changer, and Magma 109 all happen in the same time period, but once you get to Universe Express it's in the future. Basically the baseline is 2005 for all these stories until you get to Universe Express.

If you actually want to read the stories, that is. In reference to "Never Forgotten," not how many years have passed, 20, not 27. However, how many years have passed since 2003? Like 23 years. If you skip ahead a bit, actually around this time period there are so many spin-offs and future things. There's a future Zino thing, a future Mysterious and Changer thing, and other future stories.

Of course I'm going to get into those stories in a coffee shop later, but this is like the first sequel. That takes place in the Universe Express time period. Basically this makes up the core universe, as people would call it.

Leaving this time period, I created so many different ideas that have been forgotten in time. The two additions are Yu Yang and Stripes.

Yu Yang is just a story of me trying to do a story about the forces of Yin and Yang. Yes, the main character is Asian. I just thought I would try to make the main character Asian. At that point in my life a person doesn't know much about Asian people, so this was a time to learn, and that I did.

Why I did not continue the work is that I just felt like I was going to be racist if I just wrote some stuff without understanding it. I created Stripes, still another Asian character, but maybe this time half Asian and half white or something. Why? All these other series don't have any Asian characters inside, like none, like at all, and I thought that was problematic. Every other group is represented.

Stripes would later become the focus of my online animations, which were actually quite simplistic. He's supposed to be an agent that fights monsters. Mostly that's what I drew, like a snow monster. That's mostly what I would draw. I don't even know what to say. He's just an agent who fights monsters.

I would try to animate it on a computer. It failed to be saved because it was lost in time when the computer got a virus. In short, whatever backup there was of everyone's files was lost or basically still on some CD that has long been forgotten somewhere, and I don't know how to even access that now because I don't even have a CD player that works.

Computers don't even come with CD drives anymore, or the laptop ones, which is kind of sad. You could literally watch a movie on your computer that way in the past, but that was so terribly bad for the disc.

I try to preserve the cultural heritage of certain time periods when I speak of these things, so if I say something it actually means something. Anyways, that worked, and its early animations were lost to time.

The reason I make things in comics is that ultimately it's too time-expensive to animate. You gotta realize that it's smarter to just make comics and scale up that way, but yet even comics are so limited.

Everyone went on a trip to visit my grandma. She even had cable and Disney Channel, and ultimately that became the basis for him. I just liked the hat.

Ultimately, like most of these series, it lost its creative flourish. It lost its creative idealism. You know what was on TV during this time period, or what the culture truly was like in this time period? A bunch of anime-inspired works. They showed anime on TV on Saturday mornings. That is the generation we're talking about.

* Shaolin Showdown

* Totally Spies

* Martin Mystery

* Shaman King

* One Piece

There are so many more in there. I got to say that it was a special experience having to wake up early to watch Batman Beyond. You know, there are actually more stories that never made it to the modern era because I was like six. They were kind of inspired by Static Shock, and I never finished them.

Ultimately those things, just me and a certain skill set of powers, that's kind of where the idea of Zino having all these different power sets comes from.

In this time period it was like third, fourth, and fifth grade. That basically concludes the end of the happy era. I'm gonna call it that because it really was the happy era.

We get to Iron Boy when I actually went to fifth grade and things changed. There are barriers to creation by parental figures. I'm not gonna go too much into that, but that's a crucial part of the story, yet to be continued in another post.

But what concludes this era is Iron Boy being blocked in its most crucial time period. I'll leave out many different things, but I'll leave them out because I don't think you need to know all that information. You can read the official book that would come out, representing the true history and cultural references that inspired the different eras of Kyeombi.

I'm going to say this: you already see what inspired everything. If it's a black sitcom or some white-centric show that came out in that time period, or some how-to-paint show, no, no, it's not that. That's not what inspired anything, and that's just not me. I don't like Friends. I don't like those things. I really didn't. They were boring.

Seinfeld? Who watched that? Frasier? Boring. I'm just gonna tell ya, no.

The funny thing is that the same people who made those shows are still in prominence today, like 30 years later.