The 90s! What a time it was kiddies!

Gather round and I’ll tell you the tale of some strange characters called …. The Oddbodz!

Disclaimer - if you aren’t an Oddbodzophile, perhaps skip the text and jump down to the pics below.

There were no smart phones then, oh youngsters! The internet was a novelty: very odd, smaller and more varied. There was no social media, no algorithms, no AI ... just NS, or Natural Stupidity, which I possessed in abundance. Clothes were roomy, phones were dumb, and at one point shrunk until you sometimes couldn’t find them …electric cars were a foolish pipedream, fossil fuel companies polluted with impunity (oh, wait, that’s the same now)… society was finally realising that, yes, tobacco killed ya, and smoking was banned from pubs and restaurants … there was no streaming of ‘content', instead, people would gather in front of these small boxy devices called “televisions” and watch … whatever the 4 and a half broadcast channels decided they should watch! We could watch Bart Simpson or Jerry Seinfeld. You had to wait a WEEK for each new episode. I know: grim and primitive! But one magical thing kept the young kiddies from despair …

It was the closest kids could get to Fortnite on an Ipad … a set of wobble-edged collectible cards that not only glowed in the dark, were weird and often gross, but had swappable body halves on the back, along with odd stories. These were my creation, an amalgam of all the visual and surreal, silly story games I had liked as a kid.

How did I come to make these? I was working as a freelance illustrator/graphic designer, sharing studio space in Windsor, when a guy walked in representing Glow Zone Pty Ltd. I vaguely knew that they made packs of glow-in-the-dark stars you could stick on your roof, stuff like that. At the time I had been noticing a whole bunch of cardboard discs, called Tazos or Pogs, that kids apparently liked. Simon of Glow Zone asked me to create a bunch of weird printed discs, using Glow ink, to be called …

GLO CAPS

I was used to being closely directed as a commercial illustrator. This Glow Zone crowd were refreshingly hands off - I could draw whatever I wanted. A very short deadline meant I enlisted the help of my friend Wendy Foard, a hilarious and talented painter and sculptor, who lived above my studio in Windsor. We drew and painted all night, laughing and yawning and drinking coffee, using her round glass table with a light underneath it to trace our designs onto paper. Wendy painted some of hers, which I now think is awesome, because now that I do some painting, I know that using a brush and inks on something that small takes serious handskills. I think we worked about 150% -200% the print size of the finished Glo Caps, and they were scanned. I used coloured pencils, pentel pens and watercolour pencils on some of these, which would be the last time I’d use such media professionally for 25 years. After that I delved increasingly into the dark world of digital art, using ancient Wacom tablets and primitive versions of illustrator and Photoshop, only to emerge, blinking, in the sunlight, some 3 decades later. Now I like both.

Here are some picks of the first series. Looking back, I love Wendy’s Caps so much. Her expressive, economic linework is more what I try for now. Set up in loose themed sets, like GLO COSMOS, GLO MONSTER, GLO BONES, GLO SPIRITS. Some of these push the limits of glow ink silk screen fineness, and look a bit blobby. The chunky, off-white line of the glow ink was a continual influence on the images I produced for Glow Zone - the images needed to be relatively simple.

Well, they must have sold a buttload of Glo Caps, because Simon from Glow Zone was soon back for Glo Caps 2, and I know Richard Bell did some of these. He's a lovely guy I shared a studio with in Williamstown in 1994 for a few months, a film production designer and painter, who I believe is married to Rebecca Gibney now. But he also painted some weird Glo Caps with me back in the 90s. We also did some HOT ink on these: thermochromic ink,designed to fade from black to clear when its temperature was raised by, for example, frenzied rubbing with fingers, or hot lamps etc. And Cool ink too, clear ink that would go black when chilled - though I can’t find any COOL Glo Caps :( Oh, just found one.

I want to make a point at this juncture for any budding artist out there. Sign your stuff. See if you can retain some kind of ownership. Read contracts. Be proud of your creations!

We did not sign our works, didn’t even consider doing so. We just got paid and moved onto the next job, anonymously. Nor did we retain any rights to be credited as the artist, or any IP. So NO ONE knew who created the Glo Caps or the Oddbodz for a couple of decades, until somehow someone tracked me down. It is a good thing to take credit, and to insist on credit for your art, to take a moment to be proud of your work, and to retain the right to say you did it, and hopefully, to profit from it in the future. I don’t own any rights to the original Oddbodz, though I was fairly paid for them back then. I do wish I had signed them though. The man who does is David Miller, the mercurial head of Glow Zone back then. We are still friendly, and in the 30th anniversary year of the Oddbodz, it would be fun to do a new set, but Dave is thinking of cards for kids, whereas I am aiming at 30-something former kids as our target market.  

ODDBODZ

After a couple of years of frenzy, the Glo Caps thing was dying down, and I was asked to come up with some characters on cards. These were to compete with licensed product collectible cards from franchises like The Simpsons - I remember thinking, what chance do these cards have against the back up of international TV series and move franchises? How will my cards stand out? I tried to build character descriptions and some sort of story into each one, by filling the back with swappable surreal story descriptions. I added the Body Swaps, as I like these sort of simple surreal games as a kid - swapping the tops and bottoms of different characters to make unexpected monstrous combos! And just to make them unique, I designed a wobble shaped edge. I asked if Glow Zone could do all this, with glow ink and maybe Hot ink. Yes, they could!

I completed the first set of 61 Oddbodz, as we named them. It was a law that all products in the 90s had to use a Z instead of an S for a plural name. It was regarded as cool and modern. Glow Zone initially sold Oddbodz through stores like Target in little folded cardboard packets of 8 Oddbodz cards, with one of these being a HOT ink card, with a hidden image under heat-sensitive black ink. Here’s a pic of the original pack.

These sold okay … but they weren’t going to warp the minds of a generation of Aussie and NZ kids … until the marketing department of Smiths Crisps were given a boot up their backsides and told - go find a product to put in our packets, we are having our asses handed to us by the competition. I guess the competition chips had some give away Tazos in their packs, or something, can’t remember. 

Side note: the wobble edge proved expensive and dangerous.

I had left some pointy corners, and testing showed these could lacerate skin surprisingly well. They could have been promoted as rectangular ninja throwing stars, but legal advice strongly suggested we make ‘em less dangerous. So Simon, the same guy, who was an engineer, designed his super-complicated nightmare machine with several articulated, ultra expensive rotating blades, with infinitely adjustable controls, just to zip off the sharp corners of the cards after they were cut out by die cutting. This cost many thousands, took weeks, and the custom-built machine proved to be almost impossible to use, as it had to be continually adjusted all the time in numerous ways so it would cut chunks off or miss the cards. But somehow they got made, and Oddbodz went bananas!

SPACE ODDBODZ

So Oddbodz 2 was requested by Smiths Crisps. I wanted to do a Space-themed set, as I love Sci Fi jokes and tropes, planets and monstrous mutations. Smiths wanted to place some of their lame characters in the set, to which I reluctantly agreed. 

Some sneaky Oddbodz censoring happened without me being told. I can now see why, though when I noticed them after the fact I was pissed off! Dogatello of Doggyworld, the solar system’s greatest canine faecal sculptor, had his masterpiece 'The Stinker’ replaced by a cat which was cloned from the same art in a ham-fisted manner. White Dwarf was banned, not sure why - he was just a little guy with nearly infinite mass, thus gravity. Rear Admiral HeadButt, possibly my favourite name of all the Oddbodz, was made confusing when the double-cheeked hairy butt that was the Admiral’s head was edited out, leaving just his face where a normal Admiral’s butt would be. Ahh, I guess I can see that hairy butts isn’t a good match with selling a food product. Glow Zone knew I’d go ballistic so they quietly did it without telling me.

Years later old Oddbodz fans tracked me down, relishing the nostalgic memories of sitting in their bedrooms surrounded by all these glowing cards, swapping them, trying to collect a whole set. Maybe part of their appeal was that they were intentionally silly, gross, transgressive in some way, like a secret kids’ thing that adults ( unless they were emotionally stunted like yours truly ) wouldn’t get. My lurid colours and grungy, chunky line work owed a lot to U.S. comic artists of the 70s like R. Crumb, and the artists of MAD magazine, the cynical humor definitely molded my malleable mind. Oh and I had hoity toity influences too like the Dadaist and the Surrealists, go Dali and Magritte! You see, back in the day when you could study for free in Australia, I did an art history degree. What a bizarre concept, to let young people follow their interests in tertiary study without having to worry immediately about paying back a f*cking big debt? Crazy, socialist stuff. But I digress. I also pored over a lot of comics, without necessarily reading their often dumb stories. I loved the art of Jack Kirby and others. More recently I artworship Reg Mombassa and Mike Mignola; David De Grand is awesome, Tom Gauld is the thinking man’s cartoonist … so many brilliant people out there to enjoy. I met a great illustrator early in my career, and I recommend his stuff - Jeff Fisher. Australian, lives in France.

TWISTED ODDBODZ

But Glow Zone hadn’t milked my mind custard of all its generative juiciness just yet! We did a set of minicards to be given away inside packs of Twisties called Twisted Oddbodz. These were even smaller, and I designed them as a game, with a very simple mechanism. Okay, I ripped off Rock Scissors Paper! That was centuries out of copyright anyway. It would be Beauties ( gorgeous, over-muscled, puffy-lipped, buxom, many toothed hyperbeauties ); Brains (withered bodies, huge, pulsating nerd-brained megageniuses); and Beasts ( hairy, fanged, lycanthropy monsters, basically ). Beast beats Beauty, Beauty beats Brain, Brain beats Beast. In order to play, I needed to make 3 identical looking cards, 2 of which could transform into the other two character types. Using, of course, HOT ink. How anyone played this without rubbing their fingers off to bleeding stumps I do not know. Did anyone every play it? Certainly it was the TRICKIEST art I ever did for Glow Zone: using the HOT background area, I had to hide huge areas of the characters 2 different ways. I think I’ll do a video to show you what I mean. I made some funny characters - eg. Hatlas, the Geek God holding his huge, world- shaped head on his shoulders, and B. Hemoth, who spends way too much time in the gym. This theme - Glow Zone making a product with me that, though funny and kinda cool, had some flaw in its gameplay ( eg. that HOT ink took so much energy to go clear), would recur … when the Oddbodz entered HYPERVISION!

ODDBODZ in Hypervision

Simon and Co. thought they could do a multi-image moving picture by using lenticular lenses - these had been around since I was a kid. A transparent sheet of fine plastic prisms laminated onto a finely interlaced printed image would allow the viewer to see motion as they tilted the picture. Hard to make though. Would Glow Zone pony up and pay chinese experts for their mature, foolproof lenticular technology? Hell no.

Let’s make out own, using good old Aussie know-how! The prototype was … underwhelming. I was the only one willing to point out that their little TV-shaped ping pong paddle viewer, as it wasn’t attached to the image, was dang near impossible to correctly register, so you would get blurry sections of more than one image as you tilted it minutely back and forth, bent it, trying to clarify the image. There also weren’t enough prisms on our home made one. So it was like watching an old telly that had only a third as many pixels, which were big and blocky. It was hard to see what the pictures were. But Glow Zone decided to forge ahead, and Oddbodz in Hypervison were born. The fronts were in some cases reprising Oddbodz characters, with a lot of new ones. I liked Marty McMoo and his Magnetic Undies, Nerdy Neville received his dream match, Nerdy Nerida (how heteronormative of me I now think); Teensie Woossbag was Peewee’s feminine alter ego, and it was fun to reillustrate Doc Fever, FrankenBaby and other Oddbodz. But the viewer was kinda dodgy. You can sort of see the 4 frame comics I drew for the backs of the cards. I also found out that I had to share the art with another artist, whose stuff to my eye is annoyingly different. This was the beginning of the end. I did some colouring/activity books, and the CD Rom game, and even wrote some TV series pilot ideas, and novel ideas. There was an Oddbodz choose your own adventure book published, but I didn’t come up with the story, Ernie Schwartz and another guy called Mark wrote it. I did the cover and illustrations.

The AFL Footy Oddbodz, which they didn’t tell me about, and with which I had nothing to do, were the death knell, and I stopped working with Glow Zone.

A little later David Miller funded monthly Oddbodz comics in a kids magazine, K-Zone, which still give me a kick. I streamlined their style to be more comic friendly, choosing a few of the school student characters, Staring Sara, Myron Megabrain, Nerdy Neville, NoNeck McGee, Mim Screami, with others having guest roles. I also added a ‘cool’ character, in the same way the Simpsons added Poochie in one memorable later episode - this was Funkly D. Foole. Could he be Oddbodz’s Jar-Jar Binks? Time will tell. I include some Oddcomics below.

And below even that I have dredged up some older work, for Fyna Foods, that some might remember. A couple of AFL lenticular caricatures I did for David Miller’s Team Coach. Og Og ALIVE, a game I loved making back in the early 2000s, and a couple of commercial things too. Even a couple of things I did aged 18 or so.