Oddbodz & Space Oddbodz

Glow Zone Pty Ltd asked me in the mid 90s to create a shedload of weird and wonderful images to be printed on small disks of cardboard with glow-in-the-dark and thermal-sensitive inks (which became transparent if the temperature changed) silk screened on top. My initial thought was: Why? What the heck are kids collecting these bits of cardboard for? Then I thought: What would young me have liked to see on them? Lots of spoof monsters, dumb super heroes, some sneaky pro-environmental messages, exaggerated teacher types, and anything else my unconscious threw up as I doodled. They were really small, and the silk screening was quite crude, so this influenced how simple the images had to be. I was lucky enough to have some talented artist friends who worked alongside me on the Glo Caps: Wendy Foard and Richard Bell both made some great little images.

Glo-Caps must have been a hit, because Glow Zone soon asked me to develop a set of collectible cards. Again, I thought – how can I make these actually decent, with some play value? So I started drawing weird characters for the fronts, again using glow-in-the dark-ink (the off white areas), and wrote surreal stories that could be swapped by putting any card back together with another, along with top and bottom images of the characters that could be recombined endlessly – the ‘Bodyswaps’. I would have loved these as a kid, and I later found out that many thousands of Aussie and New Zealander kids did like them a lot. I am regularly contacted by these kids, who never recovered after seeing the Oddbodz, and maybe became just a bit quirkier and artier than they might have been (:

Below is a detail from a Space Oddbodz poster given out as a prize.

Oddbodz Comics

I wrote and drew comics based on a subset of the Oddbodz for K-Zone magazine for several years. The kids who liked these were a slightly different generation from the card fans, as the comics flourished in the early 2000s. I’ve included some comic pages on the site – click Myron Megabrain reading comics on the Homepage to see them.