As you’ve probably guessed, The Dreyfus is not concerned with exciting adventures in space. It is, like most issues of Sunrise, concerned with people moping around and getting testy. So stay tuned for that thrilling stuff.

This is the second April Fools’ joke I’ve done for Sunrise, the previous one being the Star Trek parody in 2009. (I beat J.J. Abrams’s parody by two months!)

Since this was such a big hit, I’m considering the possibility of some sort of non-canonical crossover novelty issue sometime in the future… it might be fun!

Oh, and for those of you interested in collecting Zarkdom minutiae, the war with the Gress is actually a canonical detail from an yet-unrealized Zirconius script.

You are about to see what has only been seen by my immediate family before.

I speak of the fabled Zark comics.  The Zark comics were the predecessors of the Zark games which you may be familiar with.   The Zarks,  our fearless green protagonists,  first appeared in a comic called Space Kid which I will not be sharing with you.  In Space Kid they were the villains,  but they were just too cute for that line of work,  and by the time I began drawing Zirconius,  they had become the protagonists instead.

Zirconius took the form of four-page issues drawn in pencil on sheets of 8.5 x 11 copy paper.  When I finished an issue,  I would leave it on the kitchen table and my family would read it,  then I would quietly file it away.  After a considerable number of issues were complete,  I would staple them together into an anthology,  which would then live on my bookshelf.  Zirconius ran in this form from 2003-2007.

Yesterday I pulled down these books and painstakingly removed the staples.  I pulled the issues apart and scanned them.  I cleaned up the pencil lines and added the spot blacks that the originals always sadly lacked.  Now the first two storylines of Zirconius are here for your enjoyment.

Premier storyline:  Reunion (zip file of pages)  For the most part this story was self-explanatory,  but I’ll say a few words about it.  Zirconius is the captain of the ship,  which is referred to only by its serial number,  Z-10D #2.  Zirconius is the Zark who wears a black band on his left arm.  In this story they experience a chance encounter with a race the Zarks would rather forget.  At the time I thought this was a pretty sophisticated story,  but in retrospect it’s kind of silly.

Storyline 2:  Side Effect (zip file of pages) This issue requires a bit more explaining because it refers to things you would only know if you’d read Space Kid first.  First and foremost,  the creatures you see on the first page are Blorks,  the series’s goofiest villains.  The Blorks are approximately the height of apartment buildings but have all the smarts of a cactus.  They prowl through space capturing creatures smaller than they are,  which they refer to as “vermin.”  The other thing you should know is the rectangular guy featured in this issue,  Tangle,  never speaks.  He is the Harpo Marx of the Zark comics.   Keep that in mind as you read this.

(Don’t worry about the page numbering in these Zip files.  I assure you there is nothing missing from the Side Effect storyline,  even though the first page is not Page 1.)

Altogether the Zirconius oeuvre is 142 pages long. That’s a lot of Zarks adventures!  If you found yourself wishing for more after this brief sampler,  worry not–I’m working on restoring the entire series,  and hopefully I will soon be able to put it into print.  Zarks forever!