What's Ozero?

Ok, it's about my online name... waaaaay back when a friend got my computer to dial a bulliten board, I was about to register with my real name. My friend stopped me, and hot me to pick a handle... I had recently been working on a little comic, so I use the name of one of the characters, so poof, I was

NINJA DUDE. Which.... served its purpose. I got into creating music, and releasing my tunes on the local BBS networks. My silly name started to feel sillier and sillier... I was deep in my black-wardrove phase, so I picked a new name,

Onyx. In my dialling area, it was unique, and definitely served its purpose... until I started getting on the internet, and found 8735635603953 other Onyxs. So... name change. I picked another black rock, and to avoid duplicates, I added a 'last name', which I stole from a summon in Final Fantasy 7, and so I became-

Obsidian Zero. Which was fine for a long time. But I got sick of typing the whole thing. So I knocked off the "bsidian" and the "ero", and I became-

Ozero. I liked it quite a bit and secured the domain name. AFTER that, someone told me it was a real word in Russian. Worried that I had named myself the Russian word for Monkey Scrotum or something, I looked it up. It means 'Lake'. I can deal with being a lake. I run into a little hassle as it's also a last name, but that's no big deal. I carried the name to create Ozero Publishing, which is only used for my own publications.

Some of my old art, mostly done between 2001-2008...

(the viewer doesn't adjust to different aspect ratios, so feel free to right-click or whatever to open ones in another tab that you want a better look at...)