About the Webmaster
Jonathan Logan Switzer is a fourth-year Information Systems major at Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kansas (USA). He was first exposed to the ROBOTECH saga as a young boy during the series' initial run in syndication. Despite it being on at 6:00 a.m. he managed to wake up for it often enough to remember the series' iconography and opening sequence many years later, as well as the shocking conclusion to episode 83 (well, shocking to someone who kept missing episodes due to the early morning timeslot!), which for the longest time was his strongest memory of the series. When ROBOTECH went off the air, all he had to remind him of the series were first printings of the first ROBOTECH novel, Genesis, and the first ROBOTECH II: The Sentinels novel, The Devil's Hand.
In the summer of 1992, on a family shopping expedition to Tulsa, Oklahoma, Switzer discovered his first Suncoast Motion Picture Company store in a mall whose name eludes him. The store had the ENTIRE ROBOTECH saga on video cassette, a sight he had never before seen (and has very rarely seen since). When his mother told him about this, he was amazed and thrilled, but she only let him buy one tape. Naturally wanting the most bang for his buck (or, to be more accurate, his parents' buck), he grabbed the first volume of FHE's truncated 100 minute/six episode The Macross Saga set. To this day he still only has half of that run (though since he's got the whole untruncated series on DVD now, he's not really complaining). From there, he delved into the novels, reading the two he owned from cover to cover and seeking out the rest. By the end of 1994, he had read the last novel of the cycle, The End of the Circle, twice, and had over half of The Macross Saga on LaserDisc, as well as a handful of Palladium Books' Robotech VHS tapes and Streamline Pictures' Perfect Collection tapes.
While did not get into the series' comic books until 1995, he quickly made up for lost time by seeking out back issues upon back issues, digging through musty comic book boxes in comic shops across the midwest. In seven years time, he has amassed nearly every ROBOTECH comic book ever published (he's only missing one issue as of this writing). He made his first foray into Robotech internet fandom at the Disciples of Zor message board in about 1995 or '96, and started the webpage which earned him his on-line screen name--a webpage called the SDF-5X Conqueror--in 1998. From that time he's gone by the nickname Captain JLS, even though the SDF-5X website is long gone after several incarnations and numerous exceedingly ambitions plans for it.
His main interests besides ROBOTECH include anime, manga, Transformers (the toys mostly, though he likes most of the comics and a lot of the cartoons), Marvel Comics' X-Men titles (mostly Agent XMazinger Z and Getter Robo, but still continues to follow modern mecha epics (he's currently awaiting the domestic release of RahXephon). Switzer also likes to write and draw, having worked for most of his life on an ambitious comic/novel/animation project called Scwonkey Dog and tinkered for the past several years, alongside a small group of off-and-on collaborators, with a ROBOTECH fanfiction epic called Robotech Conqueror. He currently contributes articles and stories for the ROBOTECH fanzine Emissaries, published quarterly. He also spent three stress-filled years in high school doing editorial cartoons and movie reviews for the school newspaper.
Switzer can be contacted via e-mail at scwonkey@hotmail.com, and tends to lurk about on America On-Line Instant Messenger under the nickname scwonkey. He also uses the name Captain JLS on both the RDF-HQ Communications Center and the forums on Robotech.com.
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