Jeff Thomas

Who is Jeff Thomas?

Jeff Thomas (also known as Azuzephre) is a visual artist famous for his series of Pon and Zi drawings. He currently lives in Los Angeles working as a barista at a local coffee house while also attending the Art Center College of Design. He first began drawing Pon and Zi in 2004 as an angsty, antisocial junior in High School. He states that the violent themes in his first comics reflected his disconnection from people.

As he became less bitter and more cuddly, so did his comics. Originally gray and nameless, Pon and Zi were named and given colors along with different personalities. Pon, colored yellow, is usually the optimistic instigator, and Zi, colored blue, retains some of the disconnect and apathy found in the first comics. Neither is assigned a gender because he thinks that each of their personalities could be identified by either male or female readers, depending on the comic and dynamics of the relationship the reader is involved in.

Pon and Zi, blatantly very simple in design, were originally drawn as doodles on notes, never to be taken more seriously than a side project to the illustration portfolio Jeff had been building since before their inception. Jeff Thomas currently attends illustration classes at Art Center College of Design, working on a portfolio and seeing where it takes him.