Broken Frontier

Runemaster Studios is teaming up with The Arizona Republic, the Southwestern United State's largest newspaper, and The Arizona Diamondbacks, Arizona's Major League Baseball team, for the Children's Literacy Summer Reading Program! An all new, 10-part Lions, Tigers and Bears story will appear in The Arizona Republic on the back page of the Comics section. A new part will run every Sunday, starting May 22nd, for 10 consecutive weeks in conjunction with the summer reading program.

The first strip ran in the Sunday, May 22nd edition of the Arizona Republic with supporting articles running the following day.

Faced with competition from video games, the Internet, DVDs and other visual forms of entertainment, libraries are getting more creative in their outreach programs. Comic books are part of the plan, and it seems to be working: according to a School Library Journal report, the presence of comics in one junior high library resulted in an 82 percent increase in library traffic and a 30 percent rise in non-comic books' circulation.

Read the article in its entirety here.

In addition, a side-bar focusing on series creator, Mike Bullock was also featured in the Monday edition of the Arizona newspaper.

"When I was a kid, my brother and two cousins, they could all draw, and I couldn't draw a recognizable stick figure," he said. "I told my aunt, 'A picture is worth a thousand words,' and she said, 'You'd better learn to write the thousand words then.' I immediately went to try to write a story."

Read the side-bar in its entirety here.

For those unable to get their hands on the Arizona Republic every Sunday, Runemaster Studios has created a mini site for the strips that will be updated every Sunday through the series conclusion on July 24th, 2005.