Broken Frontier

Hi there everybody! For those of you who don't know me, my name is Sean Wang and I self-publish a sci-fi adventure comic called Runners. I also worked for a stint in the mid-to-late 90s as writer and artist on various Tick comics, most notably the series Tick & Arthur. Broken Frontier's Frederik Hautain recently asked me if I'd be interested in writing a 3-part series on my experiences in bringing Runners from concept to comic. Hopefully some of you will find this interesting, but at the very least perhaps it will be a nice distraction from the work you should be doing. Slackers.

This first article will focus on the development of Runners and what I hoped to achieve with the series, writing-wise. Being a sci-fi book with a lot of freaky aliens, there's also a lot of concepting work that continually goes into it, and that process will be covered in the second article. Finally the third piece will cover my actual working process from script to sketches to final page art.

First, for the uninitiated, Runners focuses on the misadventures of a motley crew of alien smugglers who haul cargo runs under constant threat of attack from bounty hunters, pirates, warring mobsters and the police. The series concept came to me in the mid-90s after several attempts to find pencilling work with the big comic companies didn’t pan out. During that time, as I grew tired of the submission process, I also grew increasingly anxious about the prospect of working on an uninteresting title. I came to the sad realization that too many comics were simply unappealing to me as a reader, and I just couldn't see myself putting countless hours into the art for a book whose story I didn’t even connect with.

The road to self-publishing

I eventually did what many other frustrated comic creators have done and decided to forego the usual route and self-publish my own book instead. The trade-off of course is that as a self-publisher, it’s a real uphill battle getting your work out there and noticed. But the allure of working on exactly the kind of story I wanted to work on was too strong to ignore. Although I didn’t consider myself a writer, I approached the series with the idea that if I came up with something that I would at least want to read myself, hopefully others would feel the same.

That meant that the series had to be different. Although I had a strong interest in superhero team books at the time, I didn’t want to do another clone of the X-Men or the Avengers. There were plenty of those books already, so I had no interest in producing something virtually indistinguishable from anything else on the shelves. That seemed to be a surefire way to NOT get noticed. Besides, as much as I loved those comics, I drew even more inspiration from the original Star Wars trilogy and I had a much stronger passion for sci-fi. And I found that fun sci-fi action adventures were woefully under-represented in comics and precisely the kind of stories that I most wanted to read myself. So the genre was settled.

Seedy characters and moral ambiguities

More important to me than the genre were the alien characters. I knew that for me to really get into the book, I’d have to connect with the characters, and that meant creating a fully-realized, three-dimensional cast that consisted of more than just the typical archetypes. I drew upon various aspects of my own personality as well as those of my more colorful friends, which made it much easier to understand their motivations and insecurities more so than if I just conjured their personalities out of thin air. Physically I wanted to make them as interesting as possible as well so that I would have fun drawing them (but that will be covered more in the next article).

Having grown up on Star Wars, I always found the seedy bounty hunter aspect of The Empire Strikes Back to be extremely interesting and ripe with potential for story material, which is why I decided to focus my title on a group of smugglers. I found the thought of writing about "bad guys" infinitely more intriguing than focusing a book on a conventional cast of heroes. A large part of that decision was also influenced by the Clint Eastwood western, The Unforgiven, which had a great cast of characters, none of whom were conventional “good” or “bad” guys. I found that every character was a muddled shade of gray, which made them all the more interesting to me in that they seemed more real and capable of very dynamic ranges of personalities and emotions.

Keeping it fun

But despite the complexity of characterization, I didn’t want the book to get bogged down in grittiness and darkness. Again, I felt there were plenty of books like that already and not enough comics out there that were actually fun to read. With Runners, the smugglers would always be on the wrong side of the law, but their adventures would always be entertaining. And although I had a big epic story planned, I didn’t want to throw too much at the readers right off the bat, which is something I often see in other books and find to be just too overwhelming. I deliberately wrote the first story arc to be a light adventure romp, with the smugglers trying to complete a single run while being pursued by bounty hunters, pirates and the police. Like Bone, I wanted to ease the readers into the world with some lighter initial stories while sneaking in the foundation for the bigger ongoing story in the background.

But before I could get to that epic story, I had to first get through my first story arc. And that meant designing the look of the entire universe …

Next up: designing the world of Runners.

For more on Sean, go to www.seanwang.com.

- Sean Wang