Broken Frontier

Creating Runners - Part I: Developing the Series

In this second part of the series on creating my self-published sci-fi comic Runners, I’ll be delving into the artistic process of concepting and designing the alien worlds and characters.

As a sci-fi book, I knew the potential success of Runners would rest heavily on the visual look of the book. And unlike a story set in the real world, the series would need a LOT of concepting work up front since everything from ships to aliens to weapons to architecture had to be designed from scratch.

Most important of the initial designs were naturally the characters themselves. The original Star Wars movies were a huge influence on me growing up, and I especially loved the myriad of creatures in the cantina and Jabba's court. Not surprisingly, as a result, I wanted to populate my cast with all sorts of alien creatures. I also felt that as a comic book, I wasn’t limited to human actors the way most sci-fi shows and movies are, so I really wanted to have some fun with the designs and not just put the occasional bumps or spots on otherwise completely human-looking entities.

Limitations on weirdness

Although I really wanted my characters to look as unusual and alien as possible, I soon realized that there were limitations, unfortunately. As these were going to be my main characters and I planned to really get into the emotional cores of them, they needed somewhat human facial features in order to convey recognizable expressions. I couldn’t have an amorphous blob with 50 eyes all over its body and no mouth and then draw him in a way that conveyed sadness or suspicion or anger. Or course it can be done, as with the flying carpet from the Disney film Aladdin. Amazingly, that character conveys a huge range of emotion without the use of any facial features whatsoever, but for the subtlety of emotion I knew I’d want to deal with on occasion, I would need my characters to have faces.

But within that constraint, I felt I had a good amount of leeway to have fun. I played with proportions and textures, form and function. In order to ensure that each character was physically unique, I made sure that they all looked very different from each other in silhouette, which is a pretty good animator’s rule. It’s easy enough to make the minor details different between characters, but if you can tell them apart purely by shape at a glance, they will probably be much stronger designs.

In dealing with aliens, the real trick concerns female characters. I think it’s important to have female characters to keep a cast balanced, but with aliens, it can be difficult to design them without falling into the easy visual cliches of just adding breasts, lipstick and eyelashes to an otherwise masculine alien design. I prefer to draw inspiration from nature in these instances and differentiate males and females by other, subtler attributes. For instance, maybe the female of an alien species has horns whereas the male does not. Or the female could have a sleeker body frame overall, or very different spot or stripe patterns, or the absence of a tail, or any combination of traits. I find these kinds of differentiating features to be much more believable than just feminizing the form. But then, of course, sometime you just want a feminine form in the book, so you go with the breasts, lipstick and eyelashes. I guess not all designs can be equally inspired.

Beyond characters

Just as real animals in nature can be a great starting point for creature design, real life weapons and vehicles can serve as inspiration for creating various technologies in a sci-fi world. With the ships, I wanted each one to be distinct in the same way that each character is unique. In most cases, I also applied the silhouette test to the various vehicles to ensure that they were instantly recognizable from a distance purely by shape. In the case of the main ship, the Khoruysa Brimia, I actually made floor plans of the various levels, including the cockpit, common areas, cargo bays and living quarters, since I needed to know how the ship would be laid out for storytelling purposes. I found that thinking through little details (like which parts of the ship were original components and which had been customized over the years), though never addressed in the story itself, gave me a bit of background that made the world feel that much more real to me and thus easier to write for.

Each sci-fi world is different and I found that before I started working on too many of the stories, I had to first flesh out some of the background of the world. Were robots, androids and cybernetic organisms going to have a place in society? Would they be commonplace, rare or perhaps even non-existent in my universe? What about the availability and applications of certain technologies like cloaking mechanisms, faster-than-light travel, cloning and various types of weapons? And how would the various governments and alliances be structured between all the known civilized systems?

Thinking vs. doing

Although I gave a lot of thought to the various details of the world, that’s not to say that I figured out everything before I started, since, to be honest, that would be a lot of work. I ended up leaving many things undetermined for the time being. Some of that can be attributed to laziness in not wanting to have to settle on everything all at once, but a good deal of it also stems from the desire for spontaneity in storytelling. As many creators can probably tell you, when crafting a story, the characters and plot points may eventually go in unplanned directions. The story begins to take itself in certain directions under its own momentum, and characters begin to take on lives of their own. In some ways, I didn’t want to have everything spelled out for myself in the beginning so that I could guide the story where I wanted it to go but also react to where the story would eventually wind up taking me. Or maybe it was just the laziness.

Either way, I found that when tackling a project with a large scope, it’s easy to keep designing forever, but that eventually becomes its own trap. At some point, I realized I had to stop thinking about the series and start doing it. I spent a good deal of time working on the “bible” to my universe, but while I liked having a good chunk of my project planned out beforehand, it became all too easy to use the constant pre-planning as an excuse to put off starting the actual comic itself. At some point, I had to stop designing the world and start producing the comic itself, even if I felt I wasn’t ready for it just yet. Otherwise, I’d have all the backstory and plot points I could ever want and not have a single comic book to show for it.

And where would the fun be in that?

Next up: the process of creating a Runners issue.

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

- Sean Wang