And here, the crew has finally arrives at the planet Ciceron. From here on, it’s all snow, all the time!

The name “Ciceron” came from a very weird place. I tend to draw inspiration from all sorts of things, and I often come across words that I think just sound cool or interesting.  In the movie musical Chicago, there’s a number called the “Cell Block Tango,” in which someone mentions a Hotel Cicero. I thought “Cicero” was a cool-sounding name, so it became Ciceron.

Maybe at some point I’ll come up with five other planets called “Pop,” “Six,” “Squish,” “Uh Uh,” and “Lipschitz.”

I’ll slowly be dropping in more info about the RUNNERS universe as the series progresses. The Unified Planets were already mentioned in the first arc. Here we have the first mention of the Tet’Sali League. So there are apparently two power factions (that we know of) that the criminal underworld tends to avoid.

In my original script, I wrote that in the last panel on this page, Dhama Hes “smiles” at Roka as he says his last line. I had planned to draw it as a wicked smile, not necessarily because he’s evil, but because he knew he was sending them to a planet with less-than-ideal weather conditions. Obviously, the script was written before I did the character concept designs, as the Dhama Hes design that I settled on has no mouth to smile with! You can tell by the mouth tentacles though. Those are totally smiley tentacles.

I wanted to make it pretty clear that Roka considers himself a smuggler, not an all-out mercenary. He just moves goods from one party to another. He doesn’t rob, steal, or do other violent or confrontational pay-for-hire type work, which seems realistic to me. As a specialist, he isn’t necessarily schooled in those other types of work.

It’s something that always pops into my head when I watch CSI: Miami. As entertaining as that show can be, it’s such a departure from the original Vegas CSI. I think in that show, the characters work in forensics. I don’t think Grissom has ever carried a gun, let alone put some perp down on the street. He works in a lab. On CSI: Miami, those guys do EVERYTHING, including making arrests, interrogating suspects, and even having shootouts or dodging explosions in pretty much every single episode. It kinda reminds me of something on The Simpsons. They’re not just lab technicians. They’re not even just normal cops. They’re POLICE COPS!

Anyway, the ridiculous blurring of job responsibilities and qualifications on CSI: Miami was something I wanted to avoid with RUNNERS. Of course, as Roka gets more desperate, he may take on work he otherwise wouldn’t. And he does have two expert pirates in his crew in Cember and Bennesaud…

Oh, the Cicerin yak. The bane of my existence. At the time, doing a story revolving around a herd of 40 yak sounded like a good idea.

And it still is. Don’t get me wrong..I love the story.

But man, if I realized at the time just how many yak I’d be drawing over the course of the five issues, maybe I would have made it a herd of 3.

So now we have a little background on Bennesaud. I like being able to spotlight different characters in different story arcs. I feel like Bocce and Bennesaud got the short end of the stick in the last arc, so they figure a bit more prominently this time around.

As a minor detail, in panel 1, Roka and Ril are surprised by the revelation about Bennesaud, but Cember isn’t. He and Bennes have been partners and close friends long enough that this is obviously something Cember already knew.

The distrust and competitiveness between bosses is pretty key to the RUNNERS universe, so I wanted to start laying that out now, in preparation for some of the bigger events to come.

I ended up being really happy with the design of Dhama Hes as he’s a bit more alien than a lot of the other characters populating the series so far. I especially like the cluster of tiny knobbies on the palm of his hand “pad” and  all the thin tendrils that make up his lower body, as both of those things creep me out something fierce.

What’s fun is trying to figure out how clothing stays on some of the more unusual aliens. In Hes’s case (and his henchmen), the various articles of clothing have small straps that loop around the arms and ridged spine bumps on his back.

This next sequence was an early trial by fire for me in the coloring department. I hadn’t done much comic coloring before starting this book, and I certainly never did anything with tints. So I deliberately decided to make Hes’s headquarters bathed in red light to force myself to step out of my comfort zone. The resulting look actually makes this probably my favorite sequence visually of the first issue. And it’s good I did it since the rest of the story has several nighttime scenes that required more tint work.

As for Dhama Hes, I wanted each mob boss to have specific traits that would make them different from one another. In Hes’s case, he’s of the mindset that information is power, which he alludes to throughout his conversation with Roka. As such, I wanted his headquarters to be filled with monitors showing various stats and info he’d be keeping track of that might affect his criminal enterprise.

I always meant for Ril to be a bit of a weapons freak. I didn’t really do anything with that in the first arc, so I figured I would start showing that in the new story. While this sequence ended up being a lot of panels for one page, I thought it would be worth it just for the fun of showing how loaded up Ril can be. I especially like the beat of panel 6, where Sira Tep doesn’t even have to ASK for more weapons.  He just waits.

As with the Oniaka City Station in Bad Goods, the space station here kinda took on a life of its own.  In the first arc, once I came up with the concept of the planetoid base of the station, the history pretty much wrote itself. In this case, I just thought “Free Kespa” was a cool name for a space station. I knew I wanted the station to be seedy, but once I came up with the name, I was actually able to figure out a backstory for the station and how it GOT to be the dump that it is.

The RUNNERS universe is not a pretty one. Well, it can be in places, but there are also plenty of seedy areas to go around. Given the crew is down on their luck in this story, I wanted them to really be slumming it by going to this run-down ghetto of a station looking for work. I wanted it to look like a station that used to be nice but eventually deteriorated into an eyesore, with random additions and patches, obnoxious signs, and graffiti covering both the exterior and interior.

The two aliens in the foreground are conducting a drug transaction, by the way. You can tell by the sly way they’re looking around them, even though they’re standing in the middle of the street.

All the characters got new outfits for this story since I wanted them to cycle through clothing between different arcs (and sometimes within the same arc, as Roka does in Bad Goods). That sort of thing just grounds the world for me since real people would wear different clothes on different days. And as an artist, I figured it’d keep things fresh for me.

The one exception (other than Bennesaud, of course) is Bocce. His outfit is the same, but I attribute that to him wearing traditional garb of his people, so it’s a personal choice based on custom. They will probably be slight variants here and there, but it’ll basically stay the same.

With the other characters, I try to keep the clothing styles consistent between different outfits since I figure they all have their own tastes. Roka leans toward earthy tones and rough fabrics, as well as elongated vertical forms. Cember likes the flashier patterns, with matching hat, naturally! Ril likes nice clothing, although not as flashy as Cember, and he generally goes for tops with some sort of crossing overlap across the chest. Sky will probably keep with very light colors since I love that white-on-blue look.

I scrapped a number of Sky outfit designs for being too “pretty.” Ultimately, it made sense for her to settle on something more akin to a slightly modified worksuit. So it has the feel of something utilitarian while still being nice to look at.

Of all the things that the addition of color really enhances with this story arc, I’d say my favorites are Sky and Bocce. With Sky, the changes from blue to shiny are much more obvious with color, and with Bocce, his energy arm stands out much more now.

And of course, how would you tell a live root beetle from a cooked one without color?? How??!!

BTW, many people have asked if I’ll be coloring the first story anytime soon, and I have to say “No.” I’d love to, and I’m sure I will at some point. But given the undertaking, I’d MUCH rather put that time and effort into new stories than go back and revisit a previous one. Especially given the larger story I’ve had planned for the series from the beginning.