Along those lines, I have a random question for anyone planning to buy the RUNNERS: “The Big Snow Job” graphic novel: do you generally buy softcover trade paperbacks or hardcover editions? Just trying to figure out if I want to offer hardcover options, maybe in a much more limited quantity. And for any self-publishers out there, if you have worked with any graphic novel printers that you’d like to recommend, I’d love to hear about it.

Thanks everyone, and I’ll have more book updates soon…

Welcome to RunnersUniverse.com, home of Sean Wang’s sci-fi webcomic and comic series RUNNERS. Currently, the first two story arcs are available in their entirety on this site. Please choose a chapter from the SERIES INDEX tab above and enjoy the read!

For those of you who prefer comics in print, the first book, RUNNERS: Bad Goods, is available from the Store as both a graphic novel loaded with extras and as a specially priced set of the original 5 comic book issues.

Sean is currently working on collecting the second arc, RUNNERS: The Big Snow Job, into graphic novel format and that book should be available in 2012.

And the last sketchbook page for now…

Here are a few more concept sketches for the interior of the Khoruysa Brimia, most notably the lounge sitting area of the main commons room, as well as the opposite side of the room, the door and window into the galley next to the dining table.

I also redesigned the cockpit chairs for this story arc, since the chairs in Bad Goods were a bit clunky and had too much detail to draw over and over again. As it turns out, these new cockpit chairs are also a bit too complicated, so I may end up doing another simplifying pass to make them more “drawing friendly.”

Look for them in Arc 3!

Life has been very busy recently with increasing amounts of freelance work, which I am extremely thankful for as it helps pay the bills and is also very fun work in its own right. But obviously, it limits the amount of time I can spend on Runners, which is the unfortunate but inevitable trade-off. Hopefully I can continue to find a way to make both work in the future without too much loss of sleep!

For the above reasons, the graphic novel collection is also being delayed a bit. My hope was to have an Artist Alley table for New York Comic-Con this October and unveil the book there, but alas, I did not make the table cut this year. Combined with the freelance work and a good chunk of time spent this summer and fall moving to a new house, unfortunately the time has not been there for me to put together the book. My new goal is to have it ready for sometime early next year, which is certainly not ideal, but probably the most realistic option given my current schedule. I apologize profusely for making you all wait, but I guess that’s the bane of a one-man operation: limited time to get everything done.

I hope you all will bear with me and I really appreciate your patience while I get the graphic novel together and figure out the next arc for Runners. Hopefully next year I can hit the convention circuit in a major way with the new book!

In the meantime, while there will not be any new story content here at runnersuniverse.com immediately, I do plan to add updates every now and then on new story progress and miscellaneous universe database material, so please keep checking back.

To stay in the loop on bigger announcements, please sign up for my email newsletter to the right as that will be the best way to find out about the graphic novel aside from reading updates here. And also, if you’d like to order the first graphic novel while you wait, any support of the series would be greatly appreciated. Along those lines, I’ve been toying with the idea of trying to fund part of the new book’s printing costs through Kickstarter. If any readers have thoughts on that, I’d love to hear them!

So that’s it for now. Thanks again, everybody, for your continued support of the series, and I look forward to bringing you the Snow Job graphic novel soon!

And here we have the call-back to the root beetle dinner scene from The Big Snow Job #1, Page 10. I just couldn’t resist the idea of them being stuck with a bunch of charred yak heads for food, since that seemed like the perfect way to end the arc. Well, perfect for us. Not so much for them.

And there you have it. This page wraps up The Big Snow Job arc of RUNNERS. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing and drawing it. Look for the graphic novel collection in the Fall of 2011. If you enjoyed the series, please consider buying a copy of the book to show your support, since I don’t really make any money off of the webcomic version. And feel free to buy a copy of the first book, Bad Goods, while you’re at it! I’d hate to think all those trees died for nothing.

See you in arc 3!

Two more Bonus sketchbook pages to go!

Here we have a few concept sketches for the interior of the Khoruysa Brimia. I did a few Bonus pages a while back about the Art Tweaks I did to the ship interior. Basically, the original designs were a bit too plain and visually uninteresting. They also didn’t have much of a sci-fi feel to them. So I went back and did a second pass on the interiors, trying to come up with something better, while still being mindful of not making it overly complicated and detailed, since I knew I’d be drawing it repeatedly going forward.

One thing you’ll notice is the recurring theme of the elongated oval shape, which is basically a rectangle with rounded ends. I wanted that shape throughout the interior of the Brimia as a visual callback to the ship’s exterior, where the main part of the ship, the cargo hold, has the same shape.

Whenever I switch to a new location, I usually like to include some sort of establishing shot so readers can get their bearings. I thought about doing an establishing shot of the Free Kespa station again for this sequence, but ultimately, I decided not to since (a) I was pretty short on space for this page and needed the real estate for the other panels, (b) the first panel of the yak head hitting the table made for a nice visual that would be more jarring than a shot of the space station, which is what I wanted for a transition, and (c) the red tint of Dhama Hes’s headquarters was distinctive enough that I figured readers would know where they were fairly immediately.

Here I went back and did another pass on the Bocce farm house to figure out something that fit with the environment a bit more. Sticking with the same general design aesthetic, I based the new version on a clay structure instead of sheets of corrugated metal at its base. I also decided on terra cotta style roof tiling since that seemed like something more earthen that could potentially be created on site. The other significant change was that I made the central room of the house square in shape, since I found the previous circular shape to be too similar to the Ulon Dosi village huts. Here’s the revised panel…

So in the original draft of the story, this is where Roka was going to pull rank and we’d get a funny moment with Bocce. Yes, Bocce came to their rescue and saved them, but in the process, he also damaged a very expensive lift sled, a concern of Roka’s that was set up back in The Big Snow Job #2, Page 2. As punishment, I thought it would be funny to have Roka order Bocce to retrieve all the Crush from the yaks, so that he’d be the one having to put his arm down their throats and dealing with all the yak puke.

The problem was that the last scene with Bocce was a very intense and vicious fight with the Kaagan-Vas that ended with Bocce in a very dark place. It seemed really weird to suddenly switch tone and flip Bocce immediately back into whipping-boy mode for the sake of a laugh. So I decided not to use the scene with Roka punishing Bocce, as much as I would have loved to do it.

With this page, I started to figure out the basic look of the buildings for Bocce’s farm. I liked the idea of a central room with radiating U-shapes. I also repeated the U-shapes in the doorway arches and window frames to try to get a nice unifying theme going on. It’s also pretty apparent in the stables, both in the roof shapes and the feeding basins.

At this point, I still didn’t really know what I wanted the textures to be. When I actually drew the story pages, I originally made the house and stables constructed of more mechanical bits and steel plating, but it just didn’t look right. The farm was out in the middle of nowhere so I wasn’t sure how they would have gotten all those building supplies there. So I went back to the drawing board to do a second pass. Here is the original version…

In the previous yak pen scene (on The Big Snow Job #3, Page 22), I specifically tried to show that there were adjacent pens with other yak in them. Dhama Suul’s herd was put into the pen at the very end, while the village’s stash of regular yak was in the other pens. Thus setting the stage for Roka’s eventual switcharoo.

I just now realized I forgot to draw Roka with one of those blue gloves on his arm that both Goshen and Keyla had when they were retrieving bricks of Crush. I guess Roka’s just hardcore and doesn’t mind sticking his arm down a yak’s throat without a glove. Bad ass.

The next several sketchbook pages will focus on the farm from the Bocce Flashback sequence. I was at a real loss with this one when starting out as I had no idea what I wanted. Usually I have something in mind that gives me a nice starting point, but here I had a crippling blank canvas. The only thing I knew was to rule out a whitewashed adobe look since that would be too much like the Lars homestead from Star Wars.

On this page, I was just spitting out building shapes to see if anything grabbed me. Not much did. They all seemed a bit too busy, especially for simple farmers, and none of the shapes were terribly distinctive or memorable. I did like the U-shaped buildings at the bottom, which were based on the U-shaped cuts in Bocce’s shirt collar. I thought that one design element would be a nice way to tie back to the cultural look of the clothing, and it ended up being a nice starting point for the basis of their architecture.