In my super ambitious early days, I had planned to do an entire RUNNERS series. I then wanted to end it and do a ROGUES series about a crew of mercenaries set in the same universe. I would then follow that with a BANDITS series that followed a crew of pirates. And THEN, I’d do a big war story that brought them all together. I eventually realized it was not humanly possible for me to do all that work, so eventually the Rogue group (and war story) just got folded into the RUNNERS series.

Eagle-eyed readers may recognize the hammerhead ship from a previous appearance. I have to admit, Hiura’s crew was not originally planned to be in the Hammerhead. It was just going to be a random crew of rogues. But I realized I only showed two of the crews in that scene but not the third. I also liked the ship design and wanted to keep using it. Finally, the Hammerhead was the greatest adversary in that scene, so I thought it would be fitting for that very competent crew to be the Rogues.

Just a note: the next two posts will be bonus content featuring sketchbook pages that showcase some of the concept design work for the characters that just appeared, as well as design commentary. These posts will basically be samples of what I am currently offering on Patreon. As a backer, depending on the tier, you’ll get access to finished pages early and in a larger size, pages in the penciled and inked stages, and many more sketchbook pages with commentary. And there will be other rewards like full scripts, coloring pages, videos, and more. And most importantly, you will be helping to make this series possible by allowing me to establish a baseline of income while I continue to work on it.

For Chapter 1, there will be a few of these bonus content breaks during the story to remind readers of the Patreon and to also just offer some fun behind-the-scenes art. I decided to include them as “comic pages” instead of blog posts, since I figured they’d be harder to miss that way. I hope you don’t mind the short interruptions to the story, but it’s very important for me to make people aware of my Patreon account on occasion, in case any of you want to support the series. The occasional breaks will also help me maintain my buffer of finished pages, so that I can stay ahead of the posting schedule. The bonuses will always be at hard scene breaks though so they won’t interrupt the flow of any given scene itself.

Thanks as always for reading. I hope you like the bonus posts, and I hope you’ll consider supporting the series on Patreon!