Reviews editor Augie De Blieck Jr. at Comic Book Resources just did a nice review of RUNNERS: Bad Goods as part of an “Off the Shelf” column. It’s been a while since the first book has been reviewed, so it’s always nice to find new people discovering and enjoying the series. I also got a nice little bump in book sales from my website Store from the article. Huzzah!
Check out the column here.
As with Warsaw, the body design for Uskulon flowed pretty easily. And also like Warsaw, you don’t really get to see much of Uskulon’s actual body in the story since he’s covered in his rustler outfit throughout. But if you ever wondered what he looked like naked, as I’m sure you have, now you know.
With Uskulon’s early outfit designs, I started with some more basic snow jacket looks, but they weren’t terribly distinctive and didn’t have any of the cowboy/Southwestern look that I wanted. A few iterations later, I settled on the 2-tiered, banded poncho look, which worked much better. The hat again proved to be the biggest challenge. Given the snowy conditions, I really wanted all of the rustlers to have big brims on their hats to shield their eyes from the elements, and it was tough designing wide-brim hats that did not look incredibly stupid.
More on Uskulon on the next page…
The Kaagan-Vas leader, Warsaw, was a lot of fun to design. With the very first full-body sketch, I pretty much had the basic look down, and then it just took a few refinement passes to really nail the design down. He may be one of my favorite alien designs to date. I like the hermit crab shell on his back, even though you never actually see it in the story itself due to the clothing.
Speaking of the clothes, back on The Big Snow Job #2, Page 20, I talked a bit about the Western influence I wanted in the rustler outfits. The cowboy duster look came about pretty easily for Warsaw. Actually, all of the rustler outfits were somewhat easy to design. The hats were the killers. As you can see in this sketchbook page, I tried to go with variations of the cowboy hat early on for Warsaw, but they just weren’t working. They just seemed too glaringly cowboy-ish in an almost comical way, like he should always be saying, “Howdy, pardner!” So I eventually scrapped the idea and came up with a different type of hat altogether.
Next up…Uskulon.
More sketches for the Kaagan-Vas rustlers, this time focusing on a few body concepts. The concept in the upper left eventually became that of Warsaw, which you’ll see more of in the next sketchbook page…
The next several sketchbook pages will focus on the Kaagan-Vas “rustlers.” Since these were major characters (and the very first characters to appear in this story arc!), I put a fair amount of time into designing them. They also took quite a while to nail down because I wanted to go for a Western look without making it look too deliberately Western. Basically, I wanted to get across the cowboy feel on a subconscious level and not really slap you in the face with it.
On this first page, I just spit out a bunch of different alien heads to see which ones would jump out at me. I think it’s pretty clear which two were early favorites and eventually became the designs for Warsaw and Uskulon.
