THE RUNNER

Inspired by the comic "Shatter", created on a Mac, and overdosing on William Gibson cyberpunk stories, I decided to create a comic series about a software pirate in a future world. At the time, RUN Magazine, in conjunction with Berkeley Softworks Inc, the makers of GEOS were promoting a Desktop Publishing Contest, to coincide with their introduction of geoPUBLISH.

The contest invited people to create graphical entries using any GEOS software meant for printing. I decided to create a comic book because I was pretty sure no one else would, and it had a pretty good chance of winning.

Well, it won. First Prize in the Open Design category.

I present "The Runner." Enjoy.

THE RUNNER - ISSUE TWO

I realize that looking back, the workmanship is not so great, but at the time, this wasn't so bad. Though I'm particularly proud of the shots at Worldwide Assassination Inc. That Greeaway shot of Toggs standing before the CEO's desk is kinda nice. Keep in mind the aspect ratio is squashed a bit. Commodore 64 pixels were not square like PC pixels. They were something like 1.2:1, so you'll have to forgive any squat-looking figures. They look better on a real C64

Thanks to a friend, I recently received a fixed version of page 1-1. Originally when I found it online the file was corrupted and I recreated it as best I could from memory and from extrapolation of the surrounding graphical area. It is now replaced with an original so it's now pixel-perfect.

Special thanks to Bruce Thomas who provided the PCX versions of the Runner pages!
Also special thanks to my long-time friend Keith Pomakis who recovered page 1-1 and found this little gem:

This was a quick graphic I did of some concepts of new Runner characters I was going to introduce. These were done by actually drawing the characters on paper and scanning them on a Mac and converting them to geoPaint graphics, and then filling in colors with my fill-brush editor. The comic never got past the second issue, but it's nice to know I had some real plans for it.

Would you like The Runner? Go to my Download Page where you can find this file and others as zipped .D81 Disk Image Files for VICE Commodore Emulator. This .D81 file now contains the previously missing page 2.5, but still contains the originally re-created page 1.1 before I found a complete uncorrupted copy. Still, the differences are minimal.

All content of these pages © Sean Huxter.