^ A page of B/W artwork from "Shatter" (1986), the first computer-generated comic book, published by First Comics in Chicago. The book was art directed by Alex Wald and drawn using a mouse on an Apple MacPlus computer with 1Mb of memory and an external 800K floppy drive.

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COMIC BOOKS

Shatter (1986-87), First Publishing, Chicago
Issues #9-14
Shatter was the first computer-generated comic book. Everything, except the color, was done on a computer. The book was originally created by Mike Saenz, but Mike stopped working on Shatter after the first couple of full issues. First began digitizing drawn pages for the next few issues while they tried to find someone who would draw it from scratch with a computer. Eventually they found me.

The hardest part was not drawing with the big clunky mouse that came with the MacPlus. Nor was it the complete lack of memory, which meant that you had the drawing program (Fullpaint) on a floppy in the main drive slot, your 800K work disk floppy in the external drive, and you had to swap out disks to use any stock art that you had created. No, the hard part was the fact that you could only see about two thirds of a full page at any one time, unless you shrunk it to a postage stamp size thumbnail. Covers and splash pages, especially double-page splash pages, were a layout nightmare.

After receiving a plot outline I would breakdown the layout in pencil to get approval from the editors and so the writer could move on with the script. I would then redraw these images from scratch (no scanners) on the MacPlus and put in the dialog when it arrived. Here is a sample page:

Cover art for Shatter #14 and another sample page featuring the standard "Shatter eyes" shot. V

Cover to Shatter #10 V