Nearly a year after its beginning, Chapter 1 is now over. Faceless might or might not come back, but Chapter 2 will be about... Another runner in the night.

Sorry for those who expected it to end in fireworks and climaxing battle, but that’s the way it is... And don’t think the decision was taken because of technical difficulties. I think I can, and probably will, have some great combat scenes. It just didn’t fit in there.

So looking back down the road I have to say I’m quite happy with what started as a little experiment has become. When I did the first pages of Another Runner in the Night, I had no backstory. I just wanted to try to see what I could do. It turned out better than I expected and I actually liked the first pages enough to want to keep on with what was started. I didn’t know where I’d be a few months from there so I couldn’t really plan much. Most of the time, I only knew the direction the story would go for the next batch of pages, but no further. It’s only once in Hong-Kong that I took some time to think of a good backstory that’d fit with what I had and would be possible to shoot there.

Chapter 1 was more of an experiment than a real comic project. Most of the situations and panels were chosen because they’d allow me to test something new. The decision to focus on one character and a rather intimist story helped me work on that without needing to rely too much on outside help.

Of course, Chapter 1 still misses a lot of things : no magic, no matrix, no combat, no hot lesbian elf stripper... But I never intended to cover everything. My main objective was to check if I could do a comic, keep the same look for each page, how far I could edit pictures and to get comfortable with the tools I use.

So, what’s next ?

I’m still not settled anywhere yet, so I can’t really start working on chapter 2 right now, but I already have most of the story (I even have a potential chapter 3). Chapter 2 will have a larger scale. It will keep the same atmosphere, but there will be more characters, probably more action, some magic and a lot of aspects that were missing from chapter 1, such as a shadowrunning team on a shadowrun.

Until I can get started on chapter 2, I will work on an introduction to the Shadowrun universe. This will be useful to introduce non-Shadowrun players to Shadowrun or to the Webcomic. I’ll try to keep it short while giving a lot of information. The kind of thing you could hand to new players at the beginning of the first session to help them understand the world.

I will also switch to a weekly update. I’m following a webcomic that had more or less the same monthly schedule, and even if it’s really good, I’d forget each update if it wasn’t for the rss feed. Besides, I have to read it all over again each time to remember the story.

So as you can see, there’s a lot more coming. I hope you’ll appreciate as much as I do.