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Runners: Bad Goods TPB
Review posted: 07 Feb 2006
Writer: Sean Wang
Artist: Sean Wang
Publisher: Serve Man Press
5.00 out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by Matt Rawson
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Runners, as described by Sean Wang himself, is like
“Star Wars meets Smokey and the Bandit.” I
would definitely have to agree. However, when I first read
Runners it took me back to one of my all-time favorite comic
series, Jeff Smith’s Bone. The quality is on par with
Bone in both story and art. The pacing of the jokes versus
drama and action, the masterful use of composition to convey the
elements of the story, and the visual storytelling itself, instantly
made me pleasantly compare these two books. It’s always a great
feeling when you first discover something fantastic.
The spaceships and alien cityscapes are
crafted with a knowledge of feasible structure logic, and the
perspective in any given panel is spot-on.
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Runners: Bad Goods introduces us to the crew of the Khoruysa
Brimia, comparable to the smugglers of the Star Wars universe, and
chronicles their run-in with a very curious piece of cargo.
Runners, simply put, just works on every level. Not only is it
a fun read, but the artwork is skillful and consistent, the pacing
shows a good understanding of the medium, and the characters are
alive, three- dimensional, and believable.
Sean Wang has tailored a story with all the right ingredients. It
has comedy that is actually funny, drama, action, and the seeds of a
budding love interest. Upon meeting each of the main characters,
observing how they interact, and how they react to the stimuli of the
story, it was very natural to view them as being “real.”
They don’t seem as if they were instantaneously birthed in my
perception the moment I read the first bit of dialogue. On the
contrary, it’s more like they have been around for awhile and I
just happened to meet up with them at the outset of this latest
adventure.
The artwork is crisp, professional, and obviously from someone with
an architectural education. The spaceships and alien cityscapes are
crafted with a definite knowledge of feasible structure logic, and the
perspective in any given panel is spot-on. The backgrounds in
Runners are not just generic filler used whenever there is not
enough text to fill up the area around the characters, they are
depictions of a well-realized universe, and filling this well-realized
universe are some of the most visually interesting aliens to appear in
a comic for some time. Although heavily akin to the alien design used
in Star Wars, the population in Runners is by no means a
rip-off. In fact, it feels as if not a single character, however
minuscule, was not first worked entirely out in Wang’s
sketchbook (which you get a nice little glimpse of in the back of the
book).
Along with the story proper comes some nifty special features.
First is a pronunciation guide of the names of the ships, races, and
characters for the phonetically challenged, after that is the original
seven-page short story that appeared in SPX’s anthology EXPO 2000,
and lastly, as I stated before, is a peek into Sean Wang’s
sketchbook showing how some of the characters developed.
Runners: Bad Goods collects the first story arc in what
hopefully will evolve into a science fiction epic. I, for one, highly
anticipate the continuation of this fantastic example of a small press
book with production values that defy that description. Visit your
comic shop, or www.seanwang.com
and buy this book. This I command!
—CCdC—
Cover image used without explicit permission in accordance with the "Fair Use" provision of US copyright law.
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