Shatter, the First Comic Made on a Computer (1985) | Hacker News Reader

Shatter, the First Comic Made on a Computer (1985)

marincomics.com

15 pointsmarinbala12 comments

A comic book created by Mike Saenz, Peter B. Gillis and Charles Athanas in the mid-1980s on an Apple Macintosh (though with traditional, analog coloring). This milestone of the comics industry started out successfully but ran its course after 14 issues. It paved the way for other digital comics like Das Robot Imperium by Michael Götze, Iron Man: Crash by Mike Saenz and Batman: Digital Justice by Pepe Moreno.

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I remember this! the first issue was reprinted in a UK computer magazine called Big K (as in kilobyte) and blew my mind, but the magazine folded immediately afterwards. However they wrote about it, I was left with the impression that the comic had been commissioned for the magazine and thus assumed that the halt in publication applied to both.

As someone who was not great at drawing, the idea of being able to have the computer draw nice straight lines, undo mistakes, and copy/paste parts of the document were a revelation. Macintosh computers were not marketed to consumers in the UK and I didn't see one in person until about 5 years later; even the Amiga and Atari ST were expensive luxuries. I learned to program on a Commodore PET at school; later we upgraded to Commodore 64s.

I remembered the Shatter story quite well (though not the title) so I've spent the last ~30 years wondering what happened after the exiting mid-air car chase; this will be a fun read. The only thing that seems to be missing is a link to a digital copy of the full run. There are scans of the print edition at the Internet Archive but they look filthy compared to the original. Big K was printed on standard glossy magazine stock rather than newsprint, so every pixel was rendered with perfect sharpness and contrast, much as it would have appeared on the screen. I think there's a good fair use argument for archiving a fully digital version.

https://archive.org/details/shatter00mike

IIRC, most of Shatter's run at First was on newsprint. The mushy spread of the dithered blacks and the watercolor colors created a pretty grimy look that harmonized well with the gritty noir tone of the narration, IMHO. It certainly looked different from anything else on the shelves; clean ink lines with occasional patches of flat mechanical tone were the rule.

The US comics industry largely ran on newsprint at the time Shatter came out. At the beginning of the eighties there were a few prestige titles on better paper but it wasn't until the early nineties that pretty much everyone had moved to it.

I forgot to add that not only did I see it in glossy form, but it was monochrome (so more or less exactly as it appeared on the computer screen). I wasn't even ware that a color version existed.

Oh geez, just the black layer on glossy paper is such a different vibe than black + loose wash colors + newsprint.

Thanks for mentioning Iron Man: Crash, as I happened to have that one in my collection and am now realizing its cover claims may have been a bit dubious:

https://cdn.marvel.com/u/prod/marvel/i/mg/c/b0/5c6c58de533ec...

As someone who has done a ton of drawing both on computers and off, the idea that this was drawn with mouse blows my fricken mind! I can't even imagine the patience needed.

As I recall someone saying once, "Drawing with a mouse is like drawing with a bar of soap." So true.

It was obviously digitized. The illustrator just drew the panels on paper, then digitized them and added some textures. (Source: I bought it in the 80s when it was new.)

> "This paper was written in 2018. Now, more than 30 years later, it is difficult to assess what the original audience reaction was at the time of publication. The few remaining reviews show very positive feedback lauding the use of the Macintosh. In hindsight, much of the praise is directed towards the promised potential of digital art and not always the results on display at the time."

I bought the comic when it was new, I was in elementary school. Shout out to "Four Color Fantasies" comic shop.

Among my friends and I, we mostly thought it was a gimmick. There was nothing particularly good about it and it was really derivative. It definitely wasn't "Tron", that was actually groundbreaking.

Wow, I still have the first edition around here somewhere. Not a collector but it was so different at the time that I never got rid of it.

> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.

What am I able to play with? Why does this say on the first page that it's an essay? Where is the link to be able to download and play with it? Am I missing something?

Don't be so literal. Not every cool thing submitted as a show HN is interactive software.

That's true, but as far as I can tell this post is reading material and therefore not eligible for Show HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

That's not to say it isn't a cool site!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com