As of now, all three volumes are still available in paperback, hardcover, and digital editions. And you can opt to get your books signed when placing an order.

Book shipping is around $5 in the U.S. by Media Mail. For international orders, please contact me through the website form, but be warned that international shipping can be quite high.

My wife and I are extremely excited about this move, but sadly, it does present some complications for book shipping and managing physical stock. Hopefully I can figure something out that will work long-term, but in the meantime, the store is open until mid-May!

Last fall, I ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund the printing of the book, and it went extremely well. The physical books have now been printed and delivered, and all Kickstarter orders have been fulfilled. For those of you who do not use Kickstarter, you can now order the book from my RunnersUniverse.com Store.

Click here to buy RUNNERS Volume 3!

As always, Volumes 1 and 2 are also available in paperback, hardcover, and digital editions. And you can opt to get your books signed when placing an order.

Just a heads-up: I will be moving this spring, so the Store will be shut down at that point. And I will not be setting up at conventions this year. So if you are interested in getting the new Volume 3, I highly recommend doing it soon through my Store! 

Book shipping is around $5 in the U.S. by Media Mail. For international orders, please contact me through the website form, but be warned that international shipping can be quite high.

I am really happy with how this book turned out, and I can’t wait for you to get your copy. I think you’ll love it!

Huzzah! Volume 3 is now available in printed form as an extra long 224-page graphic novel. The books are done at the printer and I should have them by mid-December. You can now order at my Store here on RunnersUniverse for fulfilment starting in January 2026!

For those who did not back the Kickstarter, you can now PRE-ORDER Volume 3 through my Store here on RunnersUniverse. Assuming the Paypal code works properly. If there are any issues, please let me know. Any pre-ordered books will ship in January 2026.

Woot! The LAST page of Volume 3!! It’s a wrap!!

This is another one of those scenes I have been dying to get to for many years: the big reveal of the other clone!

As I mentioned a while back, I juggled the order of the three endings for this volume and finally settled on the one depicted so I could go for maximum impact. While it would’ve been nice to end on a Roka/main crew scene, I thought it would work better to have them review the camera logs from the Tique Amara BEFORE this last reveal. This would serve two purposes: (1) it would remind readers that there was a second spilled tank in the Amara cargo bay and a person was in one of the escape pods floating in space way back in Volume 1, and (2) it would give Roka and company plenty of opportunities to use the word “Amara” when referring to the Tique Amara. I thought if I did that, then when Amara shows up and actually uses her name here, readers would be better primed to know exactly where she came from.

The tricky thing was to hint at her place on the Rogue team throughout their story while never actually showing her until the end. So I wanted one rogue (Maeki) to refer to her as “Rook” so as to not give away her name. I thought “Rook” would be a good choice since it would be short for “rookie” but without knowing that, readers would just accept it as a cool name or nickname. To throw people off, I also had Maeki call others by nicknames, like “Pokey” for Ozomo. I wanted Hiura to have a scene where she said “she doesn’t like that name” but stage it in a way so that readers think she’s talking about “Pokey,” where she’s actually talking about Amara not liking being called “Rook.”

I’m curious if any readers ever really picked up on the character’s absence despite being discussed throughout the book. They repeatedly refer to Rook and in one case, Hiura mentions “the five of us,” although I had only shown four of them. I do really love things like this and I have the entire series planned so that there will be many little details that can be missed on a first read that you will actually catch on a second or third time through.

For right now, I liken Hiura and her crew to the early Daenerys Targaryen storyline in Game of Thrones (a series I still consider my favorite TV series despite most other people hating it at this point). Similar to that storyline, Hiura’s crew is not directly connected to Roka’s crew, nor do they immediately intersect with them. No doubt they will cross paths at some point, but for the time being, they are there to have their own adventures while also building more of the universe that will come into play.

Thanks everyone for reading Volume 3 here on RunnersUniverse! And a special thank you to everyone who has chimed in with comments. You have no idea how much it means, for someone working in a vacuum, to be reminded on occasion that people are actually out there reading and enjoying your work!

Can’t wait to have the physical book finally in my hands!

It was a bit tricky trying to come up with different ways of NOT showing Rook on this page. I’m particularly happy with panel 4, with Rook’s arm and body framing Maeki.

I previously mentioned the glass ceiling last page being inspired by Nishiki Market in Japan, but actually this entire space station interior was inspired by the many indoor markets in Japan. Although the ones in Japan were obviously much nicer! I just really liked the look of lots of vendors and stalls lined up next to each other selling their wares and food items.

In this whole space station sequence, I did a lot of color tweaking after I got the pages back from Cyril, one of my colorists. It’s not at all that he did a bad job. I just drew a LOT of stuff between the station architecture itself and all the stalls. So a lot of it was pretty colorful (which I had also asked for in a note sent with the line art). But when I got the pages back, they were a bit TOO colorful, and I found it a bit hard to reconcile some of the colors.

I ended up going in and adjusting a lot of the colors, making some more neutral grays and tans and desaturating others. But I also added MORE colors in some cases, like all the awnings, signs, and banners. These were definitely some of the hardest pages I’ve had to deal with, color-wise, as I wanted it to feel like a lively market, full of colorful banners and store fronts, but I also wanted it to not be too much of an assault on the eyes!

In the end, I’m really happy with how they turned out. Cyril did an amazing job with the pages, which made it fairly easy for me to just do some color adjustments to make them fit my aesthetic a bit more.

The brightly colored glass ceiling in this space station is inspired by Nishiki Market in Japan, which we visited last year on vacation. I’m not sure if this particular space station will show up again, but if it does, I want it to be instantly recognizable so I included that distinctive feature. That’s true of most environments I’ve designed for RUNNERS, be it the green speckles in the rock wall of the Cove, the horn-shaped buildings of the Jondhi city-station in Volume 1, or the tube-cluster plants and tree trunk orbs on the planet that Sky and Jayd crashed on in this volume. It’s important to me for each place to be distinctive enough that a single panel can orient readers as to the location should I decide to revisit it again in the future.

Again, I would have loved to have a more extended fight here, with Hiura taking on the three adversaries and holding her own. Plus, I had designed a side pouch full of various knives for her (and boot knives), which can be seen in some previous panels throughout her appearances. So it would’ve been fun to showcase that side of her skill set. But again, I wanted to keep this entire sequence as short as possible to not throw off the pacing of the last three scenes together.

And here we get to see Brinn’s special ability, bioluminescence, but at a much higher intensity. Throughout the story, she has had a constant low glow, which I thought would just be a cool look for a character. And again, it is an attribute found in nature. But I thought it would be fun to push it to an extreme and have her be able to do very short concentrated bursts of blinding light. But to make sure that isn’t too strong of an ability, I wanted to establish that it saps her energy immensely to do so.

I like the concept of having aliens with the equivalent of superpowers, which I think sets my RUNNERS universe apart from a lot of other sci-fi. I’m pretty sure I mentioned before that Sky, Bocce, and Jayd also originated as superhero character designs. Sky had the split personality and associated powers. Bocce had the shape-shifting arm and codename of (wait for it)…Armory. Ugh. And Jayd had the Green Lantern-ish ability to conjure weapons and armor. I eventually folded them into the RUNNERS universe though, making their super powers, like those of the rogues, more sci-fi or nature-based.

Over on my Patreon, I have a FREE PUBLIC post that covers all of Hiura’s crew with turnarounds and commentary on their designs. You can check it out HERE.

Here I had the same issue as the previous page: exclamation balloons or regular ovals? They’re not really yelling at their opponents. They’re speaking into comms. But they are also using raised voices in the heat of battle. Ack. Sometimes I can overthink these sorts of things, and I’m still not sure I made the right call.

With this scene, I was finally able to get to some fun reveals regarding Hiura’s crew of rogues. They all have special abilities, which is something I wanted to do to separate them from the main crew. As with Jayd, I wanted their abilities to derive from natural attributes, as opposed to being super-powers. In the case of the rogues, I deliberately chose traits that can be found in nature in real animals: camouflage and defensive quills. For me, it’s believable that an organism would evolve but retain some of those properties. I then decided to push them a bit to make them more interesting and useful in a combat context. And it makes sense that Hiura would have stacked her crew with people who bring something unique, ability-wise, to the table.

For Maeki, it was important to show that she is mimicking the colors around her but she is not actually transparent. So the color patterns do not perfectly match the shapes around her. It’s not seamless camouflage in this case but confusing enough to give her an edge in battle.

I previously mentioned shortening this sequence to keep the pacing tight towards the end of the story. But this is definitely a case where I would’ve loved to devote more pages to really showcasing their abilities. One or two panels each just isn’t quite enough, but ultimately, I think the quick pace of the sequence does work much better than a longer protracted final scene.

It has been an exciting weekend. First and foremost, the RUNNERS Volume 3 Kickstarter campaign officially crossed the funding goal on day 3!! I am extremely happy about the initial rush of backers and can’t believe we reached the goal that quickly. Hopefully people will continue to discover the campaign for the next few weeks.

As a side note, I don’t think I will be able to do much on the convention circuit in the coming year (or more), so if you are interested in picking up Volume 3, the Kickstarter will probably be the best way to do it. I will also be listing it on my store afterwards, but conventions might not be much of an option.

Click here to back the Kickstarter campaign now!

In addition to that exciting news, I was also in Boston last week attending the 79th Annual Reuben Awards, where I was nominated for the Divisional Award of Best Online Comic – Long Form! The award ended up going to David Milgrim, a local friend of mine who also happened to be nominated in the same category. Congrats, David!

While I didn’t win, it truly was amazing for the series to be recognized with a nomination, so I am very happy about that. Plus, I got to spend a nice weekend in Boston with my wife Peggy, and I even got to get spiffy in a suit for the night.

While in town for the Reubens, I also got to join Brad Guigar and Dave Kellett for a live recording of their awesome podcast Comic Lab, which I highly recommend. We were joined by Cassidy Wasserman and Jason Chatfield for a great talk on making money in comics and cartooning, but it also touched upon many other topics. Look for that episode to post in the coming weeks.

It was a fantastic weekend, but now it’s back to work. Don’t forget to check out the Kickstarter campaign, which runs until September 10, and keep spreading the word!

This was a scene that I truncated drastically to get to the chase. The original idea was to show Hiura’s crew of rogues making their way through the station and then running into Azarek’s gang. But it was more expedient to just cut to them in the middle of the fight. Also, with it being the end of the story, I wanted to have the three cliffhangers (including Grissom working with police and Roka’s crew deciding to break out Hamron) in rapid succession. I didn’t want two cliffhangers and then a long action scene before the last cliffhanger. That pacing would have felt off. So I tried to shorten it where I could while still showcasing enough of Hiura’s crew in action.

With scenes like these, I sometimes have a hard time deciding what kind of word balloons to use. Every balloon being an exclamation feels excessive, but it also captures the feel of characters shouting over the din of a loud firefight. I think the standard oval balloons would be less “noisy” visually, but would then make the dialogue feel more conversational, which is not the intent.

For the last three balloons, I really couldn’t decide if they should be yelling balloons or standard conversational oval balloons, which is probably why I split the difference and used periods instead of exclamation marks, which now seems super weird. So I guess I should change that to either exclamation marks in yelling balloons or periods in oval balloons.