RUN PG 9 (END)

That’s the end of RUN! I hope you enjoyed it!

If you missed it, I’ll be resuming the main storyline on December 2nd, picking up where we left off!

Wrap-up about RUN

I spend a lot of time with figures in the comic, just by the nature of the time it takes to make it. I have days, sometimes weeks, thinking about seemingly inconsequential side characters while I’m illustrating them on the page. It gives me time to fill in the blanks and consider their motivations. Originally, both the wolves and the bison were in the comic just to help set the stakes for readers— animals eat each other, this is the fate Rask and Quannaq are running from.

The wolves’ motivations are clear— they’re hungry. The bison though, I had to wonder why he was there, alone. In my head, I gave him a back story of needing to leave his herd to go into the forest to find something you can’t easily get in the grassland. Medicinal mushrooms were an obvious choice, which meant he was doing it for someone. It added a tragic gravitas to him that only I knew but I liked knowing that about him. That was the extent of the development up until I started plotting out Volume Two and the focus on Swift and her pack.

The bison’s small story fit into the larger narrative well. In the end, his failures will have consequences felt by other characters in the story’s orbit. Our lives are often interconnected by small, invisible ways we never see because we don’t have a narrative voice guiding our existence. It’s fun, however, as an author, being able to pull those strings and tie bits together. I hope it’s fun to read them, too.

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As for the story itself, it reads two ways for me. There is the surface of it; Clay the bison is a tragic hero on a doomed mission. His cause is noble and I whole heartedly agree with his motivations— we should fight every inch for the causes we care about and to protect the vulnerable people in our lives. He isn’t entirely altruistic, though— he’s afraid of change and acts impulsively, even selfishly, to stop it. He’d rather risk death than the symbolic death of change. Is that the action of a hero, or a coward?

It puts me in mind of Don Quixote, or the image of someone trying to turn back the ocean’s tide with a gun. Some battles are impossible and some events entirely out of your control. That’s life, though. All you can do in the end is put up a fight.