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The world of "Rune" is very familiar to me. It started with a dream I had over five years ago, a vivid one that was like watching a movie, where two men fought with swords among old ruins. The younger one surrendered to the elder, but somehow in that concession, he achieved true victory.

Unfortunately, the dream didn't have a complete story, but just these characters that fascinated me. I decided to try writing a short screenplay about them. I had never been interested in screenplay writing before, so I read a couple books about it and had fun learning new techniques.

I wasn't satisfied with the plot of that initial screenplay, but it had interesting bits and let me develop the characters more fully.

Then I learned about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and decided to try writing another draft of the story in novel form. This let me explore a new plot and greatly expand the number of characters. Again, I wasn't completely satisfied with the plot, but the world had gained new depth. I pondered more of the culture of my characters and the time line of events across multiple generations.

For the past several years, I've often come back to Rune, experimenting with new ideas and rewriting scenes here and there. At the same time, I've been developing my skills using 3D computer graphics models and Photoshop. I hit upon the idea of combining my interests and developing Rune as a graphic novel.

As a teenager, I was a voracious reader of Batman comics, but I hadn't read any for years. So I borrowed The Sandman series from a friend and read through all of them. The Sandman is the most amazing graphic novel story-telling I have ever seen. I literally cried through most of "The Kindly Ones." Unfortunately, this left me with a sort of "I could never do anything a tenth that good" kind of despair that put me off from starting my own comic for awhile.

Then my interest grew again, and I bought a couple of Scott McCloud books about making comics, and I just had to try my hand at it.

As the story opens, we see Prince Rune and his first love, a warrior woman named Jalina. It was hard for me, as the author, to make Rune into a naive young fool in these opening pages, but that's where his story begins. He's 20 years old and has led a rather cloistered existence. He has difficult choices ahead, and a lot to learn both about the world and about himself.

I hope you enjoy taking this little journey with me and I look forward to your comments. Oh, and I reserve the right to rewrite the entire world again in a new format with a whole new plot. :-)