and more
recently affecting the creation of another visual art form, the comic
book.

It's Not NewShatter (June, 1985) was the first computer-generated comic
book. Published by First Comics, Inc., it was created by Mike Seanz
and Peter Gillis initially, with Charlie Athanas taking the artistic
reins from issue 8 until its conclusion. "The artwork was created
from the ground up on a MacPlus with 1MB of RAM and a couple of 3.5
floppy drives," states Charlie Athanas, artist and President Burning
City, Inc., on his Web site (http://burningcity.com). "The pages were
created in black and white, printed and then colored in the traditional
manner. It was not until the last couple of issues that I was able
to get a stylus and tablet. Prior to that, it was 28 pages of artwork,
every two months, using a mouse to drawwith."

A few years later, Pepe Moreno's Batman: Digital Justice was
at the forefront of the movement to combine the art of comic books
with computer technology. Created in 1990 using a Macintosh II, the
book was created with the help of 3D modeling, Raster and Vector painting
and drawing programs, page layout and story telling. The system it
was produced on was an 8 bit/32 bit color board, a system palette
of 16,000,000 possible colors, 8MB of RAM, a removable 45 MB hard
disk drive and a Trinitron monitor.

"When I decided to pursue doing digital comic books, Batman Digital
Justice is the book that stood out," says Mat Broome, artist and
owner of Digital Broome Studios, San Diego (www.digitalbroome.com).
"Not only did other efforts not include vector graphics, but there
are so many dark tones to the book that