The year was 1984, but while not everybody was interested in any George Orwell novels, Apple Computer Inc of Cupertino California sure was because it was used as the setting of a super bowl commercial for their newest computer system they released that January, The Macintosh.
The Original Apple Macintosh
Released on January 24 1984, The Macintosh is the first successful mass-market desktop computer to have a GUI interface and mouse. it was revolutionary at the time because up until that point most computers used command based interfaces that were controlled via keyboard. it took inspiration from the Xerox Alto, a computer system designed at Xerox PARC in 1973 which was the first computer to have a mouse. Apple Co founder Steve Jobs had received an invitation to visit Xerox PARC back in 1979 and got a demonstration of the Altos interface.
The Xerox Alto
Apple's first attempt at a GUI computer was the Apple Lisa released in 1983, but the problem with the Lisa was that it was big, slow, and expensive costing $9,995.
The Apple Lisa
This lead to the development of the Macintosh with the goal of taking the GUI interface of the Lisa and making it into a smaller and more
convenient package for the average person.
Initially the Mac wasn't as successful as Apple thought it would be. This mostly because they marketed it as a business machine to compete against IBM, But by the mid 80s it had got a hold of a market that it could really succeed in, Desktop Publishing. and one of the first works of Desktop Publishing on the Mac would be revolutionary.
Shatter Special Issue #1, June 1985
It was a comic book called Shatter. First published by First Comics in June of 1985, it was the first significant comic book to use computer drawn art. The plot is set in a future where all jobs are temporary and a media conglomerate called Simon Shuster Jovanovich who have been performing experiments transferring skill sets between people using RNA. It follows a police officer named Sadr al-Din Morales, aka Shatter, capable of absorbing the talents and abilities of others–permanently, on his mission to stop the board members of the company and save the day.
The comic was created by writer Peter B. Gillis and artist Mike Saenz. Gillis came up with the concept, and Saenz drew the artwork using the then new Apple Macintosh with MacPaint. Up til that point the main method of creating art for a comic book involved a writer producing a story and script which would go to the ‘penciller,’ who would create the basic layout of the comic on an overused paperboard, determining what the design of the pages and then creating the art to accompany the script. That would go to be traced with ink, colored, have the text placed in the respective spots, and finally photographed and reduced to the the correct size.
The process of Shatter on the other hand started with rough pencil sketches of each page and then Saenz drew everything from scratch in MacPaint, printed the art on an ImageWriter dot-matrix printer, colorized, and then photographed.
Although this method worked, there were limitations due to the Mac's hardware. As you've probably noticed from the image of the first Mac at the beginning of this blog, The first Mac looked nothing like the Macs we use today. For one thing, the monitor was black and white much like the Xerox Alto was. Apple didn't add color displays to the Macintosh line until 1987 with the introduction of the Macintosh II. Although this wasn't a problem for Shatter since it was colorized traditionally anyway. Another problem the built in screen was small, at 9 inches, so creating artwork for something like the page of a comic was tedious and difficult indeed. in fact, that was the biggest challenge according to later Shatter artist Charlie Athanas. And the final problem was memory. The original Macintosh came with only 128 kilobytes of RAM and later there was a version 512 kilobytes of RAM. The only way to load and save data was to use the built in floppy drive, which used the then new 3.5 inch floppy disks from Sony. It was a big improvement over the Lisa's Twiggy drives, but the Mac only had 1 built in and could only store 400k per disk so if you had a program that couldn't fit in 400k or you needed to load extra files you would need to swap disks constantly.
Luckily, Saenz's Mac was upgraded to have 1 Megabyte of RAM and he also had an external floppy drive which made things much easier.
Even then this original method was only used for two issues. Saenz left the project and First Comics hired 3 new artists to create art for the comic Steve Erwin (not to be confused with Steve Irwin), Bob Dienethal, and Rick Oliver. They used a different method, by creating the art in the traditional way, and then using a scanner to scan it into the Mac. After issue 7, Charlie Athanas took over the art duties, returning to creating the art directly on the MacPlus, first using the mouse and eventually using a tablet and stylus much like graphic artists would do today. He also upgraded from MacPaint to another drawing program called Fullpaint. He remained with Shatter until 1988 with the release of issue 14, when the comic was finally cancelled.
So what happened to everybody involved? First Comics continued publishing comics until it shut down in 1992. In 2011, founder Ken F. Levin announced at Comic-Con that the First Comics name would be revived and in 2014 they resumed publishing then merged Devil's Due Publishing to become Devil's Due/1First Comics LLC in June 2015, who continue to publish comics today. Saenz went on to create ComicWorks for the Mac in 1986, He created Iron Man: Crash, the first computer-created graphic novel from a major comics publisher in 1987, and Donna Matrix, a graphic novel using 3D graphics in 1993. What he and the rest of the artist's behind Shatter have done since then remains unknown.
ComicWorks, 1986
Iron Man: Crash, 1987
Donna Matrix, Issue #1 1993
The use of computers to make comics still continues today in the 21st century. Although today art is created on traditional comic boards, then scanned into the computer for coloring with most lettering done by various computer programs. In a lot of ways it showed what kind of artwork could be done on a Mac back in 1985 and even today the art that they pulled off is pretty impressive considering it was done on a system that would seem that limited compared to modern computers and more over Macs. If anything it was one of the earliest uses of the Mac doing Desktop Publishing and proved that the Mac had a spot on the desks of artists and designers everywhere.