Excerpt from Heathen City Volume One: Always on the Run.
Illustrated by Ayato, digitally colored by Distasty. Written by Alex Vance.
Available for pre-order now: www.heathencity.com

Owen reminisces while Ruy worries...

Considering the importance of the characters' backstories, there's a lot of retrospection in Heathen City, especially in the first book. This gives great, compact storytelling opportunities which I, as a writer, relish as they gie me the chance to convey a whole lot of information in relatively few pages.

At the same time they serve to justify the characters' current state of mind, making them seem more real.

It's partly a cheat, really. It flies in the face of the old saw 'show, don't tell' -- but that applies fo fiction, where nobody cares if the book is a few dozen pages thicker or shorter. Considering the enormous cost of producing a full-color book like Heathen City, you have to make every square inch count.

So if a piece of information is crucial, but not particularly exciting or arousing, then it's best to find a way to just tell it and move on, and save precious pages for the thrilling stuff!