Mike Saenz (born 3 December 1959^[1]) is an American comic book artist and software designer. He is the creator of Shatter, as well as an early adult video game, MacPlaymate. Saenz was also the founder of Reactor Inc., a defunct interactive game company.

Biography

Saenz was born in Chicago, Illinois. As the founder and CEO of Reactor, Inc., he developed and published interactive entertainment on CD-ROM. Reactor produced Spaceship Warlock, Virtual Valerie, Virtual Valerie 2, Virtual Valerie: The Director's Cut, and Donna Matrix.

The comic book Shatter was written by Peter Gillis and illustrated on the computer by Saenz. It was initially drawn on a first-generation Macintosh using a mouse, and printed on a dot-matrix printer. It was then photographed like a piece of traditionally drawn black-and-white comic art, and the color separations were applied in the traditional manner of the period.

After a brief career as a professional comic book artist for hire, he went solo and continued to innovate in the fields of comics as well as computers. He developed ComicWorks, the first^{[citation needed]} computer program for creating comics. He later went on to develop Iron Man: Crash (Marvel Comics, 1988). He provided black and white graphics and animations for the 1988 Macintosh game Lunar Rescue.^[2] In 1993, Saenz created Donna Matrix, a computer-generated graphic novel with 3-D graphics, published by Reactor Press.

Saenz created the cover for Chicago punk band Naked Raygun's first album Throb Throb.