I remember this! the first issue was reprinted in a UK computer magazine called Big K (as in kilobyte) and blew my mind, but the magazine folded immediately afterwards. However they wrote about it, I was left with the impression that the comic had been commissioned for the magazine and thus assumed that the halt in publication applied to both.
As someone who was not great at drawing, the idea of being able to have the computer draw nice straight lines, undo mistakes, and copy/paste parts of the document were a revelation. Macintosh computers were not marketed to consumers in the UK and I didn't see one in person until about 5 years later; even the Amiga and Atari ST were expensive luxuries. I learned to program on a Commodore PET at school; later we upgraded to Commodore 64s.
I remembered the Shatter story quite well (though not the title) so I've spent the last ~30 years wondering what happened after the exiting mid-air car chase; this will be a fun read. The only thing that seems to be missing is a link to a digital copy of the full run. There are scans of the print edition at the Internet Archive but they look filthy compared to the original. Big K was printed on standard glossy magazine stock rather than newsprint, so every pixel was rendered with perfect sharpness and contrast, much as it would have appeared on the screen. I think there's a good fair use argument for archiving a fully digital version.
IIRC, most of Shatter's run at First was on newsprint. The mushy spread of the dithered blacks and the watercolor colors created a pretty grimy look that harmonized well with the gritty noir tone of the narration, IMHO. It certainly looked different from anything else on the shelves; clean ink lines with occasional patches of flat mechanical tone were the rule.
The US comics industry largely ran on newsprint at the time Shatter came out. At the beginning of the eighties there were a few prestige titles on better paper but it wasn't until the early nineties that pretty much everyone had moved to it.
I forgot to add that not only did I see it in glossy form, but it was monochrome (so more or less exactly as it appeared on the computer screen). I wasn't even ware that a color version existed.
As someone who was not great at drawing, the idea of being able to have the computer draw nice straight lines, undo mistakes, and copy/paste parts of the document were a revelation. Macintosh computers were not marketed to consumers in the UK and I didn't see one in person until about 5 years later; even the Amiga and Atari ST were expensive luxuries. I learned to program on a Commodore PET at school; later we upgraded to Commodore 64s.
I remembered the Shatter story quite well (though not the title) so I've spent the last ~30 years wondering what happened after the exiting mid-air car chase; this will be a fun read. The only thing that seems to be missing is a link to a digital copy of the full run. There are scans of the print edition at the Internet Archive but they look filthy compared to the original. Big K was printed on standard glossy magazine stock rather than newsprint, so every pixel was rendered with perfect sharpness and contrast, much as it would have appeared on the screen. I think there's a good fair use argument for archiving a fully digital version.
https://archive.org/details/shatter00mike