Allegiance Comics Review and a couple of Magazine Reviews

 Ilya's art from the Manga Magazine 

I can give you a quick write-your-own review with this statement: I read these two comics, put them away, and forgot about them.  Since I get paid by the word here, I guess I’ll have to expand on that.  (I’m just kidding.  I don’t get paid for this.)  I grudgingly went to Wal-Mart last month to get my truck serviced.  I went over to the book area and amazingly found that the Allegiance Comics display had been refreshed with new issues.  Let me check something.  Yep, it was over six months ago when I wrote my initial review of the company’s comics (9-1-20).

 

I picked up the next issues of the two titles that I’d gotten last time, after a momentary painful twinge from the $5 cover price.  I looked at the other two titles, but still wasn’t interested and certainly not at that price.  The magazine rack had also been expanded somewhat.  I finally found a single dog-eared NASCAR season preview only a couple of months too late.  I wasn’t interested in that either.  I read the two comics shortly afterward.  I probably should have looked over the previous two issues beforehand, but instead dove right in.  After that, I put them away and forgot all about them.  Finishing the Imagine FX magazine later, I finally thought to write something.   

 

Red Rooster #3

This was the Allegiance comic I’d liked best in the first two issues.  This issue had the big fight scene payoff between the hero and villain groups.  It’s fairly epic given that it’s mostly costumed adventurers fighting, as opposed to superpowered combatants.  There’s a resolution at the end along with a dangling mystery.  I probably should have reread everything to get the full effect, but I doubt it’d matter.  The art, story, and comic book production values are good, but not worth the price or the wait.  This issue wasn’t even worth making a couple of scans of for the post.  The images are from their website.

 

The Futurists #3

The first two issues of this title were a bit incomprehensible, so I wasn’t too concerned with keeping up with the story.  I think all of the characters are at least in the same geographic area, but they haven’t gotten together.  I think.  What is this comic about?  1800’s British India.  Magic.  Treasure.  Something.  This story is truly suffering from being published in an inconsistent periodical.  This screams for a graphic novel treatment, especially with the excellent artwork, which unfortunately tends to make the story more confusing, but pretty to look at.  Again, not worth it at the price.  

 

Surprisingly and perhaps rather overly optimistically, both issues had promotions for a new title, The Saints.  It’s sort of a conspiracy-themed adventure. 

 

So the real question is whether or not I’m going to buy anymore of these on the assumption they get published in my lifetime.  I’m going to have to defer that answer until I actually see the next issues.  I’ll decide based on how they look.  Really, I should just ignore them based on what I have.  I don’t know what I’m hoping for.  Because of the price of these issues, I can’t even toss them in for trade at the bookstore.  I have to hold on to them.

  

Imagine FX Manga Artist Eighth Edition

During my fruitless search for a Baseball preview magazine (4-1-21), I bought this after essentially giving up.  I’d often seen these colorful oversized magazines on the racks.  I’d never thought to buy one, since they were expensive and didn’t really seem to have much to do with the sketching I do.  Like I mentioned, finding the Ilya Kuvshinov content was enough to push me into trying one.  The back page also promised additional online content with the purchase.

      

The main reason is got this was to have the pretty pictures to draw.  I haven’t actually used it much for that purpose yet, so I can’t entirely speak to the utility of the magazine.  Or should I say, “Bookazine?”  That’s what they officially call it to somehow justify the $20 cover price for a magazine proudly printed on cheap eco-friendly pulp.  (At least the Allegiance comics have excellent production values for the price.) 

Really, this magazine and its multitude of tips aren’t aimed at me.  The magazine assumes that you’re already a good artist and use a computer for your artwork.  This is more for a professional artist or an aspiring one.  It will show you how to polish your work and detail it.  There are spotlights on individual artists and art studios.  There’s quite of an array of working options profiled, such as online artists, commissions, computer games, animation, comics, and card art.  There’s lots of work out there for artists.

 

There are also lots of tutorials in the magazine.  Mostly, they’re focused on how to do things in Photoshop.  There is some general art advice, but it is of an advanced nature.  They almost assume you’ve been to art school.  (Though a couple of the artists interviewed thought art school wasn’t worth really worth it.  One even said, there’s enough free online content that it didn’t even make sense to pay for school.)  The online content included nice large clean copies of pictures of some of the art in the magazine.  There are videos showing the artists at work.  Unfortunately, there wasn’t audio commentary with them (probably because they are sped up a bit), but they are very detailed.  

         

I feel like this magazine was a compilation of articles out of the regular Imagine FX magazine, so you’re probably not going to want it if you buy the periodical.  For myself, this was a questionable purchase and yet still really useful.  Watching one of the Ilya videos immediately helped my artwork.  Just seeing him quickly rough out figure drawings freehand inspired me to try that, instead trying to measure things out.  It worked much better.  I was surprised to see him redrawing bad lines, just like I do.  I saw finished professional work and assumed all the lines were perfect in production.  I’ve now been given permission to make mistakes in layout.  I haven’t been putting all the color highlighting lessons to use yet, but hopefully I will.  I don’t have Photoshop or a stylus and pad, but I used a program I have to try to color one of my old sketches.  That didn’t work out well, but it’s something to work towards. 

 

Just for the inspiration, I’ll call this a good purchase.  Annoyingly, being oversized, I can’t put it in a magazine bag to preserve it better.  Given the paper used, I wonder how long it will last.   

 

 

St. Jude Inspire Spring 2021

I’ve sent some donations to St. Jude over the years.  I think they send me at least two solicitation letters a month.  Finally, they sent me something interesting, this magazine.  I’ll say they sent this out because of a special event.  There’s going to be a manned SpaceX launch this year, which is going to be a fundraiser for St. Jude. 

 This is Hayley as a child patient.

One of the astronauts, Hayley Arceneaux, is a former child patient.  She’s grown up to be physician assistant at St. Jude.  Her bone cancer left her with a titanium prosthesis in her leg.  Were this a NASA mission, they wouldn’t have even taken her application.  A high school classmate of mine desperately wanted to be an astronaut, but couldn’t get in for an irregular heartbeat.  (It’s okay.  Ginger Kerrick ended up being a NASA Flight Director and had a street named after her in El Paso.)

For that matter, the mission commander, Jared Isaacman, wouldn’t qualify as an astronaut either.  He dropped out of high school and started a business from his parents’ basement and became a billionaire.  He’s not a military pilot, but somehow ended up founding a private air force and became a jet pilot.  He’s the one behind the fundraising for this mission and pledged $100M. 

I find myself not wanting to know anything about the astronauts until after they’re back safely.  Too late for that now.  I’ll be looking forward to this launch later this year.