Allegiance Comics Review

I’m going to subvert expectations and start with another Indy comics label before getting to the Allegiance Comics.  I’m sort of a fan of Vampire: the Masquerade.  I loved the computer game Bloodlines and I love to watch the Twitch live action game LA by Night.  The RPG itself, I’m not the biggest fan of.  The rules don’t really support the kind of game that it bills itself as.  It’s a bit dishonest.  There’s also a massive corpus of background and continuing storyline that might help, but probably just gets in the way of creating your own game (and then they reboot the whole setting start over again).

I don’t know if there have been any other VTM comics.  [Edit after a quick Internet search: There have been several, but I’d never heard of them.]  It would seem like a natural.  There’s been any number of D&D comics.  There’s a series of comics for Critical Role.  That was sort of what I was expecting here, either an LA by Night story or something set in Los Angeles or in Seattle, where the next VTM computer will be set. 

I was subverted.  The two stories in the issue were set in Minnesota.  Minnesota?  That here-to-for unknown hotbed of vampiric activity.  I was attracted to the excellent David Mack cover (good to see his work again), but the inside artwork was just dark and ugly.  I grant you that the overall setting has always been a strange mix of elegant sophistication and hideous sleaze. 

The characters and setup here just didn’t appeal to me.  It was a bit too gutter and trailer park.  The two stories featured two different sets of characters and situations, but neither was really compelling.  Fundamentally, the setting for the stories is flawed.  It’s trying to present detailed, realistic character studies in an absurd fantasy situation.  Character background and dealing with it is one of the weaker elements of VTM overall.  This comic unfortunately exposes that and plows ahead with it.  They would have been better off with a more action-oriented operatic story that alludes to character backgrounds without trying to feature them.

I hope this isn’t the last new comic I buy at Zia Comics.  DC comics has recently undergone a mass layoff.  I didn’t even notice anything solicited by them last week.  This is bad, since their 100-page comics have been the only thing I’ve been regularly buying.  If DC goes, Marvel will follow.  This led me to look for alternatives, which brings up the next set of reviews.              

Months ago, I’d heard about a new comics company, Allegiance that would be distributing comics at Wal-Marts.  I’d been kind of avoiding Wal-Mart during the lockdown, but when I was finally forced to go there I looked around for the comics.  I found them on my third trip to the store earlier this month.  They were tucked away in the Electronics/Book department in their own display stand next to some kids’ books which made sense. 

There were four different titles each having two issues out.  Cringingly, they were all priced at $5 for a normal-sized comic.  Given the price and literate nature of the comics, I’d think the slightly more upscale Target would have been a better distributor.  Looking through all of them, I picked The Futurists, since it looked the most interesting.  Also, I’m a bit of a sucker for 19-th century red-coated British soldiers, which the issue featured.

Butch Guice’s artwork was definitely a selling point.  The story was rather mysterious.  That, along with some time and location jumps in India under British rule and several unconnected characters, made the whole thing confusing.  Still, it was intriguing enough to get me to want to read #2.

After getting that first issue, I went back to find a couple of review videoes by Zach and get his opinion (one and two).  Of the four titles, he’d concluded Norah’s Saga looked good, but was for teen girls, which was what I’d thought from looking at it.  He was familiar with Bass Reeves, a real-life Old West bounty hunter, and had researched him.  The comic was too like real-life in that it wasn’t that interesting.  I’d hoped for a good western comic, but that wasn’t what I saw when I flipped through it.  Zach thought The Futurists was gorgeous, but totally confusing.  He had some nitpicks about the characters all looking too alike. 

The only one Zach really liked was Red Rooster, the 30’s pulp superhero comic.  From him and another comic commentator, I found out there was some controversy surrounding this title.  It had originally been a Kickstarter project, but the backers didn’t get their hard copy before it ended up in stores.  The creator was thought to be a bit of a sleazeball, as he parleyed his backers into a better deal with a distributor. 

I went back to Wal-Mart to get a few more comics the next time I needed to go to the store, because I was somewhat skeptical they’d be around much longer.  Indeed, my local store keeps shifting aisles around massively and I had some trouble finding the display again.  Red Rooster was my main target.  It was cool.  The artwork and setting are well done.  Even in an issue with essentially no action, all setup, and introducing, but not explaining a bunch of characters, it was very enjoyable.

Issue #2 brought the action and added some character depth.  I found myself mentally making up characters for my Pulp Fantasy Core RPG game.  (I admit that it’s not my best work, since it was early, but combined with some character building and interaction elements of my Robomech game, it might work well.)  Even with the price and questionable publisher, I have to recommend these.  

      

I also got the next issue of The Futurists.  The artwork was still good, but the story offered more confusion.  This one introduced another new main character, had more time jumps, and a location jump to Scotland.  I can appreciate a slow burn in establishing characters and building a mystery, but not in a 24-page $5 comic.  Hopefully, everything comes together more coherently in the next issue.  I’ll look at it when I pick up the next issue of Red Rooster. 

Overall, they’re too pricey to sell and thus last in the stores.  Wal-Mart has tried some other exclusives with Marvel and DC, but they didn’t last either.  They were just reprints basically.  It needs to be magazine-sized, feature new material, and not be more than $5 guys.  There’s a wide open market for their superhero comics, if they’ll just focus on fun-to-read stories, instead of the Agenda and decades of continuity-driven ones.

Somewhat depressingly, the superhero title is the only really worthwhile one.  It’s okay that not all of their titles would appeal to everyone, but they’ve all got to appeal to someone.  Only Norah’s Saga has a clearly defined audience.  The other titles are too fringe.  Bass Reeves looks cartoony, but isn’t.  The Futurists perhaps appeals to Masterpiece Theater types, not comic book readers.  Even Red Rooster is too much of a throwback concept for most MCU movie superhero fans. 

I find myself using the “C-word” as an example of a comic company that would probably do better with this kind of mass distribution, Crossgen.  They didn’t offer superhero titles, but they all had action and a certain audience in mind.  My hopeless quest for fun new comics unfortunately continues.