Comics Journey to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker: Allegiance

Though he might become a bit single minded when it comes to um...Certain objectives.


Wonder if the FO will try to salvage the wreckage and rebuild the Supremacy...Hate to see that beauty go to waist.

 

Bye bye Supremacy. Any wonder Kylo Ren needs shipyards.

 

The First Order taking Fondor and Mon Cala makes strategic sense. I don’t see them glassing either world, even one with a rebellious past like Mon Cala. The First Order are monsters, but they love weapons and presumably would want to have worlds capable of producing them.

—Adm. Nick

 

Beauty? TLJ barely showed it off! Given how much that film was wanting to pay homage to ESB at the very least we should have had a sequence of a Star Destroyer docking or launch of Star Destroyers from it.

As to "waist" Autotext at work, right?

 

They actually have a concept art for that if I'm not wrong.

 

I rest my case!

 

This issue didn't quite pop as much as the first 3, no Kylo ranting which I always want, but it certainly had a few bangs (Finn believing that Poe would save him was a nice touch) and directly ending with Mon Cala occupied makes me think we'll see the planet or at least a reference to it's occupation somewhere in Rise of Skywalker

 

They also take over

Spoiler

Corellia

in resistance reborn so they're trying to rebuild their fleet and fast.

 

Pretty interesting video some of you may like.

 

Can't help but agree.

Marvel artists need to pick up on their art. Stop tracing and actually do what you are hired to do.

 

One can hope that with Fiege overlooking comics now that might change in the mid-future.

 

Nah, it's a crappy video, punching down. It's management you need to get the attention of, those who set the deadlines the artists work to.

 

How much actual input does Lucasfilm have or is this purely Marvel Comics division?

Is it sorta a EA thing where it's not 100% in house

 

Where Marvel and comics are concerned EA is a good one to bring up. Like EA, Marvel's primary focus is the quarterly corporate reporting. To that end they focus on monthly sales, traded are secondary.

It was Marvel that started the push to double shipping. It was successful enough that DC had to follow suite. However DC have recognised what Marvel did not in terms of production and have assigned groups of artists to their books.

As to LFL, there might be some oversight but likely minimal. As Disney leaves SW to LFL, so does LFL let it's licensee operate as it sees fit. Who cares about the how so long as it sells and makes money, right?

 

I'll repeat what I said in the art thread: I don't feel like the artists should be completely absolved of all blame.

Like, imagine that they release a new Star Wars video game, and it's revealed that the developers stole assets from a fan mod to use in the final product. Should the developers be shielded from any and all criticism just because the higher ups were demanding that the game be ready for shelves by Christmas? Not to mention for a lot of these traces they don't even change the image up a bit, in some cases it doesn't even seem like they're trying to hide it.

I don't want to sound unsympathetic to the plight of the artists. But IMO while the abuse and demands of corporate may make the artists' actions understandable, it does not make them justified. At the end of the day these people still took shortcuts that not only looked bad, but more importantly used the work of others and attempted to deceive people into thinking it was their own.

 

Ben did you actually watch it?

Some of the examples are pretty egregious. In one case, the artist copied Miniature pieces in a diorama picture from Mel's miniatures...complete with the pegs.

In fact the entire final shot of the fleet is just a slightly adjusted version of that diorama.

Even if you're trying to meet a deadline, that's pretty lazy.

The artists and management need to be called out. Both are not doing their job.

 

I will still go with editors being the primary target because of the greater power they have, including the ability to change things in a way the artists simply don't. The problem here is that those editors likely have bosses too, the person you want to influence is the one who sets all the timetables and targets. Yet, if that person sees that speedy product sells, they're not going to change it either because Marvel's primary interest is the quarterly corporate reporting cycle.

Producing the art, on time, is the job, what people aren't happy about is the quality of the output. And Marvel certainly sees artists as expendable, if one artist won't do what they're told, another will. Plus the editors signed off the work, the comic came out on time and, given the reception here, that's what is most important. I've seen things kick off over a week delay and that's here it'll be worse on Twitter / Facebook. For all I'm sceptical of what attention companies give to the net, if Marvel are looking they may well be seeing that the demand for fast product trumps that for slower, higher quality product.

Some decisions are required by consumers - are you really wanting a weekly SW comic, with #4 coming out today this is all going to kick off again, if this is the result? Marvel clearly thinks enough people do. Similarly, how important to you is the whole double-shipping schedule? Because that is the likely source of all shortcuts, less time, more work, get it done any way you like so long as it is done. Are you prepared to stop buying the books to try to pressure for change? Because nothing less will have any chance of influencing. If you buy the book, you've already endorsed all the production practices of it and Marvel have been rewarded for all the crap they pulled.

Marvel do put out some good books but I try to minimise my buying because they are such a dodgy company. I've managed to get it down to about 3-4 books, with the trade buy being only if the titles get an OHC edition. I'm ambivalent about buying Gillen's SW run or Dameron, if they get an OHC, because Marvel will consider that as validating how they produced it. Even on OHCs, Marvel are reducing the production values - even with my being as selective as possible they still take the mick.

 

The insistence that this all falls at the feet of the artist simply being "lazy" is especially inaccurate in the case of Allegiance, where all one has to do is look at the series' weekly schedule and Luke Ross's portfolio of quality Star Wars work over the last few years to put the pieces together. Jedi Ben has correctly identified the actual responsible parties here - the decision-makers who felt "Allegiance" required a weekly cadence and were willing to require corners be cut to achieve it.

 

It certainly helps that, in this case, the artist is Luke Ross. But if it was Larocca? My answer has to be the same - the artist works to provide the imagery to the specs requested including deadline. That that includes this weird photo referencing is by the by.

We might think the artist's job is to carefully craft an original product from scratch, Marvel's version? That the pencils are done in time for the inking, lettering and colouring to be added and it still makes its print slot so it ships on time.

This isn't new. I doubt it's news to anyone here. Maybe it's unpleasant to admit that this is the way it is, that I can appreciate the difficulty of. But it is what it is.

 

In Larocca's case I'm convinced the entire "strange traced faces" thing he had going on for a long time was, for whatever reason, his own artistic decision. I can't explain why he thought that was a good idea, but I mean, he was proudly posting images of his work on Twitter, scanned/traced faces and all. Whether he was pressured to cut corners or not we may never know (he did produce artwork at an incredibly rapid pace), but either way the work he produced did seem to reflect his artistic intent.

 

Larocca is a more mixed case as I didn't see the style he became known for on SW to be that present in the Vader run he did. But some of the later images for the end of Aaron's run do have a real 'what was he thinking?' aspect to them.

 

Spoiler

Just started reading this on a whim after buying on comixology. To be blunt I regret it now and remembered why I avoided new canon comic books. Admiral Ackbar is a deadbeat dad? Really? There were 30 years of peace between ROTJ and the ST, yet no excuse was provided. I didn't even bother finishing after that.

 

Spoiler

The biggest failing of the Sequels (which is weird considering I enjoy the Sequel Trilogy) seems to be that no one can raise their kids. I've noticed that in the manga Naruto. Main characters Naruto and Sasuke are shown as deadbeat dads (at least in the to me non-canon spin off Boruto: Next Generations).

 

I doubt very much that Ethan Sacks introduced this detail about Aftab and Ackbar's relationship simply to character-sabotage Ackbar "just because." I suspect there's a seed for future storytelling there; maybe Ackbar had more going on during his "retirement" on Mon Cala than we're aware of at present?

 

Spoiler

Critics of the "it seems like nothing happened" between ROTJ and TFA were told that the Republic got 30 years of peace. What is the point of that if Ackbar can't even have a decent family life?

Ackbar can still have interesting stories and still have a family. One does not preclude the other.