A NEW YEAR TO RISE AGAIN
Updates on Kitaru, Critique of Alphacore and Hotel Story, and NEW PROJECTS TO COME!
Happy New Year, Fiends!
We’re going full throttle into the 2024 with a NEW TITLE ANNOUNCEMENT, a ton of updates, and critiques, for you as well as behind the scenes looks at books currently in the works. We have so many projects coming that I think a few title cards are in order:
RISE COMICS COMING in 2024:
First we’ll be printing and shipping out KITARU WITCH HUNTER and my art book NECROVONICON! So far we’ve had a lot of support but I plan to do another youtube tour of the book before closing. You can get the full library before we close our campaigns! Also all my Paid members here at Von Kingdom will be recieving a FREE DIGITAL Download of the Kitaru Book so be ready!
The TERROR IN THE TRENCHES Vol. 2 Campaign Launches this year! The book will be halfway to mostly done by launch. 25 Pages are already colored and look better than ever!
Working with
has been a blast and we’ve got something very special for you with the Campaign for the FULL PSYCHO-KILLERS Vol.1! It will be in full color and have a hefty page count telling the first arc in the PK saga. It’s gonna absolutely blow your minds!I’d like to also announce a NEW TITLE that I would love to crowdfund later in the year. I got so bored with superhero stories that I decided to take a crack at my own. A story and characters appeared and I wrote a script that cooks and makes heroes interesting to me again. I can’t believe I’m putting out a superhero title in an age of superheroes dying right in front of us at the box office and comic sales, but maybe that’s WHY I’m doing it. I want to help American heroes be cool again. I want to help American comics sell again and be FUN AGAIN. People want good stories and that’s what I’m here to do — while hopefully reminding everyone why we love superheroes again. SO I GIVE YOU:
MURDER LEAGUE is the story of young shadow hopping villain who falls in love. He loves his dream girl so much that he’s retiring. He goes to the superheroes and turns himself in so he can be chipped and live a normal life, but a corrupt superhero who wants to finally cross the line and kill, kidnaps his love and forces him to form a super villain team so he can kill them all at once. That’s MURDER LEAGUE baby, and we have an amazing artist attached! I plan to get this one in stores and get people talking about fun comics again. I will be revealing ALL my character designs to paid backers down below in this post. You guys are gonna love them!
So I’ve teamed with the perfect artist for Murder League who’s done a lot of work for the BIG 2, GEORGES DUARTE. He’s done more violent and horrific work on books like CROSSED and here’s some of his work on SHE-HULK. He brings real power and incredible facial expressions to heroes and adds details and a grit that other artist’s can’t. Also he uses space in a way I can’t wait to exploit on the page! We are going to make the best superhero book on the shelves. And I can’t wait to start because he starts drawing it THIS WEEK!
I’ve also started work on another title called DEATHSLINGER and I have some cool WIP pages to tease you with! This is my gothic tale of necromancy gone sexy, with rip-roaring battles and amazingly deep characters, teens and adults will love this one. Working with the amazing young artist JD SHUN on this one!
You guys are gonna love this book! The different ways in which Necromancy is used is so fresh and fun and original and will lead to some really great battles and conflicts for our hero Nico Mancer and her undead companion Drake Folsom. I am unsure if enough will be done in 2024 to launch a campaign so this might be a 2025 romp. Here’s hoping!
ALSO I want to work on MONSTER M.D. 2! Look for updates coming in 2024!
ALPHACORE #1 - Rippaverse - By Chuck Dixon and Joe Bennett - SPOILERS AHEAD
This review will be more in depth because there’s a lot to say about this one.
Eric July is a YouTuber and musician turned comic book publisher. He’s built his audience since the start of YouTube and became popular via his criticisms of mainstream comics. It’s no secret the mainstream has problems of degraded story, propaganda messaging over quality, tired tropes, perversion of legacy characters, variant cover exploitation, and political discrimination. Eric gave much needed critique to the mainstream and then decided to publish his own comics under the promise of doing things better. After the massive success of ISOM #1 and #2 he had Chuck Dixon take the helm of Alphacore.
Alphacore is the story of 3 super cops who hang out in a giant floating fortress above the city and fight super bad guys when the government lets them. There is Bryan the ex-military Superman analog, Braxwell the mute super guy in a helmet, and Ingrid the Latina power lasso user. No, they don’t have superhero names. They’re just cops… with a superhero team name. I found that a lot of this book is the creators wanting to have it both ways. “We don’t do superhero names, but here’s our superhero team name and a floating fortress.” “We are freaky outcasts to society but we were also hired as the police force.”
The name Alphacore stood out to me from the start. I read that fans asked Eric if he had mistakenly used ‘core’ for the name instead of the word ‘corps’ as in Marine Corps, but Eric stated that no mistake was made and he intentionally used the word ‘core’. After reading the book I don’t know why a team would be called a core. They don’t have a hideout at the core of the planet. They don’t live in some cybernetic core of energy that gives them their powers. There is no core to speak of in the book.
The team of Alphacore is even led by a military cut marine looking guy in a military green uniform who sounds straight up like R. Lee Ermey in the trailer. Why would he name the team core over corps? I wish it didn’t bug me, but it did.
There are 5 inkers and 2 colorists on this book, which I’ve never seen before in a comic. There is also the misspelling of a creator’s name. I’ve seen critics rake the industry over coals for this and rightfully so.
I saw what these 5 inkers did to Joe Bennet’s (Immortal Hulk) pencils. Joe’s pencil work is strong and dynamic overall, but the brush stroke happy unprofessional inkers butchered it. They added shading and rushed done brush strokes where nothing was needed.
In fact, they were so haphazard with their work that if you look close at the strokes you can see a kind of spiral effect taking place on people’s faces, which creates an discomforting, unnerving feeling. Maybe it’s just for villains? No, everyone pretty much gets the weird spiral treatment. I thought I was reading a superhero book, not another deep horror cut from Junji Ito.
The different inkers tried to ink in the same brushy “get ‘er done” style only to make the book look inconsistent throughout. There are 2 colorists on this book and that can also lead to some pretty jolting page turns when things don’t match up. This type of inconsistency is leveled in a mainstream books, and rightfully so.
The story works and moves us quickly from pithy scene to scene with elegance. Dixon knows how to make a story jam, but the intrigue of super cops solving mysteries while being under the Govs thumb isn’t all that engaging of a conflict. It feels contrived and like we’re missing out on what makes superheroes fun. Does Eric July, a self described “anarcho-capitalist” libertarian, really fantasize about super heroes that don’t do anything unless the government lets them?
We learn zero motivation for these heroes, or even see their lives outside of their floating palace, dubbed The Eagle’s Nest (Yet another military sounding name yet they aren’t called Corps?). We actually see where a villain with lava powers lives and it’s a beat up trailer with an overbearing grandma that wakes him with a fire extinguisher. This villain already has more character depth and interest for me than any of the heroes.
If people with super powers (Called Excepts in Rippaverse) are considered “freaks” then why are tax payers okay with them being super cops? Imagine the X-men being hired as a police force. They lose what makes them interesting outcasts now and just become more boogeymen for a bureaucracy. If you want to tell a super power outcast story, tell it. This is a COP story, where they lament being outcasts while sitting in their massive floating fortress above the city paid for by tax dollars. It doesn’t correlate well to the main conflict at all. What about adding a member to Alphacore who looks more frightening to hit home the idea harder? A new member that looks like The Thing would be fun and land those “freaky” themes.
I get the idea of the Gov being something to conflict with, but no one wants to watch superheroes get the green light from some chick on a cellphone to go do their job. The team does break rules from time to time, which I like, but they remain under the Gov’s thumb. If they had broken free of the Gov rule by the end of the story that would work, but it instead seems to be an ongoing conflict that they think makes for an interesting story. Let’s hope not.
Also why have a floating fortress for a team where only 2 of them can fly? Why not a tower that people can actually get to and doesn’t require massive amounts of jet fuel 24-7 to keep going? Of course this fortress ends up crashing into the city it protects. If there was some super smart powered character that put together the team and built a floating base for them then it would play a bit better but instead it just feels like taxation for a bad idea that no one asked for which ended up falling on the city that paid for it. Is this story actually a poignant commentary about the dangers of tax funding super heroes? I doubt that’s what they were going for.
The villains are rich schemers who hide behind their phones the entire story, which is a trope I’d expect more from a current day Marvel comic. They are essentially Klaus and Klaudia from The Chipmunk Adventure.
They say heroes are only as good as their villains so I was surprised to see Alphacore go up against such unthreatening, boring baddies. A strangely hilarious scene has the male villain enter to discover that the female one is being rubbed down by a bodybuilder who keeps creepily smirking at the male villain in every panel. I’d expect this in a current year DC book.
My favorite character was a supporting guy that I knew would die within 2 panels. He hid his powers yet used them when he had to for good. He did what was right no matter what, costing him his own life. Perhaps he is the impetus for Alphacore finally going against the government? He behaved more like an outcast than any of the main heroes, and he hit home the “outcasts who help people” themes better than the leads.
The real story of Alphacore could have been “How do outcasts with powers become tax paid super cops if society doesn’t trust them?” That might be an interesting conflict where we learn their motivations and their backgrounds and see that life wasn’t too great for them before Alphacore. They could have had conflicts with each other that were more interesting than just giving Bryan shit about his cape or eyebrows. They could have come together to face great odds and win over the people to earn their way into being protectors. That’s a story I’d read and one they can still do.
FAVORITE PART:
- The jailbreak where the baddie tricks two low IQ cops into charging back up his electric powers. No one told them to cease using electric weaponry on the electric guy they had in the cell? Still, I actually loved the jailbreak. It had great imagery and creepiness.
GOODS:
- Solid paced, easy to read.
- Some decent action moments with a cool prison break scene.
BADS:
- Pencils butchered by bad inkers.
- Bland and at times unlikeable characters with no motivations.
- Tired tropes I’d expect to find in a mainstream book.
- Weak conflicts and cell phone villains.
I’d avoid 5 inkers in the future. Hire a super editor to make these books shine. Alphacore has now dropped their giant fortress on the city. They could be disbanded and their base scrapped. They could have to work to come together again to earn the public’s trust again and we get to know them in the process. I don’t have all the answers, but these are things that would interest me as a reader more than what I’ve seen so far. Here’s hoping the best for the Rippaverse ahead. With the right changes they have the potential for good books.