Issue 5 and Big Changes

Quite a bit going on with the latest issue, which went live late yesterday.  Normally I share the link right away, but I wanted to wait until I got home and had time to write this up.

First, here is a link to the comic and a little image to go with it:

Issue 5

In this issue we meet Freedom and learn about his past as he helps Master Mind when she is caught up in the civil rights struggle when she finds herself in the 1960's.

As for the book, you'll see some pretty big changes with this one, but I'll save the best for last!

First up is the artwork.  Throughout the first 4 issues I've been disappointed with the artwork, none has really been up to my standards as I've really struggled with doing the comic digitally, while there were some perks with it, there were more problems than not, in particular for me was keeping the proportions correct.  I've actually made a change in the way I'm doing the artwork and it is starting to improve and hopefully will continue to do so.

Second, is the brightness, this is actually a step in the wrong direction.  When I do my comic they colors are bright and vibrant (as they appear here), but whenever I upload it to YouTube, for some reason the colors get darker.  For the first 4 issues I've adjusted the colors to make them brighter, but on August 22, YouTube took that option away - now every issue is going to be darker than it should be and I'm not happy about it.  I just have to figure out a way to get around this.

Third, and MOST important is that starting with this issue there is now a musical score that plays in the background while you read the comic.  The music is composed by my cousin, John Allerton, who reached out to me and offered to let me sample some of his music for the comic.  I think his music is an improvement to the comic, which until now had been silent - something very few videos are on YouTube.  I hope everyone likes his music as much as I do, feel free to give it a listen in the latest issue.

Press Conference

Magno insisted on holding a brief press conference after issue # 4.  You can check it out here...

Press Conference

Color Distortion

One of the things that concerns me in the way I'm doing the comic currently is the color distortion that is happening.  I currently create the comic digitally on my computer and then upload it to YouTube.  

When I do this two things happen, the program shrinks the images down and also darkens them quite a bit.  Then once it's on YouTube, I use the enhancement option to adjust the color to make it brighter, but it never works out quite the same way twice.  This means the colors are not consistent throughout each issue.  Also, it takes about 5 hours per issue for the color enhancement to take effect. 

Further more, I found out that YouTube is doing away with a lot of the enhancement options this month on the 22nd, which means my comic is going to appear a lot darker going forward.  

While not a perfect process, it was still something I utilized and now I'm not sure how it will work out.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about.  This is a scene from issue # 4, on the left side is the original work done on my computer - on the right side is how it looks on YouTube after the color 'enhancement' currently:

Waves of Creation

As I mentioned before, I started to come up with my characters while I was in fifth grade.  I don't remember exactly when, I think it was in May or June (I know it was near the end of the school year), but I didn't draw them for the first time until our family vacation over the July 4th holiday.  On the first day I created Titan, Cat, Crossbow, Magno, Phantom and Mr. Roboto (M.R).; Master Mind was created a little later.

I'm sorry to say that I never wrote down the dates of creation of any of my characters, as a kid I never really thought that was important, instead I considered the creation of the characters in "waves" and I know which wave each one is from, and that's about as close as I can get to the dates. 

The first wave for me started when I created the characters in 5th grade and that wave went about 4 years (grades 5 through 8), that's when I created a lot of the characters you see here and many more who are yet to debut.  The second wave was basically the next 4 years (grades 9 through 12).  Besides all of the founding members, others from this wave include X-Ray Boy and Spider-Star.  

You might wonder why I broke it into two waves when they ran straight through without interruption?  The reason is the way that I created the stories for the characters.  In the first wave I created a lot of them with their origins and backstories in tact.  However, in the second wave I was more concerned with just creating the characters, their names and powers - but put very little effort into any origins or backstories at all.  Echo is a character created during this time period, as well as most of the IPG.

Then I graduated from high school and worked for two years before going to college and during that time I thought about my characters and created about 5 new ones and redesigned a few costumes, but never put anything down on paper.  I consider this the third wave of creation - and it's shortest one.  As my first semester at college came to an end for the winter holiday break, I decided to draw my characters one more time.  I did a two-part poster and that's when I drew the new ones I had created.  I can't give any examples of them yet, as they haven't debuted in the comic yet.  

After those posters were done (I also can't show them yet or it would reveal too much) I didn't draw the characters again for a long time.  I spent the rest of the 90's drawing posters of the DC Comics universe, some for myself and some for my brother and I drew the last one around 1998 or so.  Then I stopped drawing for a while. 

Then in 2012 I got the idea to do my own comic book business and see I could get a following for my characters and started to practice drawing again, learning to do digital artwork (boy was that a change from pencil and paper) and reworking the stories and origins from years ago.  This is what I consider my fourth wave of creation, and what I consider myself to be in now - I've already created dozens of new characters to mix in with my existing ones and really open it up and see where it takes me.  One of the characters from this wave is Semeulke (pronounced SEMI - ULK).

I don't know how long this wave will last or if it will change into something else, I guess only time will tell....but I know this, when all is said and done all of the characters from all of the waves will have come together to tell a massive storyline. 

PS. I should add that I created the character of Diodarius when I was about 6 years old, but he was more of a stand alone character at that time and he didn't get pulled into my Ultra-Elite Team stories until many years later.

Synopsis - Issues 3 and 4

Here are the original breakdowns for issues 3 and 4.  For number 3 almost nothing was changed at all, but for issue 4 I made some modifications as I went  Here is issue 2:

Here is issue 3:

Issue 4 Deleted Scenes

When doing issue 4 I decided to leave a couple of scenes out of the final book.  The first scene that got cut takes place while Magno and Coaxoch are sitting by the fire talking.  To be honest, I don't know that much about Aztec history and when I originally read about them, I thought that Aztlan the name of a man and a village that was important to their origins.  I later realized that it wasn't a man at all, just the village that they originated from.  The scene cut was of Coaxoch telling Magno about Aztlan the man.  It was never inked

so it's a little faint to make out.

The second scene comes a little later in the issue when Magno and Coaxoch break into the temple and she sees her rubies on the statute and points to them.  As I was inking the issue, I realized that I had two scenes where she pointed to the statute and I just felt that was redundant.  In this panel you can also see my original sketch of the statute, which helped me keep the size ratio I wanted.  Clearly it looked much different in the final issue.