Rantel's Stuff

(July 2000)

Written by Barbara Randall Kesel

Pencils by Ben Lai

Inks by Ray Lai

Colours by Wil Quintana

Letters by Dave Lanphear

(Note: the writer of this comic was born Barbara Randall, and after her marriage to Karl Kesel used the professional name Barbara Kesel, which is how she is credited in this comic and, I believe, everything published by CrossGen. However, she has since gotten divorced, and last I saw was using Barbara Randall Kesel as her professional name, so that is what I will be calling her.)

So here we are at the launch of CrossGen's second series, Sigil. I'm not sure why they decided to call it that, as Sigils are a major part of all of their books, not just this one. Oh well.

This one is intriguing right off the bat, as it takes place in a sci-fi corner of the universe, with interstellar travel and multiple races and such. (I'm curious to see whether future issues explain how this relates to the non-spacefaring planets of the CrossGen universe. Do they have some kind of Prime Directive that keeps them from contacting them? Or are they just geographically isolated in their own section of space or something?)

So it appears that there is a union of human worlds, and a rival faction of reptiloids known as Saurians. We are informed early on that the two powers are on the brink of war. This issue is set on Tanipal, a waystation frequented by members of both species, which seems to give off a vibe of Mos Eisley: The Planet.

Our protagonists are Samandahl Rey ("Sam") and Roiya, two... freighters? Mercenaries? Honestly, it's not super clear WHAT they do, other than that they are "between jobs" at the moment.

Sam makes some money by playing Pseudosaurs, wherein people take psychic control of lower-order dino-things and make them gruesomely fight to the death. Pro tip: if you want the audience to like your protagonist, don't have them participating in bloodsports literally one page after their introduction. I get that they're trying to present him as rogueish, rough-around-the-edges type, but this is a bit much. Not really the kind of thing I can see, like, Han Solo doing.

While Sam does that, Roiya flirts with a dude and makes a dinner date with him.

Scene then shifts to the palace of Sultan Rotolo, ruler of Talipan.

He once had some sort of exclusive trade deal with the human planets, which has since lapsed, and they've sent a rep to convince him to renew it. The Sultan is reluctant, as he enjoys the freedom of being able to trade with both sides. However, this negotiation is cut short when the Sultan notices that one of his harem has gone missing.

Coincidentally, just at that moment Sam has bumped into a mysterious, beautiful woman who appears to be in disguise.

Before he can say more than a few words to her, the authorities bust in, announcing that Zanniati, one of the Sultan's wives, has been kidnapped, and the spaceport is now on high alert.

And THEN, if that's not enough, a group of Saurians burst upon the scene and declare their intent to kill Sam, saying they have been sent by someone named Tchlusarud, who Sam has history with. Presumably we will learn this story in future issues. (Roiya complains about Sam getting "all the credit," insisting she is just as deserving of Tchlusarud's wrath.)

A buncha things happen very quickly: Zanniati gets her hands on a big fuckin gun and joins the fight, Sam is pulled aside by a mysterious figure who imprints him with the titular Sigil (right across his chest!), and Roiya is impaled by one the Saurians, who is promptly blown away by Zanniati.

Roiya is alive, but gravely injured. Sam needs to get her back to their ship's medical facilities in order to have any hope of saving her life. The guy she was supposed to have a date with (who still hasn't been named, unless I'm missing something) reappears seemingly out of nowhere, revealing himself to be a local security officer ("Although I'm in the process of executing my sudden resignation.") who uses his security ID to bypass all the lockdowns and get them back to the ship.

After that... it's not super clear what happens? Roiya appears to die on the operating table, Sam's new Sigil-powers cause some sort of an explosion... and then the issue just kind of ends.

I get that it's supposed to be a cliffhanger, but I feel like it would be more effective if the audience had a clearer idea of what was happening. And I feel like that sums up a lot of what I think is wrong with this comic.

Pros always tell aspiring comic artists: focus on drawing SEQUENCES, not just pin-ups. Because being able to draw good is only half the battle in comics. You've also got to be able to clearly convey story and action from panel to panel. And I feel like the storytelling in this comic is just not up to snuff. Lai's compositions are often overly crowded, his panel-to-panel continuity of frequently unclear, and Quintana's muted coloring doesn't help matters. And maybe this is just a nitpick, but Sam and Roiya's nameless (?) date look way too similar to each other. In short, there several points in this comic where I had a bit of trouble following what was going on.

I didn't talk much about the art in Mystic in my last post, but you can really see the difference. Brandon Peterson had been drawing comics professionally for years, and his storytelling is miles clearer than that of the Lai brothers, who were promising newbies that CrossGen snapped up. Their heavily anime-influence style may be pretty to look at, but their storytelling needs practice. I'll be interested to see if I notice improvement over the course of this series (although I'm actually not sure how long they stick around for.)

(July 2000)

Written by Ron Marz

Pencils by Brandon Peterson

Inks by John Dell

Colours by Andrew Crossley

Letters by Dave Lanphear

The first comic that CrossGen published was actually CrossGen Chronicles #1, written by head writers Ron Marz and Barbara Randall Kesel and illustrated by Claudio Castellini, which served as an introduction to the four monthly series they launched with. But I don't own CrossGen Chronicles #1, so we'll be skipping that and instead going right to the first issues of each series, which work just fine as introductions themselves.

So here we are at Mystic #1.

The creative team on this one were mostly relative veterans: Marz had had lengthy runs on Silver Surfer for Marvel and Green Lantern for DC, Peterson had worked on X-Men and various Image titles before being recruited as CrossGen's art director, and Dell had been the main inker on Grant Morrison and Howard Porter's blockbuster JLA run. Crossley was the only relative newby of the group.

This issue begins, as each of the first issues does, with a conversation between mysterious celestial beings (this is possibly explained more in the Chronicles that I don't have) as they lament the state of the universe, and plan to introduce an element of chaos into the order of things by granting powerful "sigils" to select individuals across the various worlds, but offering no guidance to those chosen few as to what has happened to them or what they should do.

(Note: I don't have a scanner or anything, so apart from covers, which are readily available online, any art that I post is just gonna be photos that I take on my phone.)

This particular story takes us to the world of Ciress, a place rife with magic and mysticism and governed by seven mages' guilds. Each guild is headed by a master, and when a master dies, their spirit is transferred into their successor, giving them the accumulated knowledge and experience of all the past masters (though the new one retains their own identity and personality; it's basically like the Avatar.)

Our protagonist is Giselle Villard, an upper-class party girl, whose studious older sister Genevieve is set to be invested as a guild master the following day (a rare achievement for one so young.)

Giselle is attending a society party, where she expresses her contempt for magic and those who practice it. Of course, her sister turns out to be standing right behind her as she says this. Genevieve drags Giselle outside, castigates her for her irresponsible ways and unserious attitude, and coldly reminds her of the importance of the next day's ceremony. No longer in a party mood, Giselle goes home for the night, on the way spontaneously adopting a stray squit (apparently this world's equivalent to dogs) who will almost certainly later turn out to be more than he seems.

Interestingly, despite the ubiquity of magic, our glimpse of the city street here seems remarkably like that of contemporary America, with brownstones, fire hydrants, and taxi cabs. I'll be interested to see how this aesthetic develops going forward.

The next day, Giselle meets with Genevieve at the guild cathedral, and the two sisters patch things up ahead of Genevieve's investiture ceremony. However, during the ceremony (attended by the heads of all seven guilds), things go awry. Giselle, seated in the audience, encounters a mysterious man who shakes her hand before disappearing, imprinting her palm with a mysterious mark. Sensing that things are amiss, Giselle attempts to flee the Cathedral... but the spiritual transfer ceremony is interrupted, and the spirits of ALL SEVEN guild heads abandon their hosts and enter Giselle instead!

She collapses into a fountain, and the final panel shows her palm, now marked with the glowing Sigil (the yin-yang-like design that serves as the company logo.)

The North American comic book industry has always operated mostly on a freelance, work-for-hire basis. Writers and artists do their work in their own time from their own homes, and are paid piecemeal by publishers for the pages they produce.

On the one hand, the highly decentralized work force is kind of cool. While comics were once produced almost exclusively by people who lived in the vicinity of New York City, advances in technology mean that people all around the world can now collaborate on these things!

However, because they are all freelancers, there is no health insurance, no pension plan, no sick leave, no vacation pay, no benefits of any kind. If an artist breaks their arm and can't draw for three months, they're out of luck. No income until they can start putting out pages again.

But what if there was another way?

At the turn of the millennium, tech entrepreneur and comics fan Mark Alessi and his cousin Gina Villa founded CrossGen comics, and they were determined to do things differently.

CrossGen writers and artists were salaried employees, and all worked out of a central office space in Tampa, Florida (which for most of them meant relocating, potentially uprooting families and in some cases even immigrating to a whole new country.) They were able to recruit a mix of young up-and-comers looking for a shot at the big leagues, and industry veterans who admired the vision of their new way of doing things.

CrossGen comics were set in a shared universe, like those of Marvel and DC, but unlike the Big Two, CrossGen eschewed superheroes, focusing instead on genres like fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and horror. And they took the phrase "shared universe" pretty literally, with most of their series taking place on entirely separate PLANETS with no direct crossover between them, but all connected by the mysterious "Sigils" which kicked off the plot of each book.

They had a lot of cool ideas, and received some strong fan support, but in many ways the company was mismanaged from the beginning. I won't go into detail about that here, but Ron Marz, one of the company's primary writers throughout its existence, has shared many behind-the-scenes CrossGen stories at various outlets over the years, and I encourage you to seek them out. Suffice to say, CrossGen declared bankruptcy and ceased publishing operations in 2004, less than four years after putting out their first comics.

Their assets were purchased by Disney, who then bought Marvel a few years later, essentially putting CrossGen's intellectual property under the auspices of Marvel Comics. Marvel hasn't done much with properties since then; they put out a few miniseries reimagining CrossGen titles over a decade ago, but those never really went anywhere. This year, for the first time, Marvel finally announced that they would be publishing omnibus editions of the old CrossGen comics from the early 2000s, perhaps heralding a new era of relevance for these oft-forgotten stories (we'll see.)

And this is where I come in! A few years ago, I bought a longbox of comics on ebay, which included complete runs of CrossGen's four launch titles: Sigil, Mystic, Scion, and Meridian, as well as their first expansion title, The First.

I've never really been a big social media user. The only platform I've ever previously been active on was twitter, and, well... things ain't going so well over there.