Sunday Revue: Stellar Persona

Make Sure Your Aura's Cleansed, Because Here Comes

There's a lot to be said for being a good samaritan. Help out a pal with the jitters at karaoke, you'll make a friend for life. Help out a dragon from the stars, you may just get super powers.

That's the jist of Stellar Personae, a sweet and candy colored story of friendship, learning and-yes-cosmic auras with special powers created by Squeakybat.

It can be found on Tapas or at this site. This little darling is a pre-teen adventure Story a la Rainbow Brite or My Little Pony. While that may not be every reader's cup of tea, within this comic's genre Stellar Persona is worth a high rating.

The Rating

There's a lot going for this one!

The Raves

I'll give this work one of my higher compliments: I could see it going into animation. It started out good in art style and it's gotten better with time. The stylization is sweetly and deftly done, creating the cheerful bubblegum-flavored effect of Cartoon Network with the gentleness of the old Care Bears show or, more aptly, Rainbow Brite.

In fact, Rainbow Brite popped into my head quite a lot as this story went on through its protagonists' work to help an injured alien, learn about their powers and find artifacts. Throughout the story readers are shown examples of diversity, supporting friends, teamwork and empathy in the context of a fun and engaging story. Explosions make nice punctuation here and there.

In fact, the alien in question heals through symbiosis with people doing good things, a touch I particularly liked.
There's a nod to the New Age concept of auras, used as shorthand for magic and has a real focus on thematic color, which makes for a really BRIGHT page. Definitely an eye-catcher!

The Razzes

Just a few wrinkles in this lovely game of dress-up need to be ironed out.

I'd like to see a little more attention paid to word bubble formation. For example, the art here looks great; by comparison the bubble looks clumsy.  In fact, most of the issues that come up in this comic are lettering-related. Word bubbles are sometimes visually out of order, making the reader track back to figure out who's speaking. Squeakybat, you're not alone. This is one of the most difficult things to learn in comic work!
My best recommendation is to read the the eminent article Comic Layout Tutorial: The Comic Lettering Spell By Chris Oatley. You'll get a lot of great advice there! Oh, and watch out for typos. I found quite a few on a read through.

The Revue

Definitely handing this out the next time someone asks 'so what do I give my kid to read in comics?'