Red Rooster Part 2: Mitch Swirls Further Down the Drain.

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Yesterday I got a backer email from Red Rooster's Indiegogo announcing that the second part of the PDF would be emailed to backers that night. I actually got kind of excited, because as some of you might remember, I enjoyed the art and story of the first PDF despite some of the problems with lateness and consumer communication with the Breitweisers and their campaign. I joked in a Tweet that a new phrase would rise out of the whole Red Rooster debacle: "Better Late than Red Rooster."

The first part of Red Rooster was a big surprise for me personally because even though I had been critical of the Breitweisers and many of the people they associate with, and I had been vocally critical of the Allegiance Walmart deal and the disappointment many of those books made me feel, I was SHOCKED once I trudged through all of the annoyances of the downloadable comic's DRM to read it and find out that I actually loved the story and the art. But, I am sad to report, pretty much everything that I had found redeeming about the first part of the comic, seems to have been thrown to the curb in order for Mitch to meet his Wal-mart deadlines.

I titled the review of the first red Rooster blog "GROWING ROSES" as a not so subtle dig at Mitch being so slow drawing and working on the comic book which is now around two years late, but I was forced to admit that the first part of the book was well written and especially well drawn. I had really enjoyed Mitch's art style and attention to detail even though I had to question his work ethic. The quality of the first book actually made me secretly look forward to enjoying the rest of it once Mitch had finally decided to buckle down and get his work done on this book "like a man". Sadly the Breitweiser's found a way to make Red Rooster, and their whole Allegiance business model, look like an even bigger failure than the already colossal one so many backers have been complaining about all along.

Mitch, oddly enough, seems to have dealt with the lateness of the book and the Walmart deadlines for the book in the worst way he possibly could have done- take the exact opposite strategy with the creation of the book and cut corners in order to crank it out. 

It only took reading a couple of pages of the second part of the series to instantly see a massive drop in quality from the first. It appears, to my untrained eye, that Mitch has began to just use layouts and has started skimping on backgrounds in order to crank out the book and start "meeting" his deadlines for his Walmart deal. Check out the picture above to see an interesting comparison from the two different parts of Red Rooster and see if you can't tell what I am talking about. 

The sheer amount of detail and craftsmanship in the first part of the story truly made me appreciate Red Rooster despite all of the problems with it being massively late and even the questionable aspects of the Walmart deal. At least from the first book one could tell that Mitch was at least putting the work in and giving the project some passion, but it appears that the reality of the looming Walmart deadlines to get the book on store shelves made Mitch sacrifice all of his artistic integrity and fall back on Layouts instead of finished pencils and finished backgrounds. I promise you that I am not just picking and choosing these examples. The drastic change and drop in quality goes throughout the whole book and becomes even more noticeable and laughably worse as the second book progresses. This drop in quality from the first books applies to the story as well as the art sadly.

This change in quality is a bigger problem than just a change in philosophy and work ethic. It points to a bigger problem with the Breitweisers, their Walmart deal, and their integrity in dealing with their original Indiegogo backers who believed in them and their vision and gave them the money and the clout to make the whole Allegiance Walmart deal a reality.

When this book was just to fulfill the Indiegogo promise to the backers it seems as if Mitch had the philosophy of growing roses with the creation of the book. He looked as if he was putting lots of detail and time into the art and at least making it look like a quality and finished product to account for it's lateness, but once he made the Allegiance deal and the deadlines loomed and he needed to crank out the rest of the book to meet real world deadlines and consequences he dropped all pretense and showing of caring for the quality of his work and sold out his artistic integrity to not even give consumers, Walmart and Indiegogo alike, finished pencils in the final product. Basically, he sold out and punked out both by the end.

This reveals a lot about the Breitweisers and their character. Originally they didn't care about their first backers enough to give them a quality book in a timely manner and appeared to drop all allegiance (pun intended) to those backers when an opportunity came up for them to get even more money and attention with the Walmart deal.

All of a sudden they didn't seem to care about the fans who believed and supported them because now they had something bigger to latch on. Then, making things even worse, once they made those bigger commitments they sold out those people as well in order to skimp on quality, instead of doubling down on their work ethic, he resulted to layouts instead of finished pencils, just to phone it in and meet a deadline just to get paid. There appears to be a pattern emerging with the Breitweisers and one thing is certain to me personally, I will never be able to trust them and their businesses again.