Hi again, Speaker,<P>Sorry it took an extra day, but the love of my life was leaving today, so I chose to spend all of my last days with her and her only, because I knew I woldn't be able to see her again for a good while...<P>So, Here I am, and as promised, heree are my comments for ya:<P>ART: This one's a no-brainer -- i LIKE it. You have created cool-lloking characters in a very nice and pretty distinct style. You show good sense of proportion and perspective, and your CG, while shaky at times (I'm guessing because you were in a rush or something), is usually quite good and clean.<P>WRITING: So far, you seem to be a hit and miss joke writer. Your second strip was proly one of my favorites, along with about a dozen others, including the fourth strip, the 7th strip, the 8/19 strip, the 8/20 strip, the 8/22, the 8/27, etc...<P>Thinking up Cee and Silent Bot was pretty much GENIUS, and for the most part, their being a recurring theme works really well for you.<P>You seem to have a good flair for buildup, as well as pacing and the ability to bring back something you've set up earlier with panache and great effect (the Chasing R2-A3 and the 9/04 sex joke are good examples of bringing back an old joke with more punch)...<P>However, there are a few things that I would warn you about...<P>1) "Clique" humour: one of the dangers that you often skirt around with in your strip is that of "clique" humour, or In-Jokes. Now I know that your strip professes itself as a Geek strip, and that's fine, but you have to realize that you risk losing a large number of readers with more obscure jokes sometimes (i.e., you're definitely not appealing to a wide demographic). <P>Some of your AICN jokes, for example, may be lost on your readers, unles they've been keeping up with exactly the same things you've been keeping up with.<P>This doesn't mean you should only do general jokes that EVERYONE will get, but rather that you should ensure that if you make an obscure-ish in-joke, that you give enough info so that even someone who has NO idea what, say, LoTR is, that they'll still find the joke funny. <P>---
2) Fresh jokes vs. old jokes: This one's a little harder to stay on top of, but is still pretty important -- try to avoid using old or tired gags... the AYB joke was wayyyy too overused to be rehashed for another few hundred years, methinks... and some of your other gags i've also seen before (now, mind you, i read a LOT of comics, and there's LOTS that i've seen before, and i sometimes find even the "big boys" rehashing old jokes and stuff, so it's not like it's an uncommon problem) <P>------------
3) Mismatching facial expressions with lines: This one is one that you do occasionally, where the face doesn't match the punchline exactly, thus weaking the OOMPH effect. For example, your 3rd strip (which was a joke i'd seen before, incidentally), the punchline "well, some of the time" has her smiling when it seems it might be more effective if she were looking dismayed, confused, embarrassed, or perhaps a few other potential expressions... <P>And the next strip, which i really enjoyed, I think would have been even better if she would have given Andy a nice toothy EVIL grin rather than a happy smile...<P>----------
4) 4th wall humour: breaking the fourth wall is real tricky business, and you've got to avoid using it as a crutch... your 6th strip suffers because of it -- you build up a nice gag with the mask, but end it with "i didn't draw us" as a punchline. unfortunately, that is a gag that is so overdone it's almost worse than an AYB gag. However, the next strip was hilarious, by taking the previous as a set-up, and offering us the slightly predictable but still very funny triangle face.<P>Really, the way you're working with your characters, I don't think you need to use any 4th wall throwaway gags -- your charcters are interesting enough as is to date, so develop them more instead of reverting to cartoonist jokes and such... ^__^ <P>---------------
5) Pacing: This may be the biggest qualm I have with your strip so far. I think that you try to pack too much into each strip, when you could EASILY stretch out storylines and gagas over the course of two or three or more strips...<P>Example: Your "finally a plot" strips, where you started out what seemed like a potentially interesting Thundercats parody -- you set it up for two strips, then nothing ensued. I'm sure that you could have drawn a few interesting and funny strips making fun of the Thundercats, wheether or not the readers even knew who they were...<P>Another example: Your first Binky strip. I really think that each one of those panels could have almost been a strip unto itself... You could have had one strip with the suspense of the tentacle behind Andy, with a joke there, then a strip with Andy seeing the tentacle and being incredibly afraid, wondering what it will do next, then a third strip with the tentacle not doing anything yet, and andy waiting in fear, and the fourth strip with andy finally approaching the tentacle and giving it a name, and then a fifth strip with Binky talking to another tentacle, and saying how it made itself a new pet (with the reversal on the it takes a while for a wild animal to get accustomed to a human joke), etc... BAsically, a LOT could have been made from what you packed into a single strip.<P>Basically, what I'm saying is, milk a good idea for what you can get -- you don't make orange juice out of just a single squeeze of an orange, right? ^__^<P>----------<P>I'm sure that there are a lot more things I could say in terms of criticism, but this should offer you a good start.<P>And of course, like i said at the beginning of all this, while you <I>do</I> hit and miss (at least in my opinion), remember that you DO hit. There WERE about a dozen or so of your strips that i chuckled or laughed out loud at, which is good for any strip that is just starting out.<P>Overall, I think you're art is good, and your writing improving. Don't try as hard to be funny, and let it some out neaturally -- non-sequitor humour, which you seem to try to do a lot of, is a very difficult thing to do -- check out <A HREF="
http://jwalkin.keenspace.com" TARGET=_blank>J-Walkin</A> for some EXCELLENT examples of non-sequitor humour -- in my opinion, Joe Nadeau is one of the non-sequitor humour <B>geniuses</B> of the webtoon world, bar none, and you may learn a good trick or two by reading through his archives. <P>I <I>did</I> like your stuff, though, Speaker, and will even keep reading it for a while to see where you're going with it.<P>Keep stripping, man! ^_^<P>(Oh, and, yes -- feel free to use Dick and the sign if you want. Just let me know when you plan on using them, and I'll even post a link on that day for ya! ^__^)
<A HREF="http://geekgasm.keenspace.com" TARGET=_blank>http://geekgasm.keenspace.com</A> 
