Comic Genesis Forums

I have finally reached 30 comics! (A little more if you want to count filler) And I have come to take my critique. This is a no-holds-barred open to all topics type thing. So tell me whatever you think. If you think something is great, say so. If you think something sucks, say so too. I need to know what I'm doing wrong as well as right. Point out every single clich

Okay then...let's take a look shall we? [Pulls on rubber glove]. Turn your head and cough.

Heh, uh oh...introducing yourself as a character and breaking the 4th wall all in the first comic. You'll get some furrowed brows and clucks of disapproval from many Keenspacers for that one, I'm sure. [Reads further] the 4th wall breaking continues! But then again, since you broke it in the first comic...it never really existed in the first place I suppose. Your comic is existing with only 3 walls...it wouldn't stand up in an earthquake that's for sure!

Ah, this is better...colour! An actual story seems to be beginning! You've added a 4th wall to your house! Uh oh...now we're back to the black and white stuff...now the colour again. This bouncing back and forth is confusing. Stick to one story.

Oh, and a comic about nerdy friends who hang around playing videogames while making sarcastic vaguely insulting coments towards each other? Yeah, never seen that before. If people want Penny Arcade/PVP, they'll go read those comics...since you're not on the level yet to make a comic better than those two, you have to come up with something original to get people to read.

The non-PA rip-off part of your strip...the full colour adventure part, is much better. Is it horribly original? No...but the story is easy to follow, the dialogue sounds relatively natural and it actually is fairly funny in parts. "Boy you know you're having a rough day when you're suprised to not be dead". Good line.

The art isn't bad. Nice colour, well done backgrounds, you actually put your text in bubbles and text itself isn't totally obnoxious. A bit step up over a lot of web comics. You handle action quite well...sure, the characters don't always look quite right while in action...but it's always clear what's going on. I could definitely foresee you improving a lot, because you've got the basics...you're not completely hopeless like many. Keep focusing no improving your figures...buy an anatomy book or take a life drawing class if you're really serious (despite the fact that both are utterly useless according to Van Douchebag).

So basically...drop the cheesy black and white PA rip-off (I realize they're mostly used as filler...but when reading your archives they come off as just part of the normal comic) and work on your art a bit. If you put some effort into improving I could see this comic becoming relatively succesful...

"Obligatory 30th comic critique"

Dictionary:oblig

I only have a few things to add beyond what Jackhass said.

When you contract the words "YOU ARE", it's spelled "YOU'RE", not "YOUR". Avoid basic spelling mistakes.

It's certainly not required, but a little background decoration for the site beyond stark black and white text would be nice, and makes the whole thing look a little classier.

You should put your name at the top of the page, with the title. And I'd move the various link buttons above the Newsbox.

Center your comics on the page, and if the comic is that small "naturally", try to keep 800x600 pixel screen users from having to scroll sideways if you can avoid it.

Could this be shounen-ai I wonder? The main character is awefully girly... *Ahem* Anyways, down to the critique...

Art: While your filler strips offend my otaku eyes I must admit that your basic colored strips are rather good. Everything is where it should be as far as your characters anatomy, plus you have some pretty spiffy backgrounds. Though, I DO think you should go back and edit those first few strips you drew in pencil. It was REALLY hard for me to read them, so I didn't bother doing so.

Story: The first few strips had me yawning, but once the plot magically appeared I became rather interested in what was going on. The diolog is pretty funny, and it looks like there may be a story in there somewhere. As far as the spelling goes, I agree with the comment above about "Your" and "You're". Also, please, please, PLEASE cap your I's! It's one thing to make silly spelling and punctuation mistakes while typing to your friends, but it's a whole different thing when you make these mistakes in front of an audience.

Characters: For some odd reason I had no idea Carl was a guy until the last few strips. O o;;

I read about 10 strips in reverse order (more than those and it would be bad since I am at work).

Things I like:
- Figures are well proportioned, colours are appealing, and I liked how you drew him falling down the stairs.
- There isn't too much text, which often puts people off when they look at a comic for the first time and realise that they have to read for 10 minutes just to make it to the end of the panel.

Things I don't like as much:
I felt that some of what I read could have been summarised more.
SPELLCHECK! *slap*

All in all, it's not bad I think Keep up the good work!

Thanks for the input.

Jackhass wrote:Heh, uh oh...introducing yourself as a character and breaking the 4th wall all in the first comic....Your comic is existing with only 3 walls...it wouldn't stand up in an earthquake that's for sure!

Yah, I didn't realize how clich

You character didn't look to girly to me...well he did look girly...but I knew it was a guy.

Oh, and the differences between you and the "Skid" version of you were pretty clear to me as well...

[geoduck] wrote:You should put your name at the top of the page, with the title. And I'd move the various link buttons above the Newsbox.

I moved the buttons up, but I decided not to move my name. I was afraid it would push the comic too far down the page, and I care more about people seeing my work than knowing who I am. If they really want to know, they'll find out.

And thanks again everybody! I really appreciate all the input!

Ahem...

I have no problem with the self-insertion at the beginning. It's bad story-telling, the way "It was a Dark and Stormy Night" and "Once upon a time" are bad story-telling, but it got you started and is survivable.

I have every problem with the self insertions in the MIDDLE of a story line. Do notnotnotnotNOTNOT!!!! do this. Yanking someone out of a story like that is painful. You bend your imagination and attention on this story. You do not like being pulled out of it so fast your head is still spinning.

Your plot has a faint taste of recycling. I can name several stories that begin in a similar fashion. However, it is young enough, and your jokes, unique enough, to make it more than salvageable. It saggs in certain places (such as the master telling the apprentice to clean the work room, the master reminding the apprentice of past mistakes, the apprentice complaining about the master) but you had one good "Oh my GAW!!!" moment in there, and I think I'll endure the currant saggyness to find out what the shatter-orb-thingy was in the tear. And what happened to the Main Character when he touched it.

Also, build up your characters. They feel wooden and I know nothing about them. I have no reason to like them. The moment with the shatter-globe thingy was exiciting, but the wolf-chase scene is not because I simply don't know enough about him to care what happens to him. I don't even know if he has the physical abilities to outrun the wolves. At the moment, it's early enough to save this as well. Later on, this will NOT be the case, so develop them a bit more and FAST.

Artwork...

Your B&W pages are lackluster at best. Your line art is not fantastic enough to stand on its own without some kind of background and remain visually interesting. You need a small amount of anatomical correction and a large amount of polish, and the B&W pages call attention to all your mistakes.

The color pages, on the other hand, fill in the mistakes so that only the largest ones stand out, and even then, the only really glaring mistakes I've seen in COLOR are his eyes (they bug) and his arms (his elbows go in when they shouldn't, and once, when his arm was across his desk, it looked more like a discarded chicken drumstick). He also has no flow when he's running...it doesn't look like he's moving at all.

You fixed the bug-eyed thing in the last few pages, but you also added a new problem to his masculinity. Female eyes have a slight upward slant--it's a visual cue for femeninity. Your male eyes are too pointy, they give the chars a female cue. I'd suggest you soften that point, thicken the neck and indicate an adam's apple/voice box. And buy a book that details the visual cues for men and women. Your cartoon style makes a large amount of anatomical knowlege irrelevant, but because of your simplified style, those cues are vital.

All in all, If we were asked to give you a grade, I'd give you a C+ or a B- just to be nice. The grade is higher because of the sudden springs of your story and the general clean apperance of the comic, lower because of the lackluster black and white pages, the self insertions, the sag of the first few pages and the woodneness of the current characters.

Hope that was helpful.

CW

Thnaks that will be a big help (Man I guess he really dose look girly )

the only part I'm really worried about is:

christwriter wrote:Also, build up your characters. They feel wooden and I know nothing about them. I have no reason to like them. The moment with the shatter-globe thingy was exiciting, but the wolf-chase scene is not because I simply don't know enough about him to care what happens to him. I don't even know if he has the physical abilities to outrun the wolves. At the moment, it's early enough to save this as well. Later on, this will NOT be the case, so develop them a bit more and FAST.

I get what you

Ok...And someone who knows better can correct me if I'm wrong...

First suggestion is read books. Any books. I'd suggest Julain May, David Webber and Stephen R. Donaldson--Especially Donaldson's Gap series. I'll explain more about all three later.

Developing a Character does not require flash backs, though standing around and talking is actually a very good thing. Dialogue is one of the biggest tools for character development, and can be very interesting. But a lot of it is how the character reacts/doesn't react to things.

A strong personality trait is easier to develop first. Show what this trait is through some actions of his. Is he the take-charge kind of person? The kind that just sits back and goes with it? Can he handle the really weird on his own, and how can he react here if he can't, but he has to?

Say your character sees a dead cat by the side of the road. How does he react to it? Why does he react that way? What does he do with the cat, and why does he do that? "By their fruits you shall know them" might be a Bible verse, but it is a very accurate rule when it comes to human nature.

Julian May wrote a novel about the development of psychics on earth and she followed the lives of her heroes as well as her villans, developing them from innocent, young children into either outstanding human beings or real monsters. One of the childhood sequences of one of the "monsters" involved the little boy coming across a dying cat after the death of his mother. He had heard her dying psychicly, and he heard the same noise in this cat, so he listened to it. He enjoyed it. He was angry when a woman chased him off of the cat. This sequence was unsettling, but it made his actions later (the murder of anyone who stood in his way, the posession of the President of the USA, his acts with his own daughter) plausable. It prepaired the reader to hate him, in other words. She does the same thing in the second set of books in the series...starts her heroes and villans out as children and follows them as they grow up. The things that turn them into heroes and villians are incredibly simple things, sometimes as simple as arrogance, but that makes them no less important and devistating.

After his streingth has been identified, start showing his weaknesses. There is actually more development in the failures than there is in the sucesses. Being able to overcome all the time just isn't interesting...but having to pick yourself up again and again, only to have it all fall apart and you have to start all over again...that's something the adverage person can associate with. Knowing that the character can and WILL fail repetedly makes the sucesses so much greater, they almost shine.

So pick him apart. If he's take charge, stick him with somebody who's even more so, someone he can barely handle. If he's very passive, Mr. Sit-back-and-let-it-all-go-by, make him have to deal with things over and over, have to lead in the situation (even if he's only leading himself) and mess up over and over on simple solutions...then progressively harder ones. Show he's human.

David Weber's Honor Harrington series is an exelent example of this. You have a woman who is an absolute glory of a military leader, seemingly fated to end up in trouble, yet she's good enough to drag her commands out of the problems by the skin of her teeth every time...and she has an incredible heart that gets torn apart every time she looses the people under her command, the bad luck to lose one love to a duel (and thus has the guilt of being unable to protect him) and fall in love with another who is absolutely dedicated to his wife, and the natural weaknesses of a human body--by the tenth book, she's lost an arm, one eye and half the nerves in her face to assorted battles, her beloved sentient pet is telepathicly deaf from another and she has to watch her country screw itself to hell because of bad leadership. Her streingths are not only damaged by her weaknesses, but actually lead to them, time and time again.

The third thing is the recovery...the moment when the weaknesses are either overcome or incorporated into streingths. A passive guy becomes a little less passive, a little sharper when it comes to dealing with situations. A women with a large heart learns how to overcome greif, how to ignore it until it is safe to mourn. Someone with overweening pride learns how to humble himself before other people. A man thrown into leadership by chance becomes a great leader. This would be the climax, either of the situation, the chapter or the story itself. Every time this happens, the character becomes a little clearer, his streingths better defined, his weaknesses glaring holes the reader actively worries about.

Stephen R. Donaldson's Gap series is the best I've ever read in terms of Character development. In the beginning you're introduced to three characters: The weakly beautiful female cop, the rapist outlaw who kidnaps her and the dashingly handsome pirate who rescues her. Over the course of five novels the rapist is betrayed and forced into a kind of mental slavery, the woman has to give up EVERYTHING she has, from her badge and identity, her trust in her system, even her looks, and the pirate captian is slowly peeled away into nothing at all. By the end of these books, this disgusting outlaw rapist has turned into a nearly admirable hero, the cop has broken out of being a victim, and the "dashing pirate" devolves first into a disgusting worm and then into nothing at all. And all the time, everyone, the main and supporting cast, is sunk into the edge of desperation, every flaw flayed open, every streingth pulled to and beyond the breaking point. By the end, the only simularity between the characters in the first book and the characters in the last are the names...yet the progression to and from who they were to who they are in the end is compltely, horribly logical.

So, to sum it all up...

1. Pick a strong trait for your character and show it to us as soon as possible. Passivity, Leadership, Emotional stability or instability, even sheer homocidal mania. Maybe he's very smart, maybe he's very tough.

2. Pick a weakness or a bunch of weaknesses for him that are natural to that strong trait. A born killer who can't love, a smart person who isn't very strong, or very imaginative. Use situations to show these off, usually by having him reach an obsticle and fail.

3. Have a resolution. He overcomes his weak body by working out. He overcomes his passive nature, or he finds someone who can support that part of him (this is also very important...if he can't plug all his holes, have someone who can, thus, supporting character). He solves the problem he failed at not too long ago.

4. Repete. Repete. Repete. As often as you need to.

CW

Wow, you just gave me about 3 months of solid thinking to do, if I never eat or sleep. Now I'm not going to be able to concentrate on anything else you just filled my head with so many ideas. I'm having a hard time concentrating long enough just to get through this response....


*crosses legs, chews on fingertips, taps pencil, stares off into space*

hmmmmmm.......


It's going to take forever to get to sleep tonight. I am forever in your debt.

I think the first time that happened to me was when I bought Stephen King's "On Writing".

And that was kind of big...but it's a pretty meaty subject.

That was the first and only thing my father ever said he wanted in a story. Good Character Development.

CW