Honest Criticism (warning: not for the faint of heart.)

[Dreamaniaccomic]

Everyone, this thread is not merely about critiquing my comic. I want you to tear it apart. Find as much wrong with it as you can, whether its the art or jokes or whatever. Anyone else who wants to use this thread to open up their comics for criticism, go ahead, but be warned: it will be completely and totally honest.
A couple of rules to sum it up.
1. Critiques must be brutally honest.
2. You must provide REASONS behind your critique: "your shading sucks" is bad. "your shading sucks because it dosen't seem realistic enough" is good.
3. No critiquing unless the artist/writer asks.
4. Do not participate if you have a history of high blood pressure or heart attacks.

[Joel]

One thing I'd say you should work on is either scanning or image compression. I can't tell which. All your pages have tiny dots on them.

And sizing. It's really hard to read when you have to scroll both vertically and horizontally.

[Redtech]

I'm going to ask for ONE FAVOUR!

I crit yours, you crit mine? Anyway, the ability to constructivly criticise is a useful skill when helping to improve oneself.

Anyhow: The comic at least makes me smile. The gag-a-day format works and your characters aren't brilliantly drawn, but they suit their purpose, but as already mentioned far too many times, the strip is far too big! My laptop has a resolution of 1280*800 and some of the strips don't fit properly. Also, you're let down with really shaky pencilwork, you need to get used to inking and scanning better (you'll get better results) and use a ruler or straight edge for the frames, either that or you're using a plastic rule which is worn out. I use a metal rule and if you can get a stainless steel one, you'll almost never need another rule. Ever!

Your site design is really off-putting, to be honest, you DON'T need a hyped up page, as that's far beyond what you're doing, but your buttons are far too big also. If you can smooth out the shapes, it'll look a lot better. Speaking of buttons...your banner is HUGE! As a trend, you shouldn't ever have a banner that's rivalling the size of your comic. I have to scroll just to reach your buttons. And looping back around to button design, while the background colour suits the buttons and all, because the pencil work you use is scratchy they "don't quite" match the background, so they stand out and makes it uglier than need be.

Oh yeah, you've got two copies of your strip #1 and your current strip is showing up twice at seperate dates as well: check your archives!

Finally, if you want peopele to ever link to you, need sig banners!

[Dreamaniaccomic]

Too lazy to crit yours right now, I'll get on it after I respond...
I'm working on correcting the scanner/ink problems. I did go and adjust my comics in size recently, but if they're still too big I'll figure something out...
What do you suggest for a background color, then? I hand draw (and ink) everything, and do not possess a reliable image modifying program, so I need something that'll work...
I converted all the strips to GIF so they would work on the site, but I could start doing jpeg (they look nice in jpeg) if that dosen't matter.
Well, going to read YOUR comic now...

[Dreamaniaccomic]

Captain, ready to open fire.
Allright. First, Redtek, pretty good plot. Interesting, grabs my attention, but then the other stuff gets in the way.
The art is too cartoony for the kind of subject you've got, and it just dosen't really seem right in several situations. The proportions of the characters are kind of odd (yes, even for anthromorphic animals) and your limbs don't look realistic enough.
On a few of your dialouge baloons, the words blend into the background and are difficult to see. I would also like to see larger text- currently, I have to strain my eyes to read the text.
Not much else- you've got a lot of potential here.

[Redtech]

Thanks very much.
I don't know what you're using to scan in your work and to resize it so some of my suggestions are going to be a tad vague:

Didn't you say somewhere you have a super-huge monitor? As a rule I use, try and get the comic to a WIDTH of about 700-800 pixels across for it to fit on a 1024*768 resolution easily. For .jpg vs .gif, files, well the .gif files should be better for your work as you're only working in black and white, .jpg files are really designed for files with lots of colours in them and they create artifacts (tiny little blobs of colour) so it becomes a comprimise between a perfect picture and one that's full of artifacts you didn't create.

For your buttons and banner, try making them about 75% of their original size and see how that works and your background colour works, I guess, but it'd help if you did manage to get some digital colour that matches the green. I am not a good example though as Meiosis' background colour is black and the buttons just exploit that.

-----
Thanks for the crit. I never really considered how the story is compared to the art style! It seems almost schizophrenic in implementation now, come to think of it. Saying that, Antibunny is a great example of a furry comic that's dark, while Lightbringer is a good example of a serious story in a cartoony style... I am neither, so I'll play around a little and see what works out. I actually started out drawing comedy back in 2000, honestly, I've never realised that I've been working that angle still. As for fonts and bubbles, can-do!

Greatly appreciated.

[Wendybird]

I might recommend a background color of #99ff99, or even a tiled image of some scribble with the same pencil you used for the banner background. However, I'd much rather see a cleaner, smaller banner. It could even just be cropped, almost to the edges of the letters, especially if you make the background mesh better with the site. The same goes for the buttons.

If you really want to stay with the scribbly feel, I know the GIMP has a tool for making tiled backgrounds called "make seamless." It could be useful. This would work best if you made the backgrounds of your banner and buttons transparent, and your comic's panel borders cleaner, especially in relation to the edge of the image itself. Or at least crop so there's an equal amount of space on each side. This didn't matter as much when the background was white, but now it's pretty distracting.

I definitely recommend the GIMP, but my husband says paint.net is easier to learn. They're both free, so try them out if you get the chance. A lot of online tutorials based in Photoshop are pretty easy to translate into the GIMP.

And yes, if you can't make your GIFs look any better, switch to JPGs. Even a severely compressed JPG should look better than what you have now. But if you get the GIMP, you should be able to make GIFs work much better.

[[geoduck]]

Another possibility regarding strip-size is to make them four-by-four squares instead of strips..

[Karchesky]

This is sloppy but it's just to show you how it could be done:

What I did was open your comic in Photoshop (if you use The Gimp I'm sure you can do it too as I did nothing fancy), despeckle (filter) a couple of times to get rid of those dots, resize to 75% (your lettering is large enough that is still easily readable like that), moved the last 2 panels down, adjusted the curves to get better contrasts, and then saved it as a .jpg. Note that at 60% quality it looks better than the original and has almost half the size (106 kb vs 171 kb), though admittedly this image is smaller.

Anyways, those are just a couple of things to get your strip to look better Cheers,

[Ohemgee]

The art is fine, though I would recommend playing with some contrast so that you don't have the pixel speckles. As far as comic size, I think something that would fit on most screens, though more importantly, consistent sizes. Something else: you don't have many comics, but you already break the fourth wall several times (I'm not guiltless either ) so you might want to rifle through http://hownottorunacomic.comicgenesis.com/. They've got some good tips there.

[Jinachi]

Colour for the obvious reason that colour is generally better than just black and white since its more interesting.
Second would be to use straight gutters between each panel, i always think it looks more professional to having wonky lines that split the panels.
Inking would make the strip more broad and again professional, seeing the pencil lines still used for the construction makes it look kinda "meh"

I think thats all on my mind right now after reading your strip for 5 minutes, I know its alot to improve on your part and i think your doing a great job its just that i personally think that it would stand out more if it was in colour and inked.

[Dreamaniaccomic]

This is sloppy but it's just to show you how it could be done:

What I did was open your comic in Photoshop (if you use The Gimp I'm sure you can do it too as I did nothing fancy), despeckle (filter) a couple of times to get rid of those dots, resize to 75% (your lettering is large enough that is still easily readable like that), moved the last 2 panels down, adjusted the curves to get better contrasts, and then saved it as a .jpg. Note that at 60% quality it looks better than the original and has almost half the size (106 kb vs 171 kb), though admittedly this image is smaller.

Anyways, those are just a couple of things to get your strip to look better Cheers,

Thanks for the advice. I've got some new inking pens which look pretty good, and I'm starting to use Comic Life to get the panels, word balloons, etc. taken care of. I also got Gimp finally, so any major flaws should go right out the window

Colour for the obvious reason that colour is generally better than just black and white since its more interesting...

I've got school, theatre club, and homework to deal with. Color will come later.

[K-Dawg]

Colour for the obvious reason that colour is generally better than just black and white since its more interesting.

Very very wrong, B&W can be just as good if not better than colour.
http://ttg.comicgenesis.com/
http://www.graphicsmash.com/comics/digger.php
http://zebragirl.keenspot.com/

But either one can look just as bad if you don't know what you're doing.