Linkara wrote:Oh, what the hell. McDuffies, take a gander at Lightbringer.
http://lightbringer.comicgenesis.com
Lot of comics to go through and the art is especially horrible in the first seven storylines, so feel free to skip around or not at all as you wish.
I didn't skip around, I wanted to be positively sure about what I'm saying.
Now I know why there isn't so many review sites these days: they know that eventually Linkara will turn up and ask them to read Lightbringer. Ha ha ha!
But seriously, when Lightbringer started, those were the very beginning steps, basically the level of a child - and there has been some improvement since. But bad art is easy to spot, and you were probably showered with advices like "learn anatomy", "learn inking", "learn backgrounds", "practice, practice, practice".
What actually made Lightbringer a sort of torturous read for me was it's script. Early on I decided that my review would largely depend on how much writing has improved over the course of three years, see, practice drawing you will, and you will get better, but what about writing? Doesn't it need more than just keeping going to improve writing? A sort of analytical approach towards your own art? To isolate what exactly you did wrong, and to do it better.
Judging writing is harder; I could even imagine some of your pages being illustrated with some hyper-realistic professionally-looking mainstream comic style art. That wouldn't be a good comic at all, it would be the case of art distracting the reader from the bad comic. It would be much harder to distract from bad art with a good script.
And, while subject matter has somewhat changed (there's no need for so much exposition now), writing hasn't improved much. There are some indications that you know some of your downfalls, but do little to fix them. And then it wouldn't be enough.
For one, comic might have been better if it was a simple action superhero comic. But you try to make this comic a philosophical playground: a sort of discourse on ethics. However, it turns out to be not discourse, but monologue. All we get is your views of morality, elaborated over and over, redundantly. Any other standpoint is only brushed in passing by, long enough to mention that it's wrong.
You insists on term "philosophical", but philosophy is much more than having an opinion: it's studying works of other philosophers, comparing them, having a dialogue with great minds of past. You can't have that because you know very little about history of philosophy. In one scene, Lightbringer says something along the lines of "generations of philosophers tried to understand why it is so, and failed" regarding relativity of moral. Generations of philosophers, in fact, have studied such topics, and came to some very valid conclusions, but you don't know this because you haven't read those books.
Which brings me to what is probably the largest problem of writing in this comic, which overshadows everything that is written in it: you insists on talking about topics you don't know much about, and you do this with self-confidence of an expert.
Take for example the city where story is taking place: narration says that it's a dangerous and bad city. We see a few attacks in back alleys and one burning trashcan, but nothing else tells us that life in this city is hard. People seem to get out to streets without hesitation or fear, shops seem to work like in any other town. There's no powerty on any other manifestation of what's said in narration. You don't actually know what a crime-ridden city looks like. You try to imagine it from scratch, but in the end all you do is take an ordinary town, and glue on a few mock-up gang attacks here and there.
Police, narration says, is doing their job poorly. It is never said why. From what we see in scenes where they appear, they seem like a decent, professional force, and one very determined at doing their job at that. They even collaborate with FBI, and we remain confused at why FBI hasn't intervened in such gritty city before. I've seen much less organized police forces in cities that function decently. Again, you don't know how to portray inneficient police. You portray police as you saw it in comics and series. Check out "Batman: year one" again to remind yourself of how this issue can be handled fine.
Further example: there are regular mentions of pacifism. But again, you haven't done research on pacifism. You only know that they think that problems shouldn't be solved in violent manner, but you can't spell their arguements and opinions, so when you try, it comes out sounding like some esoteric mumbo-jumbo. Pacifism is an ideology and not mysticism, but from your pen, it sounds more like second.
But maybe Lightbringer's parents were actually hippies, only he mixed those two terms?
You don't know much about organized crime either: a street gang leader has an office with a file cabinet, in which, I suppose, all robberies are filed and tax deduction has been calculated on purchase of guns? A slave market is made to look like some theatrical ceremony. And in the end, defeating a gang is as simple as defeating their boss who walks around unprotected in a building without any guard in sight. After which hundreds of other gangsters just surrender to the (ineficcient) police. Wow, how comes noone thought of it before?
Have you asked yourself - is all this really believeable? I think not.
You don't even know much about jumping from great heights. One reporter is portrayed as faking suicide just so she could get to contact with Lightbringer (her luck that he wasn't mangling some gang at the time). And she actually smirks the entire time. Why not go to bungee jumping to test whether it's actually possible to smirk and smile while falling from such heights?
You should have thought about reading a book or two about organized crime. A book or two on philosophies that appear in his comic. There's a reason why one of advices given most often to young writers is "write what you know". You stubbornly insists on writing about things you obviously know nothing about, with very misguided results. That gets irritating after a while, and is probably the reason no 1. why I found reading unbearable.
One of the consequences of this is, I think, that you don't consider much how other people think. That's why all characters in a comic are basically your puppets, and you speaks your opinions through them. Even the bad guys present the oposing cases in such weak arguements, that they are basically just setting themselves up to be told off by Lightbringer. You never actually bother to come up with convincing personalities that are different from your own. Somewhere on site, you wrote that you didn't want to write characters you disliked. Therefore you apparently didn't write characters that have opinions disagreeing with you own.
Welcome to writing. You're gonna have to have things you dislike even if you wrote children's books about a boy learning to be a magician.
Now, Lightbringer as a character is a special case: he proclaims this retro ideology of his and never doubts it. To be as self-assured as he is, he has to be an extremely self-centered person. See, I can just as easily imagine this character doing crimes, as doing good deeds. Because, lack of self-doubt makes his moral feeble. Occasional putting of his views to test (through no less than philosophical discourse) would make his moral stronger, more justified. Nothing of that sort is showed in a comic, and considering high stakes in question, it makes Lightbringer look borderline psychotic.
If you don't believe me, just count the times he has responded to some arguement with lines like "I don't want to listen to that" or "I don't freaking care". These seem to became his catchphrases. It indicates that he avoids arguement at the moment he's about to hear something he can't find an answer to. His self-assuredness is purely a result of looking away from everything that could put his beliefs to test.
Then there are other usual follies of beginner-writer. One that was probably mentioned the most is the excessive monologue/dialogue piling around the pages. I estimate that about 75% of the dialogue could have been removed without any damage. But you seem to value your sentences very much, it seems as if you gives great importance to every word, and I can almost imagine you trying to edit these piles of text, not being able to bring yourself to throw anything out.
But much of it is redundant and ineffective. Characters will say things like "Now I know what I have to do. Now I know what I will do". This is not drama. It is attempt at manipulating us into thinking that it's drama. There is no dramatic tension in the scene to make the drama possible, and lines themself are funny in it's exagerated theatrical style. I'm sure that just "Now I know what I have to do" would be more effective and efficient.
Editing isn't just some stock advice. Here are some reasons to cut down on wordcount:
a) Timing. It takes literally minutes to get through individual panels. Do you want the reader to linger for a minute on an action that takes a lot less? If a character kicking the other takes a few miliseconds, there's dialogue there worth for halfa minute. Timing is off and your reader gets the impression of a story going really, really slow, because he's reading it really slow. And that's probably a reason no 2 why I found reading unbearable.
b) Show, don't tell. Your comic tells it's story through words. Images play practically no part, only repeating something of what's already said in narration. Coming to comics primarily as a writer is no excuse: you are now working in a different medium, so use it's benefits. This is one of things where you've actually improved since the beginning, trying to rely on images a bit more and not explaining every bit of story in narration. Leaving narration aside will help you improve drawing too. For instance, before, when you had to express an emotion on a character, you'd describe it in monologue, because your skills in drawing faces weren't sufficient to show it. Leaving such things out of narration force you to tamper with facial expressions more, and eventually learn them.
c) Have you asked yourself: is a reader really interested in reading this?
Cliches are another problem here. For instance, ever willain will indulge in monologue about how he and Lightbringer are basically the same - I think that there's even a derogatory name for this kind of scene, although more usually connected to "Silence of the lambs" type thrillers. Later in the comic, Lightbringer reffers to this: "i am sick of evil people telling me I'm like them". But anknowledging them doesn't make them dissapear. If you don't use cliches, you have to think of something to replace them, and that's why so many webwriters cling to cliches even though they addmit how sucky they are.
Some other time, a scene starts with a character saying "...so then I said to my old boss, "stock check? I thought you said stocking check?" But if he's telling the end of an an anecdote, hasn't he mentioned "his old boss" before in it? In that case, he wouldn't say the whole construction "my old boss". He'd say "boss" or "he".
It's an example of "noone really speaks like this" effect. You should try to read your scripts aloud - specially dialogues. Do they sound like real people speaking? Do monologues really sound like someone's thoughts? Or do they sound like a really bad poet struggling to read his poetry with exagerated emotions, or a coach trying to give a mothivation speech to his team?
You're, evidently, a big fan of superheroes. Much of his comic was rewriten from superhero comics. Lots of setting and some villains are all too similar to Batman's iconography (gritty town, parents killed, chief-of-police figure eccentrically dressed gangsters). Some other heroes seem to be modeled by characters from other comics.
There's not much plot-wise either. Most of plots are basically: a) introduce character b) a single encounter of bad and good guys on some rooftop, that results in defeating a bad guy. Bad guys never seem to have a strong plan, and good guys don't either. They are all very simple, linear stories that rarely even follow more than one story arch.
You go as far in attempt to emulate superhero books as to make your mock-up comic book edition, and to sign yourself under two pseudonyms - artist and writer. It's all part of your daydream of being a serious comic writer, but it doesn't amount to anything. It is obvious that comic was made by one person even if you don't know the author personally.
But if you are serious about being a writer, I think that you should broaden your horizons. Read as many different genres and types of literature as you can. Read classics. Try to figure out why they're classics. No matter how much you like them, superhero comics in most of cases aren't well-written at all - and neither is most of American mainstream comic production, sadly. They are very bad writers to look up to, and specially bad to learn from.
Sometimes, a good way of learning to write is looking at things you wrote 3 or more years ago with a critical eye. Seeing what you wanted to do, and what you've actually done. Trying to avoid mistakes from the past. Looking back, I wrote so many crappy scripts, and re-reading them taught me of what I hate in bad scripts and what I want to avoid.
I guess I can say a thing or two about drawing too. You put some effort in learning, so now you have some knowledge of construction of bodies and they look decent. Faces, however, are still very simplified and should be more detailed for this kind of comic. You never draws backgrouns, usually just filling the space with some sort of gradient, and that should be fixed.
Inking is another thing that should be fixed: line is flat. There should be some thickness variation, some dynamics. Inking is in a way comparable to the work of cameraman in the movie, in that is defines final look, and that it can make your comic look professional, or it can make it look totally amateurish. With current inking, no scene you draw will look dynamic, no matter how good pencils are.
Sometimes, due to poor choice of camera and lack of establishing background, it's not actually clear what happened. We only rely on narration or context to tell us that.
Finally, you reuse some of the layouts to the point of excess. Particulary the one where two people talk, and page shows half of each one's face, which melt into one face. I think that you really overused that idea.
Conclusion?
I think that you made a mistake by running headlessly into such ambitious attempt. You don't have skills needed to pull it off yet. You bite more than you can chew, and I am certain that if you've taken a simpler, perhaps action-based or comedic superhero comic, result wouldn't be this bad, people would be more likely to read it, and your process of learning to make comics would be more gradual and even. Climbing the stairs instead of trying to jump right onto the platform.
There's a lot of comics here. One reads them slowly. We have impression that author hasn't spent as much time on making him, as we do on reading it: text seems like it's written out of head and never revided, and drawing lacks finesse and detail, so we feel as if it's drawn very quickly. You obviously want to progress the story as fast as you can, to tell a lot of it. I think that this is a bad approach for learning. Working on both script and drawing on particular pages, planning them, detailing them, trying to fix problems that occur, may teach you more than just cranking up new material can.
Your desire to tell this story is huge, but think about it: this way, after the end, what's left is a long comic that not many people will want to read. Slow down, and you'll more likely gain priceless skills that you can use in future projects.
)
