TWCL

[Traegorn]

Fugabutacus wrote:

Anyhoo, let's see how well this goes down... http://www.daffadillies.co.uk/fetch/

My major criticism is just that you need to resize your comics for the web.

Just having them resized in the webpage means that my computer has to take the time to download a much larger image -- and then aferwards (because the browser doesn't do things like antialias the graphics) it just ends up looking illegible (even though the original image is perfectly clear).

Again -- it will also speed up load times. I'm on a pretty fast connection, and I feel like I'm on dialup watching the images slowly load...

[Mockingbirdflyaway]

Also, can someone take a look at the comic I posted and offer some critique? I'm not sure why it was missed, lol.

Mockingbirdflyaway wrote:

[b]Silence of the Gods[/b] - There is an OLD VERSION and a NEW VERSION. Old Version is an overview of the plot. The NEW version is at the bottom and is for the art critique. Old version 1 http://mockingbirdflyaway.deviantart.com/art/Silence-of-the-Gods-Page-1-140834291 2http://mockingbirdflyaway.deviantart.com/art/Silence-of-the-Gods-page-2-141480763 3http://mockingbirdflyaway.deviantart.com/art/Silence-of-the-Gods-Page-3-170935357 4http://fav.me/d2trsn3 5http://fav.me/d2trw61 6http://fav.me/d2ts2qp 7http://fav.me/d2uxuj1 8http://fav.me/d2uxuld 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 (edit: forgot this page: ) 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 New version 1 2 3

[Kallisti]

Mockingbirdflyaway wrote:

Also, can someone take a look at the comic I posted and offer some critique? I'm not sure why it was missed, lol.

Patience, young padawan. If you repost like that (and with bold too) so soon after your original post, people will view you as needy and dismiss you. This is a give-and-take sort of thing. Just because you did review one person's thing doesn't mean the internets must immediately comply. Give it a couple more days.

Also, why don't you put your comic up somewhere? There's a bunch of low-end hosts that are free - DrunkDuck and SmackJeeves are horrible and have ads, but have decent communities; ComicDish is smaller but doesn't have ads - all those things are great petri dishes for starter comics, and then you won't have to be throwing around bold tags here trying to get commentary on your comic you haven't even posted yet.
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[RustMonster]

Mockingbirdflyaway wrote:

Also, can someone take a look at the comic I posted and offer some critique? I'm not sure why it was missed, lol.

Oopsie.

My main critique would be that, while you draw individual body parts acceptably well, you seem to have trouble fitting them together. For example, your characters' arms rotate like those on an action figure, instead of the way they should, where the shape of the shoulder changes and the fabric of their clothing bunches up in places and gets pulled taut in others. (Or the shoulder disappears entirely, like this slap.) You can draw a nose but you don't seem confident in how to place it on the face, so there's some "drift" and weird tangency issues.

My suggested fix is to draw in a more volumetric fashion and less by rote. Sketch in the entire head each time, with all the center lines and all that, before placing your features. Take the time to do the ball-and-cylinder skeletons... it only takes a few extra seconds and really, really makes a difference.

[rocketpig]

Sure, I'll give it a go. My comic is pretty new but there's enough there to warrant some feedback, I think:

http://selfcentent.com/read-variables/variables-1992-1/

Supermassive Black Hole A*:

It's a niggling complaint because I follow your comic and read it whenever you update but it'd be nice to see a little more priority given to the Next and Previous buttons. When I first hit your site, I ended up clicking through the episode list (which catches the eye before the next/previous buttons) and got frustrated before realizing that you had conventional next/previous buttons on the corner of the div.
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[ttallan]

L33t:

I agree with Kallisti here-- it was uncanny valley for me, too. You need to choose a direction for your art. If you want to just do copy-and-paste stuff-- and I've seen some very funny comics that use nothing but clip art, so I'm not saying that's a bad thing-- then I suggest you use something less human-looking in place of your characters. Your Pac Man strip is a perfect example of a successful comic-- no uncanny valley there because it's not supposed to look human. Otherwise, you need to find a way to get more expression into the faces, especially the eyes.

Fetch:

The cats have a constant surprised stare that over several strips never varies, and makes them look like zombies. Your fish doesn't have this problem, just the cats for some reason. (Actually, I'm not clear on why the fish sometimes "talks", and sometimes just uses speech bubbles.) I'd like to see the cats have at least as much expression as the fish.

Silence of the Gods:

You need to either put in panel borders or else leave at least twice as much space as you have now between panels-- especially between the rows. It's too easy to get confused about whether the dialogue belongs to the panel on top or the panel on the bottom (p. 21 is an example of this).

EDIT to add:

Variables:

I have to say, I really, really dislike your interface. Drives me nuts. I've clicked on your banner previous to this just to see what your comic was like, and gave up in disgust. But for the purposes of the review I gritted my teeth and dealt with it.

Other than that, it's the backgrounds that I find a little weird, and would encourage you to work on. On page 3, for example, the backgrounds in the 2nd and 3rd panels are just green, but the same colour as the grass/trees, which makes it look as though it's meant to be a really lazy way of rendering grass and trees. (Is this also uncanny valley at work?) I have absolutely no idea where the man in the yellow is supposed to be sitting in the 6th panel. I know I skip out on backgrounds too, but the non-background parts of your comic work better for me with something abstract like the 4th panel on page 4, so I'm not trying to puzzle out if it's actually supposed to be a background.
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[Mockingbirdflyaway]

Kallisti wrote:

Mockingbirdflyaway wrote: Also, can someone take a look at the comic I posted and offer some critique? I'm not sure why it was missed, lol. Patience, young padawan. If you repost like that (and with bold too) so soon after your original post, people will view you as needy and dismiss you. This is a give-and-take sort of thing. Just because you did review one person's thing doesn't mean the internets must immediately comply. Give it a couple more days. Also, why don't you put your comic up somewhere? There's a bunch of low-end hosts that are free - DrunkDuck and SmackJeeves are horrible and have ads, but have decent communities; ComicDish is smaller but doesn't have ads - all those things are great petri dishes for starter comics, and then you won't have to be throwing around bold tags here trying to get commentary on your comic you haven't even posted yet.

lol, I've reviewed almost every comic that's been posted so far in this thread.

Anyhow, I don't put it up yet because I'm not in a situation where I could update it on a regular basis. I have it planned out and I built a site for it on my own, but I don't want to put it up until I have a decent backlog.

For Variables:

I agree with ttallan in that the interface is frustrating and the backgrounds need more detail.

However, my big stickler was .... why on EARTH is an RCMP officer taking notes in panel three? Ontario is under the jurisdiction of the OPP, not the RCMP and it smacks of lack of research. I make this comment, because you mention Thunder Bay is nearby in the comic - and the dude looks like he's got an RCMP uniform.

Also, I started writing further commentary about how the later uniforms didn't match up to the Thunder Bay Police force.... then I noticed what I'd missed - the little bit that says "Atlanta, Georgia" doesn't stand out at all. I'd suggest making it more obvious.

[smbhax.com]

rocketpig wrote:

Sure, I'll give it a go. My comic is pretty new but there's enough there to warrant some feedback, I think: http://selfcentent.com/read-variables/variables-1992-1/ Supermassive Black Hole A*: It's a niggling complaint because I follow your comic and read it whenever you update but it'd be nice to see a little more priority given to the Next and Previous buttons. When I first hit your site, I ended up clicking through the episode list (which catches the eye before the next/previous buttons) and got frustrated before realizing that you had conventional next/previous buttons on the corner of the div.

That's something I've wondered about, so I'm glad you mentioned it; the browsing UI probably *is* a bit too much on the minimal side in that respect. I suppose I could bold it or something (EDIT: actually I suppose I'd be more likely to bump up their font size a notch)...although from an aesthetic point of view I don't think I'd like it that way. Hm. Do you think you would have found the page navigation links more quickly if they had been underneath the comic, like with most webcomics?

Thank you very much for the critique by the way, and thanks to the nice people who posted earlier critiques of A*--I thought those were all spot-on (I just didn't have questions about them so didn't have an excuse to post according to the thread rules :D).

~~~~~~~~

Variables:
We've already discussed the interface, so now I gotta find something else... No, wait, I see you've changed the in-comic browsing interface, so now I have something new that I can't let go: don't call the button that goes to the previous page "last," because a lot of comics use that to indicate a button linking to the last existing page of the comic--so it looks like you have links only to the next and the last page, which is befuddling. I'd suggestion calling it "Previous," or "Prev" for short.
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[rocketpig]

Good point, smbhax. I'll change that to Prev. I never thought of it before.

And backgrounds frustrate the hell out of me. Not the actual drawing of them but WHEN to draw them and how much detail to add. It's something I need to figure out.

Thanks for pointing out the police bit. I actually did a fair amount of research looking around for the proper uniform but came up blank because I didn't know the name of the OPP (or specifically, who handles the rural areas of Ontario). I had to improvise a bit and hodge-podged a few uniforms together. What you see there is the final result. I may go back and change the coloring now that I know what to look for (though they play such a small role and so few people will notice that I don't know if I'll bother).
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[Mockingbirdflyaway]

rocketpig wrote:

Thanks for pointing out the police bit. I actually did a fair amount of research looking around for the proper uniform but came up blank because I didn't know the name of the OPP (or specifically, who handles the rural areas of Ontario). I had to improvise a bit and hodge-podged a few uniforms together. What you see there is the final result. I may go back and change the coloring now that I know what to look for (though they play such a small role and so few people will notice that I don't know if I'll bother).

Fair enough. The only reason I know the difference between the uniforms is because I've taken so many crim classes.

@ ttallan, comments on Galaxion:

I started reading through your comic from the beginning, and the first two thoughts I have, though I'm not sure what you can do about them, given the amount of change it would require, is that:

1) Even though your character pages tell us Anna is the main character, the first evidence I see of her actually as that main character doesn't come till page 54. The previous fifty pages, Fusella dominates and if I hadn't read your "about" pages, I wouldn't have been the wiser.

2) I don't know what sort of professional organization the TSA is, but if they have a captain who behaves like Fusella, I'm not sure I'd want to be a part of it! For a high-ranking officer, while I understand having a command you're used to being yanked out from under your feet to be upsetting, but she isn't handling it professionally at all. I haven't really seen her having any leadership qualities or anything particularly special that would warrant her rank and I'm rather puzzled why she has it, other than being "a lucky chance", as mention in her bio. Mostly, she's been stalking around the ship in a temper and getting uncomfortable around old flames and new techies, sneaking around "illegally", and then in recent pages (which I haven't read yet, but glanced through), she appears to be illegally entering someone's quarters. (I use "illegally" loosely, as who knows what the laws are in your world With some hand waving, maybe it is legal?) Either way, not the most consciencous or professional commanding officer or role model.

[ttallan]

Mockingbirdflyaway wrote:

Even though your character pages tell us Anna is the main character

You really had me confused for a minute there, until I figured out you meant Aria! Galaxion has evolved into more of an ensemble cast than I originally intended. But this is actually an easy fix-- I need to change her entry on the cast page.

Since everyone else seems to be doing it, I don't feel so guilty now when expressing my thanks to everyone who's taken the time to share their thoughts! You've given me a lot of good advice, and a lot to think about. Unfortunately you won't be seeing the results of your suggestions for several weeks yet, since the pages I'm working on now are many updates away.
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[Mockingbirdflyaway]

ttallan wrote:

Mockingbirdflyaway wrote: Even though your character pages tell us Anna is the main character You really had me confused for a minute there, until I figured out you meant Aria! Galaxion has evolved into more of an ensemble cast than I originally intended. But this is actually an easy fix-- I need to change her entry on the cast page.

Whoops! Yes, Aria. For some reason, I read her name as "Anna" and for some reason, was blind to the other spelling? Who knows.

[lianne]

Jejeune:

I think you need to vary your level of zoom and/or panel size more - having mostly the same size panels means you lose a lot of emotional impact. A panel of a character, deeply relieved, hugging someone they thought had been killed gets the same amount of page space as a little light banter, making it feel like everything's of the same importance.

Maybe you could compensate by using zoom more dramatically - really going up close to make the emotions big. I know some of the great comic artists (I can think of Kirby off-hand) have done all their panels the same size and shape, so if you're not keen on going bolder with panel variation, you might be able to find other techniques to keep it exciting and emotionally engaging.

For a positive, you do some nice expressions: Nina's "umm.." in the bottom middle panel of March 11th has a subtlety I like, while her "Damn it!" on Jan 21st is cartoony in the good, expressive way.

[ttallan]

I think I skipped over Psychic Soldier Kai! Sorry, Hanzou, that was unintentional. So here goes:

You appear to switch back and forth between using thought balloons and narrative boxes, which is a little odd. Ususally if there is a narrator, the reader doesn't get to see into other characters' heads. I would suggest picking one method or the other.

(I really like your shading style, by the way. )
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[tusk1113]

First, thanks all for the helpful critiques. (bonus props to Kallisti for the hand-holding over the last couple of days)

Koad wrote:

I’d love to hear about all the bugs in my comic. In keeping with the thread guidelines I won’t be responding to critiques unless there’s a question. So to anyone who takes to time to give me critiques: a big thank you in advance.

Koad, Love your artwork, though as RustMonster pointed out, once in a great while the varying styles become distracting. The only thing I can really add is that your text seems just slightly out of focus. Not sure what can be done about it, but thought i'd throw that out there.