TWCL

[Steels]

Untitled Comedy #34, has been up for over a month now and we're at about 25 strips. Things have been going pretty well, now we're trying to spread the word as well as recieve some constructive cricism... and a larger community in our own forums.

Here's a basic synopsis:

Untitled Comedy is a unique webcomic that follows the lives of three or four unlikely roomates. We've gotten many great comments from people like Lar Desouza of Least I Could Do and Kimmo Lemetti of Gone with the Blastwave.

Please lend us any thoughts you may have, and if you enjoy the comic please don't hesitate to bookmark it and let others know about us... if you run a webcomic and are interested in a link swap, just PM/Email me.

/J. D Wenzel

[vulpeslibertas]

Steels wrote:

a unique webcomic that follows the lives of three or four unlikely roomates.

This is about as un-unique as you can get. The funny hijinks of room mates stopped being unique when "Three's Company" was a prime time show. Breaking the fourth wall is also a pretty serious violation of webcomic law, and since your strip is so professionally drawn, I'm going to have to give you double the minus points, because you should know better.

The first paragraph comes off as harsh because the room mates thing is over done. It's a genre in itself, like reality TV shows and "Who wants to be a _____?" No matter how hard you stomp, the fire just wont go out. Don't imagine this is anything personal, it's a straight-out case of vehement bigotry against all room mate kind.

You do have good art. The characters are well drawn, etc. The backgrounds are easily the most eye-catching part of your comic, so they should be toned down a little. Maybe to 50% or 75%. I kind of liked the random movie posters, but I'm a big fan of the random 60's patterns. They're just so gosh-darned horrendous though, they make it hard to look at the rest of your comic. In all seriousness keep them, but mute them a little.

I can tell you put thought into speech bubble placement, because they all orient in natural reading order. However, they don't orient to the images in the comic, so I can always tell instinctively what comes first, second, etc, but I can't always tell instinctively which character is speaking. Try drawing your panels with your speech bubbles in mind from the drafting stage. This will allow you to place the characters so that the text bubbles will fall around them naturally. Right now, there are too many speech bubble tails that cross the panel, disconnecting the speaker from the speech.

Really, I do like the backgrounds, but they are a tad too strong, IMO.
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