@wekanian Alrighty I'm back! Turns out I was a little more busy than I thought, so hopefully it wasn't making you nervous or anything while waiting for this little...kind of critique? It's not really a critique, since it's just legibility stuff.

Since this is scroll format and I'm on a tiny baby laptop I'm gonna read it on my phone, hopefully that was the way you intended, since it's a bit too tall to be nicely read on this tiny laptop screen.

One of the biggest things was onomatopoeia usage--which is the words we use in english to be sound effects. I get the sense that this may not be your first language, and so I don't want to get on your case about technical writing and grammar usage (I still understood it quite clearly, even if some of the grammar was a little off). However, with onomatopoeia, interpretation can go different directions, so I'll let you know how I interpreted them.

-In Ep 1 I think I read everything the right way and in the right order. It came off funny to me, so hopefully that was what you were going for, especially since this big egg in the sky is honking like a duck in the first panel there when it says "HONK HONK".

I will say the art is very clean and nice, and I would like to see more of it, there's a bit of copy paste going on which I don't think is wrong, but I think some panels just needed more redrawing on top of what was drawn in the scene before it to make more reaction and interaction in the characters themselves. It is episode one, so don't worry about it, don't redraw everything or anything like that, just know that I got less of an emotional punch than what could have been.

-In Ep 2 the crickets make the sound of "Cricket." This could be a humor thing, in which case, I like this joke, keep it in. but it could also be that you wanted the actual sound a cricket makes, which is a chirp. Crickets chirp. Confusing since you don't want to be interpreted as birds, but you can add more iiiii's to the chiiiirp chiiiiirp or you can always just say cricket because again, I think that's pretty good, although it is kind of incorrect.

-I like that you chose a big landscape shot for when it says "why is it still up there" in episode 2. This brought a nice moment of mystery and helped build that tension I think you're looking for. It's a bit ominous.

-There seems to be a period of time between when he says "Yeah I still have the book, do you need it?" and when he wakes up in a void--I'm not sure if he fell asleep or if he sort of passed out while on the phone. Maybe you want to keep that a secret right now in the way you're telling the story, which is fine, but just know that for me as a reader, it wasn't clear if he meant to fall asleep or not.

-After he gets a visit from his ancestor who says "child" he moves his head with a motion that says "SET" and I don't know what you meant to say here. Set doesn't really infer turning your head. Did you mean turn? (and I did get that he was turning just from the one white line, so it isn't necessary to say "turn" although you can.)

-I do get the vibe that he is angry and confused at meeting his ancestor, so that's good. Also, I liked the contrast between him being late and in a hurry to get to school, and then realizing that there was no reason to be worried because all humans are gone. Makes nice tension.

-On Ep 4, there's a scene where the small crying boy dissappears in a WHOOSH and at first I thought the background here was a decorative pattern--I didn't realize it was meant to be the ground. Perhaps if you included the thing he was hiding behind in this scene, it would cement the fact that this is a physical background and not a decorative one.

-The panel "I am just looking around if there is someone else other than me" is a bit of an awkward sentence, some rewording to make it more clean or clear would be better. There's a lot of ways to say this sentence and I don't want to tell you to just use mine, but saying something like "I am just looking around to see if there is anyone else other than me left." Is less confusing of a sentence.

-On Ep 5 I read the first panel as "Ye-Yeah" before "It's nice that you have a car, Vikal." This could be because I'm hard coded to read left to right, that and it's the first panel so it's hard to come from the right direction instead of the left.

-In Ep 6 when Vikal gets his stuff while still not leaving the bathroom, I was confused, but then I noticed Farrel is also confused--so that's good. I think you meant for it to be a mystery there.

-I like that we have a character interaction with Vikal cooking Farrel pancakes, it helps me like them more, and it shows that they're bonding.

-In Ch 8 the dark blue background with black text on it is still legible because of that white outline, but it's cutting it pretty close.

-In Ep 10, she says the words "HAA HAA" as a reaction to everyone disappearing, and when I see "Haa haa" I think of sarcastic laughter, but I don't think she's laughing. Is this heavy panicked breathing? I'm not sure what emotion you meant.

-In Ep 12 we see the word "Set" again as an onomatopoeia and I still don't know what this means.

-I like the introduction of Irina, especially when it meets up with our protagonist and we find out he has like a heebie jeebie sort of magic we were not aware of. It is a nice reveal.

Overall, there were some grammar problems, but I could still understand everything (that and like...a grammar critique is a whole other critique and I don't want to dog you for every time you misspelled something or used the wrong tense.) And I like it, you build something new nearly every episode, you're getting better at the art the more episodes we go, and you have an interesting world an premise. Good luck on the rest!

All right! Onto Code: Youkai.

So this one is longer, I did read the whole thing, but I want to focus this critique on the later more recent stuff since that's more where you are at right now as an artist. So to summarize anything that stood out from episodes 1-30, the plot is good and interesting, and I've followed it just fine. The monster stuff is fun, and I liked how we get a slow reveal of who this doctor is piece by piece as the story goes on. So it never really lore dumps, it naturally reveals the world that it lives in, and I like that.

There were some places where I mixed up characters when they were introduced, which is partly because hair is my biggest signifier of who anyone is. Their faces and builds are very similar, and their eyes are too small to go by just eye color alone. But I quickly figured out who was who, so that really isn't that big of a deal (and a lot of those characters are only there for a little while anyway, I always knew who the main characters were because they're more distinctive). I also had a hard time reading some of the scenes that occurred in the dark. I think this is something you already know about because you mentioned it in the author notes--I had my phone on 100% brightness and I couldn't make every panel out.

So there's a ton of ways to remedy this (including just having more light sources in night scenes) but I have this problem myself. And what I like to do is look at a histogram of the scene with Levels or with Curves (Levels is easier than curves). You probably already know about this, but for anyone reading about this that may not know what this is, I'll just explain it for their sake.

So here's a little Levels tutorial for anyone interested: In Clip Studio it's called "Level correction" and in Photoshop it's also called "Levels" and you can find it in the menu. A histogram tonal graph tells you the amount of dark colors you have vs light colors in graph form--Usually, we have a mountain kinda like this

this is an example just off of Google, of what a more typical histogram graph looks like. Left is dark stuff, the right is light stuff, all the stuff in between are mid-tones. Where the peak of that mountain is, is where we have the most colors of that range. You can see "ah, this is a kinda dark scene, the peak of the mountain is at the left." While it depends on the piece, I've always found it helps to aim my art so that I have a natural looking mountain like this one that is wide enough to have a range of midtones in it.

If I do a histogram on this scene using Clip Studio:

You can see that we do not have much of a mountain--it's pretty much up against the left side there. A quick fix is to take that arrow on the right and pull it towards your mountain, this will brighten everything within that range without having to redraw or recolor. Basically it takes your lightest color and moves it towards pure white.

hist2.jpg1073x594 323 KB

It's a really nice tool to help us see all the lovely details that get lost in the dark.

Moving on, I think you mentioned you thought your ambient light was distracting, and I didn't feel it was. I actually appreciated when the light helped it jump from the darker backgrounds. There were several places it looked just lovely.

the other thing, and this is more of what I found distracting--since you wanted me to look out for that--is you use a lot of stage direction-type words in your comic, and especially in those fight scenes (like it's not onomatapiea but just words like "stop, escape, punch". A lot of comics do it, so it's not wrong, but it does change the tone. This is a dark horror adventure vampire story, and the stage directions make it feel more cartoony. It's up to you, but occasionally it felt like it was also there to clarify moves that may be harder to draw.

Now for Episodes 30-on:

-On Ch 8.2 when it says "Either way, I attacked him first and he just defended 'imself" I at first thought that Maeko was saying that. I did figure out from the way he said 'imself that it was her bodyguard/bro, but just the fact no one else was in that panel or the one before it is why I initially thought that.

-In ch 8.3 There's a whistling panel that is a little confusing--there's a patch on his nose there that breaks that face silhouette and so at first I didn't know what was happening in that panel, if it were not for the "whistle" sound effect after it.

-In ch 10.1 she says "there had to be a fence there!" I can't actually very well see the fence on my phone because it's too dark.

-In Ch 10.2 the panel where she says "I'd better get going before he calls my-" I can't see the limbs behind here because it's too dark. If it weren't for one in front of her face, I'd just assume there was nothing there.

-I also want to add that this last fight arc you've done is soo much improved in quality, and I like seeing that improvement. It was a fun fight.

So that's it, overall, it's easy to understand, real legible--a good time!

OK I finally got to the third on my list, thanks for waiting, I ended up just being more busy than I thought this weekend so I had to get to it till now. Funnily enough I swore I subbed to your comic a while back (left comments even) and I was unsubbed for some reason today as I was reading it? Anyway I resubbed so that'll...fix that problem I guess. (like what happened there?)

As far as legibility goes--it's really legible and has a good quality to it, which is one of the reasons I found it easy to get into and one of the reasons I subbed in the first place back in the day. I think your bubbles read well, I never read out of order, and I think your paneling makes sense, and I love the voices you gave to your characters.

If I was to get nitpicky about composition, there are places where the composition does feel like it's cut and pasted from your page format version, but I like that you put the panels in different sizes and different places to move the eye around. It's harder to move the eye about in vertical comics, since there's just not much left or right that the eye can go. And, I think having that contrast between big panel and small panel helps create interest, makes good sense of timing and space--you seem to already understand that. I especially like when we overlapped longer panels with smaller panels, or broke through the panel gutter, because that helped the composition feel less like it was cut and paste, and more like it was originally scroll format to begin with.

There are other comics (like I really enjoy Midnight Furies for this) that go from page format into scroll, and they add details outside the panels to help it feel less like a void--but that's not so necessary, and it does make your file size just so much bigger. I've been doing that and filling the void makes me happy but also makes it impossible to upload haha. I agree with you that it's very grey in some of the pages, but I think it's mostly just that gutter color doing that. I think your scenes in themselves are probably fine enough.

It's still a point in the comic where it's just heating up, so we haven't had any need for dynamic scenes to either get confused in (which can happen in a fight scene) or have a need to push further in our panel compositions. So for now--this is good. I really don't have complaints.

Either way, it's a great comic, was already reading it (and had some catching up, which was nice) good job!

Also kudos on using procreate for this--I hear it's wonderful, but does have some limitations in file size and layers, and as someone who has like a billion layers as part of my process, hats off to you for going for it. It seems to work well for your comic.