[CLOSED] Giving your comic honest feedback/reviews

To start off, I’m going to talk a little about the art before getting into the actual humor itself. The style reminds me of early to mid-2000 rage comics with simplistic characters on a white background. There’s nothing that really makes it stand out among the plethora of other gag comics, but it works as a way to easily and quickly convey humour to the viewer. One thing I would suggest is to put in a bit more time in making the comic look neater. I noticed that for close-ups, you enlarge the base character image instead of drawing a new one. This is especially noticeable when you get really close6 to a character, you can see the blurred lines and the artifacts around the eyes and mouth. I would also try and keep the font size consistent unless you’re trying to highlight certain words – don’t change the font size relative to how much space you have in the speech bubble, change the speech bubble in order to fit the font.

The humour for me was rather hit or miss. A lot of it again reminded me of early to mid-2000 gag comics, where the punchline was less about making a joke and more of subverting expectations. That can work in moderation but overusing it can get boring quick, especially when you can start predicting the actual punchlines. There’s also a few jokes that just went over my head (out of juice2, dead squirrel2). While I may just be an outlier, sometimes a joke will make sense to you because you know the context around it while not translating well on paper.

I tended to enjoy the puns, 4th wall breaking and "relatable" posts the most. Out of all of them, lost arm5 was by far my favourite. It’s a simple punchline that relies solely on visuals, but is a perfect fit for your art style. Others that got a smile out of me were left side, motto and clone (to name a few).

Other things not related to the comic itself are to try and make your cover and banner stand out more. The webcomic market is very saturated right now, so it’s a difficult battle to compete with everyone else. The saying goes “don’t judge a book by its cover”, but that’s exactly what people do; in order to get people to even click on you, they need a reason.

I’m not sure what your current process is like, but I’d recommend writing down a bunch of ideas and then going over them with someone else and see what they think. A lot of jokes that may seem funny to you may only be funny to you. Having another set of eyes to offer a different perspective can weed out a lot of the “misses” and improve the overall quality of your comics. Your jokes have definitely improved since you started, which is great considering you’ve only been doing this for a couple months.

So I’ve read the first 25 pages and I have to admit that I have no idea what’s going on. It’s common for stories to throw you right in the middle of everything at the beginning to get you hooked, but right now I’m just confused.

I didn't write a script or anything

That already is a huge red flag. If you don't even know where the story is going, how do you expect the reader to follow what's going on. If you want to make a cohesive story, you need to at least create the groundwork.

Who are the characters? What are they like? How do they interact with each other? Where is the plot going? What are the problems the characters are going to face? How will the characters face these problems?

These are all basic questions that need to have at least some sort of answer before you even start writing. Now I'm not saying that you need to know each aspect of your story in excruciating detail, but you need to have some idea of what's going on, where you want things to go, and how you're going to get there.

To get to your story specifically, the dialogue feels very unnatural. It can be difficult to get speech to sound natural while also making the conversation to flow the path you want (I tend to struggle with it myself) but it's just something you just need to keep reading and revising until you can actually picture people having that exact conversation. Things are also jumping around like crazy. First it starts off in a forest, then a school, then somewhere with a computer, then watching TV? Overall I'm just having a hard time following what's going on.

In terms of art style, there's definitely a lot that can be improved upon. I'm not talking about how good the art work is (everyone starts somewhere and just saying "get better" literally helps no one), but rather how things are presented. The lineart itself is extremely messy, with lines overlapping each other or stopping abruptly. The text bubbles share the same fate, while also being difficult to distinguish from the background art. This problem is amplified by the font being difficult to read (especially when Virgil talks) due to the constantly changing font size, the poor choice of font, the weird gray border around the lettering and the sub-optimal positioning of the text relative to the speech bubble. Everything seems to clash with each other making an already hard to follow story even more difficult to follow.

Here's an example of "cleaning things up" (I'd recommend a larger font size as well):

cleaned.png940x400 104 KB

I'd highly recommend you spend more time working on the story as well as your writing and art style. It looks like you're taking a break until December so I'd spend that time doing a bit more planning before you continue.

I don't really have much to say for this one since I don't think there's too much to critique.

At first I wasn't a fan of the art style, but it started to grow on me as I read through the chapters. It's definitely something that's memorable and stands out. One complaint I have is that some of the text is too difficult to read, sometimes because the speech bubbles are slightly too small and sometimes because the text itself is too small. There are also a few typos here and there, but from what I've seen I don't believe English is your first language? If that's the case, it might be a good idea to find someone who's willing to proofread your work before posting it.

The story itself has started off fairly slow. I enjoyed the characters as well as their interactions, but the first two chapters didn't have me hooked. Chapter 3 was when the main plot finally started kicking in and made me scroll to read the next chapter, not because I was reading it for a review but because I actually wanted to see what was going to happen next!

Honestly I'm not too sure what I'm supposed to be reviewing here. Like you mentioned, this is more of you testing geometry and perspective than anything else. Since I'm not exactly good with perspective drawing myself, I'm definitely not the guy you want to be hearing feedback from. There's also no story right now for me to critique. If you'd like, you should post again when you have more to show off!

Since you asked me to, I won't hold back with this review.

From what I've seen so far, the art style is really cool. An issue I have with the art itself is the action scenes. The movement feels very stiff and lacked "omph" in some panels (examples 16 24) where it felt like the characters were posing rather than fighting. I have to admit I was a bit disappointed that the comic isn't in full colour, but I understand that doing 2 coloured pages a week probably isn't the most feasible time-wise. I would've suggested considering moving to a 1 coloured page a week release schedule, but that brings me to the next problem.

We're currently 47 pages into the story and almost nothing has happened. We've gotten some character interactions with the two MCs, a short fight scene, a little bit of lore, and an arm wrestling competition with the frog man. Part 2 has seemed to have gotten better in the fact that things seem to be speeding up a bit, but it can be a big problem if you want to have an active and engaged audience as you're making the story. Take episode 5 to 9 for example. You used 10 pages to show a fight scene which could have probably fit in 5 or 6. This can be seen with episode 15 as well where you use 2 full pages to introduce a new town. Now this isn't too much of a problem if you care more about what people think about the final product rather than what they think as you're creating it, but it's important to keep a balance if you want people to enjoy the process.

Looking at the typesetting, (apparently I'm a stickler about it since I seem to somehow mention it in every review I've given so far) there are a few panels7 where the text isn't center aligned. This seems like it was done purposely since there are other panels where the text aligned, but I'm not too sure why. I don't know if this is just a me thing, but the text feels jarring when it's not.

Finally getting to the story, the plot seems fairly generic right now. From what's been said so far, it can be summed up as "two people on a journey to find a magical person". That's not to say that it'll be like that in the future; it's just that nothing has really jumped out at me so far saying "you should read this" - especially considering we're almost 50 pages in. Plot aside, the characterization and and interactions have been fun to read. I've especially enjoyed the facial expression they have during dialogue.

Overall, my biggest complaint with the comic right now is the pacing. The art is good, the characters are enjoyable, but the plot seems like it hasn't moved past the starting line. As it stands, it'd be a series that I wouldn't actively follow and instead pop back every few months to see what's happened.

Since you didn't mention the art in things you want to be critiqued, I'll make this section brief. As I mentioned with DiscountedArtist, the art itself isn't too important when creating gag/comedy comics since it's just a tool used to tell a joke. However, the art is what's used to initially get a viewer. I'd recommend tidying up certain aspects, mainly the typesetting. The text is unnecessarily difficult to read (look into Wild Words if you want something that looks cleaner), sometimes overlaps with the speech bubble3, and sometimes changes colour2 for no real reason. There are even times where the speech bubbles themselves are positioned out of order1. When positioning the bubbles, you need to take into account the readers "path" through the panels.

As for the story/humour, I can't say I'm a fan of it. It seems like a lot of the jokes revolved around puns which isn't always a bad thing (I actually like puns), but everything in moderation. Many of them felt forced which comes across as cheesy rather than funny. The non-pun jokes also fell flat with me. There were some good jokes in there (episode 92, the Betsie joke from episode 11, episode 16), but I honestly wouldn't have reached those if it wasn't for me sticking around to review the series.

I can't really critique the story itself since as you mentioned, it's just snippets of the characters lives. Since you said SoL was one of your genres, maybe consider putting your characters in places/situations that the user can relate to? That makes it easier for the reader to connect to the character since you can "put yourselves in their shoes". You kind of did that with the COVID "arc", but I would choose a topic that isn't beaten to death since it's literally all you hear about right now.

The characters themselves are fairly one-dimensional. They seem to have a single defining trait that encompasses their entire character and the jokes are based off of that. The only character that had any sort of real "development" was Cassie, which went from someone who was annoyed at the beavers insensitivity to one who played along with the jokes (which happened completely in chapter 2). I wouldn't really worry about character development at the beginning of a comedy comic though. Most people come for the jokes, so I'd say to focus on those before you start building complex characters. When you've laid down the fundamentals and feel like it's time to spice things up, then you should start looking in to giving the characters more depth.

After reading what you have so far, I can't really think of any feedback I can give you. I liked the art, the dialogue flowed nicely, each character had their own personality which showed by the way they talked and acted, and panel layout was great! The story hasn't developed much yet so I can't give a critique on it yet, but you did an amazing job with the world building thus far. Just make sure you've developed enough of the story so that you don't lose direction of where you want to go as you get further into it.

The one piece of advice I can think of is to advertise your comic more whether it be on here, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, your local supermarket - anywhere really. I'm sure there's a lot of people who'd be interested in seeing where this story goes.