And now... very sorry @Hot_Coffee for the delay because I know this is long-awaited... the review of Hot Metal Miami (I'M GOING TO MIAMI, WELCOME TO MIAMI-!)
So this is a first for my review threads. It's a completed long-form comic! WOW! That's incredible, congratulations!
I'll therefore be assuming that crit of this comic isn't to improve it going ahead, but to point out things that could be relevant for whatever your next work is.
Also.... whew that was a lot to read. I know you were frustrated when a past reviewer didn't read the full thing. This is a long comic, it has a lot of pages and the pages are DENSE with lots of panels and intense subject matter. It must have been quite a feat to make, so it really deserved some effort on my end.
It was a pleasure though. This is a great comic, and I would urge anyone reading this thread to give this one a look. Hopefully my review will convince you why...
Art:
So one thing I have to praise this comic for is guts. It knows what it wants to be, there's a really bold, artistic vision here to the style, and I approve. That stylised eighties neon flat colouring and the strong black fills are really striking, and your use of them gets better throughout, with really confident use of hyper-saturated colour. It absolutely evokes that eighties feel. So I really want to give praise for that excellent, consistent art direction. It will definitely serve you well going forwards.
I did feel like at times, the weakness in the stylistic choice was that the characters being quite cartoonish made the very brutal scenes of violence feel jarring and out of place at times, like the drawing style on the characters perhaps didn't fit the gritty tone. The style reminds me a bit of old webcomics I loved, like Megatokyo, RPG World or It's Walky!, which have generally always been a bit more comedy-focused and fantastical, and this being a much darker, more serious story, the style feels a little too cute for things like people snorting coke and getting gunned down by the cartel and stuff.
The use of flat background colour to denote location is a simple, but honestly kinda genius way of getting shot continuity across panels in the same room or scene without needing a lot of background detail. Generally the whole thing has really clear storytelling, it felt like I was reading the storyboard to a film or TV show. Your storyboarding sense is extremely strong, with even complex action sequences reading clearly. It's good stuff!
One area I would say definitely holds the comic back from looking as good as it could is the inking. The art definitely improved throughout, but even by the end, the inking still retained a lot of the same issues. It's very "floppy", with a lack of line weight variation, and with poor control on curves and could use more definition to edges and points. It makes the comic look a bit rushed and amateurish. I understand that with the sheer panel count and page count going down here, clearly you felt the need to prioritise a fast pipeline, but I feel like in a future work, it'd be good to maybe trim down the story a bit and reduce the panel count and to really go in for some inks with a bit more character and tension to them to give the characters a bit more depth and volume.
The detail of the world is great. I love that there are eighties posters everywhere referencing bands and movies of the time, and great world-building touches like a shelf made from a cinderblock and planks.
Overall, I'd really say that you have a striking and unique vision, a strong sense of colour and visual storytelling, and your art direction is great. If you can continue to raise the polish level of your work, I could see you making some spectacular comics in the future.
Music:
Confession: I'm not normally a fan of music in Tapas comics. Odd coming from a die-hard Homestuck like me, but most people put in like... songs that really don't fit, it rarely enhances the tone.
This comic was the exception though. The choice of period-appropriate and tone-appropriate music was excellent. Thumbs up.
Writing:
Because the art starts out rough looking, I was really blindsided by the quality of the writing in this comic. I immediately felt like I was watching an eighties movie, with the style of the dialogue and the colloquialisms of the time nailed. It's cheesy, but it's exactly the right kind of cheesy to evoke that period. I can imagine that might be a little hard to relate to for the Tapas audience because they're...um... less born in the Thatcher era than me. Also I think some of the very 20th Century American phrases and Lyndi's thick NY accent would probably be a bit inaccessible for a lot of people, since many Tapas readers might not have English as their first language.
I think it's cool to make something with a strong identity in terms of place, but I've experienced first hand how it can make a comic inaccessible. In my own earlier works, I loved to use a lot of British and particularly Northern English slang, but it really put international readers off, so I had to cut that down a lot. You'd probably find it easier to build a large readership on Tapas if you assumed that a lot of readers here don't necessarily know US culture and will struggle to read accents written phonetically (they can't look up the words and may not realise it's a deliberate misspelling of a common word to denote an accent). It's just one of those annoying things where you have to choose between creative vision and marketability.
Story-wise, I felt like scene-to-scene, it was really well-written, but that there were too many characters and too many subplots going on for the payoff of the main story. It introduces a lot of characters, and while every side-plot would be quite compelling on its own as a self-contained story, there were a lot of times I just couldn't remember who some of the less important ones were, or really focus on their character arcs and plotlines and just wanted to get the focus back to the main plot. Having so many characters and plotlines going on felt like it stretched out the comic too much. There are so many pages packed with so many panels that it's a bit of a behemoth to read, and ultimately I felt like pruning some of the branches would have kept the main narrative punchier; there were definitely some subplots going on with characters that weren't adding enough to the plot or the theme of the story where the payoff justified the setup.
Sometimes, even when a subplot or a character interaction scene is really good, it still needs cutting if it's taking too much attention away from the main event.
I did feel that maybe the beginning could have been clearer in establishing who the main character is. It seemed like Donna was the main protagonist, but it didn't take all that long before it really felt like actually the intended protagonist was Joan. Perhaps it would have been stronger to establish Joan as protagonist from the get-go? Hindsight is always 20-20 though, right?
I was in two minds about the Metal Gear homages. When (one of my fave MGS characters) The Boss... or, er... "Joy" turned up, I legit said aloud to my partner "wait, what the crap, is this comic actually a Metal Gear fancomic!?", the sheer amount of Metal Gear references puts the comic in a weird place where it's not exactly a fanfic, but the similarities to MGS go beyond just an "homage". In many cases, the tone being more like a small-scale, bloody personal conflict Tarantino movie felt like it was fighting against the grand Kojima-esque parts of the narrative. I felt like maybe you had two different, really awesome comic ideas you wanted to make, and decided to combine them and they were kinda fighting each other. Mashups can definitely work, but it's always hard to get the balance right.
Honestly, I wouldn't tell you not to try a weird mashup again in the future though, because this almost worked. I think it would have been less jarring if the homages to specific games (MGS3 and 5) weren't so obvious, and I could see the logic behind the mixing of MGS5's 80's setting, themes of American imperialism and how innocent people get sucked into lives of brutal violence through desperation and the scars that leaves, with a neo noir crime saga. I just felt like the references were a bit too obvious, bordering on feeling less like a passing homage and more like an AU fanfic, particularly later on, and that some of the more fantastical, large-scale parts of Metal Gear are just a bit too big for a smaller scale story about drug lords controlling Miami. I think as your confidence grows, you may well someday nail it and make something incredible, but in this case, I think maybe had you ended the comic at the end of the True Blue arc and started a new comic with a bit of a more action movie tone, possibly a spinoff with some of the same characters, about gangs taking over a city with homages to The Warriors, Escape from New York and MGSV, it might have been two really solid comics, each with a clear vision rather than a very very long and slightly janky amalgam.
Overall though, the writing was great. The scenes were well-paced, the dialogue had a TV or movie-like feel and excellent flow, the characters were well-realised with distinct voices, and the flow of action was always really clear. So really the area to work on is just learning to edit things down and to really think about the core of the story you're trying to tell and keeping only scenes, characters and storylines that strengthen it, and putting everything else in your "ideas drawers" for later.
Summary:
I gotta say, I think out of every comic I've reviewed on my threads, and I've seen some very underrated comics here, this one is one of the most ridiculously underrated in terms of subs to how good it was. While the art was rough around the edges and the subject matter was probably not Tapas' cup of tea, and maybe it went in a little hard on the MGS love and kept in some darlings that should have been killed, the storytelling and directing of scenes were honestly higher quality than I've seen in a lot of top-tier published comics.
The art is still "getting there", it's functional, it tells the story and there's good direction here and a sense for composition of a shot, it just needs polish on that anatomy and the line quality. There's room for improvement, but all doable with some study.
The writing though? The way you pace your scenes, your dialogue flow, it's just so natural and cinematic, just...wow. You are good enough that you could submit to big publishers. Honestly if you teamed up with a skilled artist, and used your rough drawings of the panels as a storyboard then had a dedicated art person draw stuff with more detail and cleaner lines and things, you'd have a really pro-quality product on your hands.
Please keep making comics (or at least become like a TV/film/animation/games writer, story boarder, editor or director or something). I see enormous potential in you.
And with that.... Slots.... ARE.... OPEN!!! (5 slots!)