Did we waste a big opportunity? [critique]

[Candel_and_Goji]

Hey forumland! Me and Goji are doing a comic — https://tapastic.com/series/ParlorTricks

and we're really eager for critique. Let me explain our situation here. We've been working on Parlor Tricks for more than a year now, and what we're putting out is kind of our "pilot."

We know it isn't the best we have for our skill levels now, but we made it for learning experience (and learned a lot!). We started publishing with the mindset of "hey, it's just the pilot and we're getting better. We'll find our niche and by the time our hook is out there we'll have the interest to really get some momentum."

Parlor Tricks got featured. And it was an amazing, unexpected honor (definitely made us really happy!) but despite the feature, we've had some trouble gaining traction. Our first few updates definitely weren't our best (that's on us, and learning how things work), and I feel like it just wasn't quite ready for a feature. Our current and future work is much better, but we're still learning, and we want to give our creative baby the best chance it can get.

We would love and welcome critique on our layout, writing, art, et cetera. We want to know what you think of the comic so far, and what we can do better for the future. We have a really big story that we want to tell.

Feel free to leave your own comics, too, and we'll take a look and give you feedback if you like.

[Strontium]

I checked out the comic when it was first featured and the initial updates changed a lot! I wasn't expecting that.

I'm going to offer a critique because I'm frustrated with myself with my inability to focus on your comic. The art is really nice and the narrative is really nice but they don't combine nicely for me. It's hard for me to switch between reading prose in a book or such, and reading comics and speech bubbles and looking at art. This is especially hard because in the first set of pages, the speech bubble font is illegible to me. It's too scribbly and in order to decipher it I have to concentrate even harder and at that point I just give up and scroll through for the art.

Comics have varying amounts of text in them but this one is too text heavy. I feel like the images tell the story pretty well on their own. And I appreciate the strength of the narrative voice - the section about the vase of flowers was really inspired and unique. But I don't think it fits in well with the comic. Comis, especially webcomics and especially the webcomics on Tapastic, are optimized to be read quickly. Because I have to force my eyes to slow down and read the text, and pay attention to the art at the same time, it becomes a real chore. It makes me not want to read the comic.

If this was an animated short, and the narrative text boxes were a voice over, I think it would work. I think it would be super nice! But animation is time consuming. If this were a straight up novel, I'd miss the cinematic art and the interesting character designs. I would never tell you to excise the text - clearly that's a big part of your story and storytelling style - but I would advice you to rely on it less, to use it more like a narrator who comes in occasionally rather than it being a majority of your uploads. Maybe also separate narrative moments more from the comic segments - because when I'm confronted with a choice between comic or text, I will choose to look at comic.

I also got a feature in the Staff Pick when I began my comic and I didn't get many followers from it. So I know the feeling. You feel like, it was a gift you wish you had gotten later. And then you feel bad because it's rude to refuse a gift. You can check out my comic if you'd like, I'm not looking for critiques at the moment since I'm far along in the story and it would require a full read on behalf of the critic (242 episodes, how did I get here...)

Incidentally I'd love to know what a formorian is, that word sounds so familiar to me...

[Candel_and_Goji]

Hi, goji here this time! I just wanted to say thank you so much for the in-depth thought and critique!

About at the same time you posted this, actually, I updated scene 1 with dialogue in the standard comic font, and now candel and I are diving back in to freshen up the rest of the text.

Unfortunately there still will be some considerable bulk to the narration for a while, because our current updates are from a backlog buffer and aren't being posted according to the dates of their completion (tonight's update is from, like, November of last year), but we've been planning for a while now to tone it down and transition more into what you might expect from a comic format. Some of the later pilot updates begin to make this transition.

The formorians are based off fomorians of Irish myth!

[Strontium]

Oh yes, that font is MUCH better! Ah! What a relief.

You're welcome! I hope that you continue to post the comic and work on it, it will take a while to build an audience but I believe you can do it.

Also thanks for the hot tip on formorians. I think @punkarsenic has a comic with them too, and they've posted about it here on the forums before so the word was rolling about my head.

[punkarsenic]

yeah i do! thanks for reminding me, actually, ive been meaning to take a break and read this comic, its cool to see someone else reference the fomorii.

[solhawthorne]

I just read the first few chapters and I'll read more tomorrow.

I actually really like the prose addition to the story! You don't see comics try to mix up different narrative styles and I feel like trying to combine the details of text narration with interesting pictures could work out really well.

That being said, I think the text portions aren't being utilized properly. By that I mean you're using too much descriptive language that could be captured more succinctly in a single picture. For example, in the second episode, there's a prose box that says "[Hambone] smiles toothily...". That should be a picture. The prose works out very well in the first episode where it was talking of things that are hard to convey in a picture (the familiarity with crime, the atmosphere of the street, thoughts not spoken, etc).

You may also want to separate out the dialog scenes from the prose scenes and be more careful about when to use either. Strontium mentioned above about the difficulty with focusing. It is rather hard to bounce back and forth between narration and dialog (especially due to the handwritten font). I don't believe at all that comics should be restricted to quick reading, but there needs to be better separation between exposition and action. This could also be that there's just too many boxes and bubbles.

It's also true that the images alone are fairly strong in telling the story. If you widened the scenes and added a couple more shots you may not need the prose at all. That is an issue because it means the prose isn't serving an explicit purpose. Besides cutting out the prose you could solve this by cutting out large chunks of dialog and putting that into the narration, turning the images into illustrations rather than talking heads. (I believe The Heart Collector did this and it was wonderful)

[Candel_and_Goji]

goji here!
we're definitely going to be thinning the narration after we go through the pilot backlog. it's our most consistent issue and it's one we've had personally for a long time, but it's just not worth it at this point to rework this pilot much more than we already have-- we don't want to spend much longer before getting into the meat of the plot!
(the narration does serve a concrete purpose within the universe of the story, but we both definitely agree that at the time of writing the pilot we did nOT understand how the utilization would work haha)
we're also going to use handwriting very sparingly for future updates.

thank you so much for your time and the critique! we really appreciate the feedback :")