Give me your honest criticisms

[chrisrussell167]

Hey guys,

I'm looking for some feedback on my comic so far. I've been working on this project for about a month now and I'm about 5 pages in. I'm also pretty new to drawing comics so I would really love some constructive criticism on this project so I can improve the quality.

My comic is called Pirates & Pandas. In a nutshell it's going to follow the TV sitcom format for each episode, which will be about 25 pages, in order to convey a story within this universe. Each episode will be completely stand alone in the same way an episode of the Simpsons or Family Guy stands out on it's own two feet.

The basic concept of this comic is as such: Imagine pirates of the Caribbean and family guy had a baby in 18th century China. In other words it's a pirate comic based in a setting inspired by the Ming Dynasty, and in the future will include parodies of various Chinese mythological characters as well as famous pirates. My hope is to focus more on the culture of Chinese piracy rather than the Caribbean pirates, although I love a good story in the Caribbean, majority of the pirate stories focus on that genre.

Anyways, that's the basic background of what my plan is. For now, I would love to hear some honest critique on what I have so far. The art work, the jokes, the writing, etc.

Thanks everyone

Pirates & Pandas | Tapas

[darthmongoose]

I feel like there's a sort of tone issue with this comic where it's not quite sure what it's trying to be.

The art style has quite naturalistic proportions and detailed characters and overall quite a dark, subdued looking colour scheme that make it look like the comic is meant to be taken seriously, so the farcical tone of the humour feels like it's constantly fighting against the art.

Putting a huge banner underneath every episode of the characters all standing in the dark looking pretty serious undermines the punchlines. There doesn't need to be an advert for your comic under your comic. It's okay for updates to be short when it's a gag strip. Get rid of those.

If you want to make a serious comic about cool furry pirates being badass and occasionally cracking wise at each other (you know, like the tone of a Marvel movie or Avatar the Last Airbender or Ducktales or something) the art style and the serious, dramatic framing and moody lighting you're doing now would work a lot better for something like that. Trying to sell it like it's a sitcom though and structuring it like a gag strip just doesn't seem to mesh well with what you seem to want to draw and how you want these characters to come across looking at how you're drawing them and composing panels like you want the reader to think they're cool. I'd recommend either changing to a more adventure with jokes structure, or changing the art to be more suited to comedy; flatter, brighter, less moody colours.

[chrisrussell167]

Thank you for the feedback.

I definitely understand what you mean about pairing the art style with genre. I’ve never really thought that.

That being said I like the idea of brighter colors. Can realistic proportions still function well with a comedy? I guess thinking back at cartoons in general they are usually exaggerated.

Looking at my script I think the future of the comic will start to go in that direction you said. Adventure but with the occasional joke/punch line where it’s fitting. I was concerned when I was writing it that the script was lacking jokes and focused too much on the story but I’m glad you brought it up.

Somehow my writing style changed a little between the first 5 pages and the rest of the episode. I think I approached these first pages almost like a gag strip before I really started to let the story flow.

Thanks again. Some interesting critiques to think about.

[Rhonder]

I don't have time to do a full critique right now sadly, but to offer my opinion on this question here:

Can realistic proportions still function well with a comedy?

I definitely think they can! I looked through the first 3 parts (1.1-1.3) and I think that realistic proportions can definitely work for this style of comic. The area that I think I would focus on would be to take more liberties in exaggerating poses and expressions where appropriate to help sell the comedy especially if it's going to be more physical slapstick-esque comedy like this. I doodled a few examples from 1.3 below (Excuse the poor lighting ):

So far it seems like a lot of your poses are just really rigid and stiff and your characters don't emote very strongly. When someone's happy, don't be afraid to make them really happy! When someone busts out the world's tiniest violin to mourn their soon-to-be-shark-bait crewmate, show some of that lightly sarcastic sorrow on their face.

The third doodle is just a really small and crude rework of this panel:

Right now the guy doing the pushing is standing almost completely straight up and barely giving a shove, and while falling guy is leaning over, it's also at a rather tame angle. Push those lines of action The mischievous crewmate can really give the guy a big shove, and you can comedically see the guy's body bending around the point of impact as he tried (and fails) to maintain balance.

If you practice some things like these, I think your character designs and art style will do just fine! But it can be loosened up and exaggerated to better effect, I think

[chrisrussell167]

I appreciate all the feedback so far. Definitely a lot to take into consideration that I've missed so far.

So more exaggerated expressions, poses. Brighter colors. Match up the overall style of the comic in a nutshell.

Thank you guys.

[system]

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