Intro+ looking for feedback on my fantasy comic

[kytri]

Hello! So I've been posting on this forum for a few months now but I never made an introductory thread. My name is Kieran, and I've been doing webcomics for a while. This one is fairly new though, it's only been running since the end of June.

Anyhow my comic is called Crypts and Cantrips and it's a fantasy adventure comic about an orphaned drow who lives in the capital city of a large empire. The setting is pretty heavily inspired by Dungeons and Dragons but you don't have to have played it to enjoy the comic.
I'm mirroring the comic a few different places but here are the links to tapas and webtoons

Crypts and Cantrips | Tapas

Crypts and Cantrips

I also have it hosted on my own website, it's a week's worth of updates ahead: http://cryptsandcantrips.kytri.net/

I'm generally pretty proud of how it's coming along so far but I don't tend to get a lot of comments or feedback of any sort. So it'd be nice to hear some feedback and/or critique from people who maybe aren't already familiar with my work.
Thanks!

[hjfsdh2222]

I like it^^ it’s cute. I’m not good at giving critiques:3

Here’s mine if your interested:

Crime & Cars | Tapas

[OttoGruenwald]

Mirroring is the way to go. I haven't done it near enough personally. Don't forget tumblr and reddit. Promotion is key in this game.

Speaking of promotion...

Mere decades after the end of the Great War in the Air the world finds itself in the midst of a second Great War--a war in which gods and men-like gods shake the very foundations of reality with their combat.

The rise of superhumanity and supertechnology has expanded Earth's war to the far corners of reality. There is no end in sight to the conflict. With each new miracle comes several new nightmares. The fires of war grow and threaten to consume all existence.

After a battle in Europe against an Axis energy dragon, a superhuman named Spectro tumbles through uncharted reality--and something follows him back home to Earth, something with strange thoughts and incredible power.

This is the tipping point. This is point of no return.

The Earth is in the Power of Stardust, and there is no turning back.

https://tapas.io/dashboard/series/update/104731

[kytri]

I guess thanks to everyone who at least gave it a look.
I wasn't really intending this to be a general promotion thread for everybody? I thought there were already several of those.

I guess I was a little over ambitious asking for feedback.

[yozhikisblue]

I thought I would hold off on giving feedback since I have been commenting here and there as I follow your comic, but it looks like the last few posts haven't pursued the review angle too deeply, so I hope you don't mind if I give it a shot. :3

I'm really enjoying Crypts and Cantrips. I think the d&d style character sheets are an especially nice touch- it would be very cool to see them collected together some ways down the road.

It does seem as though this comic has a lengthy overarching plot that is in its early stages, so I find it hard to comment on that aside from a general curiousity about where it's headed, how Kitov will take to his new job and what this journey is going to be like.

I have noticed that the backgrounds in this comic tend to be a little sparse- and I think this is a shame, because it seems like a missed opportunity to learn more about the fantasy world the story is set in through various hints at lore or even just tone-setting interiors. If the story is taking a turn for journeying, I would love to see more glimpses of relevant landmarks and the overall landscape. I do know how time consuming drawing involved backgrounds can be though, so I can understand if tht's not in the cards!

The characters are very expressive, so I get a strong sense for how they speak and what they seem to feel- although, as with the backgrounds, I do sometimes feel the contents of the dialogue are giving me little information to go on. It's not that I'm expecting them to launch into backstory- but perhaps more frequent allusions to their private lives and where they come from might not be out of place? I realize of course that the main body of the story is just getting started, but it would be nice to see farther along.

Perhaps my review is veering into personal preference- I apologize if I'm talking past your goals for the story. In general, as I've said, I'm enjoying it so far, and I'm confident that will continue to be the case. But I hope the criticism I do have might prove helpful!

[kytri]

Thanks!
Yeah I can definitely agree on the background thing, I'm generally way better at characters than I am at environments. So when I'm short on time and energy it can be easy to go, "well we've already seen this room in the establishing shot" I'm trying to get better about that.

As for character stuff and general info, yeah I'm still working out the balance on that. One issue I think some of my previous writing has had is I would spend too much real estate on little mundane stuff that didn't move the story forward or really matter and I think people found it confusing. So I'm really making an effort to keep the chapter length down and cut out a lot of the fluff. I really didn't want to overwhelm new readers. It's possible I've over corrected.

[paperwren]

Beautiful colors, and your character art is really solid. I agree with @yozhikisblue on their comments regarding the backgrounds. I'm wondering if you could figure out some shortcuts for doing backgrounds using a combination of some of the features in clip studio with photo references, or building rooms in google sketchup (although I don't know what fantasy style assets they have). I know a lot of people spend an hour or so building a room in sketch up and then screenshot it from different angles to use instead of a backwash.

One thing I did want to mention, I am finding the font you are using gorgeous to look at and very difficult to read. To the point where I'm reading things at half speed, especially the inner monologue portions with the white outline. I think part of it is things like the exaggerated curve on the lowercase "d" in the dialogue, and the height of the h. Having those as the only lowercase letters was a little distracting which broke the flow for me. The speech bubbles also felt a bit cramped in places, where the font was almost touching the edge, which I think was also contributing to my problems with readability. All pretty minor details, but sometimes I think stuff like that can put people off, even though your art is lovely.

Also I really like your logo design. I noticed you're using comicpress on your website. Have you considering making custom navigation buttons that tie into your logo's style? I think you can add them with the Webcomic plugin.

Looks really good overall! Hope you find tons of success in this new project.

[kytri]

Thank you!
You're not the first person to say they found the narration font hard to read, but you are the first to say they found the dialogue font illegible. Personally I love the dialogue font but I'm not completely happy with the narration one. So far it's the most legible one I've found that still looks a bit like a medieval handwritten script and has a free licence. I don't really have the budget to buy font licences at the moment. Hopefully I can replace it with a better font eventually.

I've used sketchup a little bit but I haven't gotten enough of a hang of it yet to actually model anything useful. I really wish I found it more intuitive because it would help a lot. Right now I'm mostly just abusing clip studios perspective tools.

I'll have to look into adding custom buttons to wordpress. I've done it before, years ago on a different comic but it didn't look great.

[paperwren]

Oh there is an online website thing that let's you make your own font. If other people haven't had a problem then maybe it's just me! It wasn't that it was illegible, just I was aware of it and it slowed my reading, I probably could have worded that better.

Yeah that's totally fair about sketchup not being intuitive, I haven't used it in a couple of years but now that I think about it I probably had to look up a bunch of tutorials to get it working properly. I mean I don't draw backgrounds at all right now, so probably running my mouth a bit. Sorry this wasn't very helpful!

[kytri]

Other people seem to have no trouble with sketchup, I just can't seem to manage it.

I guess I could try making my own font again. Every time I've tried it's come out looking awful though.