okey here we go, feedback @Rai_Muffin
First off, love the art and especially your character design and their expressiveness! And the library / observatory design was cool. Really liked the map at the beginning too!
_`Is the fight too brief? Didn't want to drag it out too much, keeping it to just the essentials, but would you rather see longer actions scenes?-`_
I liked the balance you had. Unless you want to change to tone and focus of your comic intentionally, I would keep it as you have it. Having an elaborate fight scene so early without context to keep the readers engaged would not be beneficial, imo, and the action and energy you have does a good job of picking up momentum.
Is the dialogue too stilted? Worried that my dialogue isn't natural enough while still getting across the ideas I want. Any way I can punch it up?-
I agree on the previous points that for a reader the Deman/ demen is tough, and that the clunkier parts are mostly the dialogue related to background etc. It definitely flows more naturally on later pages. I also got the feeling that a bit of the very beginning was not needed to set off the next bits of your narrative, but since I don't know what comes later I can't make a big judgement on that. Overall while I think you could have a tighter beginning story wise, the energy was good and at no point did I feel like I was really losing focus as a reader. Nice job!
> Are the panels too small? Feel like some panels are too small and cramped. Are they alright or should I go fewer per page with bigger panels? I'm not making these for a magazine or anything so it's not like I have a hard page limit, but would it make the pacing slower?
I'm not a comic artist, so I can't speak to this as well as previous posters have, but as a reader I found it your panel sizes visually appealing and clear when viewing them both on my phone and on a desktop screen
A few minor things, feel free to disregard if you prefer things stylistically of course!:
- On the first page, example on my edits for grammar. Since that's your first bit of narration, I went ahead and gave some specific edit suggestions here:
The day our Mama left, the thing that stuck with me the most was, 'why was she smiling as she cried?'
For clarity, you could also consider rewording it to break up the lines and emphasize the fact that the experience left the MC with a question, e.g. something like
The day our Mama left, I was left with a question. 'Why was she smiling as she cried?'
Careful of commas throughout, it's an easy thing to miss; check for other little punctuation things too
as a previous reply noted, check for spelling. That said, of course dialogue has stylistic grammar choices depending on the character's voice etc so i dont mean to overstep with any of these suggestions
Random thoughts:
Your use of bits of german was interesting! Is that consistent in your worldbuilding later too? If that is one of your sources of inspiration for some words, would it be reasonable to dig into that to revisit the demen/deman naming scheme given the geography and history in-world? (also random, but as a german the idea of Affe sausage scared me until I realized it was not actually made of apes haha)
I thought how you broke the fourth wall on (i think) page 22 was funny! That said, one dialogue related thing i noticed was occasionally some modern / real world terminology slipped into the dialogue. If that's an intentional stylistic choice, that's great, but if you want to make the readers' immersion in your worldbuilding a bit smoother, perhaps you can try avoiding words like 'primetime' etc. unless its in an explicit joke like on page 22, or something that translates into some in-world tech or culture.
Hope this is at least somewhat helpful! Keep up the great work!
