No hand holding critique + Sub ( comics )

[Demy]

I'd appreciate if you could criticize my comic so far! You might catch a bit of a difference between the earlier and later chapters art-wise.

Read Myriad Voyages | Tapas Web Comics

I'll check out yours a little later and give input as well!

[Nabel-Mabel]

Hello VersusVII!
Yes you're supposed to read like in your screenshot. My comics is a manga so you read it from left to right like in Japan.

As for your comics i just read it ( chapter 1) and here's what i think:

I think the art is alright!
You're character are well drawn but can feel a little stiff, it's because you're very timid in the way you express their actions, you should make it a bit more impactful in moments where they are running, slamming doors, etc.
Your backgrounds work well also and you can use some texturing to make them better. In the church for example, you draw the chairs really well with the wood texture. The floor at the school is good too. Try to do things like this with everything especially the walls because it can feel empty ( big block of white).
The chara design works but can feel very normal, for example we can't really distinguish the main character from the others, i would say the only character that leaves an impact is the girl who was dressed like a nun because she has an original design.
Paneling 90% is good!!! Just sooometimes there are bizarre choices. Like in this scene:

When you show the school for the first time, i don't know why it's in such a small panel. I can't tell if it's a framing of a painting in the wall, or if you're showing an exterior view of the building.

But the art isn't the problem of your comic, it's working. For me the problem is the story, it's very difficult to understand what is going on, it is very very fast and skips lots of things. One second your character is talking to the girl, she shows him photos so you think: oh they are friends! Then he jokes with her and she calls people to beat him? This makes no sense, it is waaay too big of a reaction for that. And the main character doesn't seem to care that he will get beaten. And then the girl who called the bullies starts acting like it's normal?? I was so lost. The main character even says it's not the first time when before he was so casual talking to the girl who called the guys to beat him? This makes absolutely 0 sense. And then he has a flashback of a character we've never seen who says that if you say this cows will become crazy, but there was no set-up for this! For example if before in your story we see that old men say this and the cows go crazy, it would be like the "Tcheckov's gun" technique we use in writing, but there was none of that. And it doesn't stop, it continues to make no sense throughout all chapter 1. You need to make your script better. It's not the ideas that are bad! It's the presentation. If this was for example a cartoon on television, chapter 1 would be 3-5 minutes something like that. Look at everything that happens in that timelapse, no one will understand. You need to establish characters ( who is who? Where are they? Why are they here? What is the relationship between characters? ) theeen give us what happens in chapter 1.

I hope this will help!!
So in short:
Good:
-Art ( especially the cover)
-Paneling ( most of the time)
Bad:
- Story structure
- Some stiffness in character movement

[dbeirigo]

sorry for the grammar mistakes english is not my first language.
Hi so about your comic,I recomend starting with character and then latter explain the world,
show me a way to empathize with character and root for her then from there you show the world and scenario.

too much expositon you could start at the guy saying give it back after presenting the girl.

you then show that people have powers and as you show more and more people with powers the reader will get that this is a world full of people with powers without you having to tell them that and ends up being more interesting that way.

I'm not a fan of the cards saying the name and power of the character trope, but it's fine, what I'm getting so far is that you seemed to pass information about stuff a lot trough text and that is fine but is way better to get information through scenes and events and actions.

although some information can only be showed trough dialogue, but then you should make it work in the story it makes no sense for the director to tell the girl what her powers are she should already know that.
althogh it wasn't clear if she knew it or not at that point.

okay so you want to avoid repeating the same information too much, we read that her name is layla a lot of times. you could hold that information get rid of the cards telling that and introduce her name when she tells it to other people.

also you should show at the beggining the order in which we should read only now I realized is right to left.

finished first ep.

the art is good the comedy works just reduce the amount of exposition that can scare away readers, the way to go is aways focus on character and show information through the story instead of via texts boxes, i guess you can keep the character cards but show them once, the layla card repeats a lot.

finished the second ep.

this is a lot better less exposition, it was good, there's nothing to change here.

finished the third ep
good episode, I see no problem here.

finished the fourth ep.
here was a good example of how to do exposition right it worked with the story and makes sense for her to be talking about her backstory, it's good nothing to complain here.

on episode 5
the outistan revolution part
the exposition is way to long is not believable that the character would say all this, I recomend making it shorter

you could leave implied that the metorite gave birth to the gifited, 15 years ago, it dosen't seem natural for a person to say that when in the world is common knoledge.

finished the fifth ep.

good character momments I enjoyed the iteractions between the two, just again less exposition it's okay to have some is necessary but make it in away that the characters would say it sorry if I'm being to straight foward.

finished the sixth ep.

i like this one, the exposition was good it blended in the story, it flows nice.

finished the seventh ep.

good one overall, good job.

finished the eighth:
this is a good one for now on i will no loger comment by episode, because it's becoming repetitive to say it's good.

I will keep reading and update the critique as I notice something that I think I should point out.

[Oxyderia]

Hey hey! I'd love you (or anyone) to criticise my comic if you find the time, this is my first one so I am already aware of some of my issues (lack of sfx bc I just can't do it well, minimal background, maybe pacing idk?) in any case many of you seem to have produced such interesting works!!

Black Out Days

[KevinReijnders]

Yo, apologies for taking so long, but I finally got around to going over Gladiators.

I'll preface by saying I only read your first episode and your two most recent ones, I just didn't have the time to go through all of it, very sorry about that.

Overall I think you have a fun and well drawn comic going for you. The character designs are fun and wacky and you use a lot of great facial expressions. While I do think you could benefit from some anatomy studies and looking into your perspective here and there. But honestly, who amongst us couldn't benefit from that.

Stylistically you are very shonen inspired and have mastered it well. Maybe a bit too well, especially when it comes to dialogue. I find it very heavy on exposition and the kind of anime-style narration, where a character is flat out saying the thing they are doing, when the message can be easily conveyed through your great visuals. It's a style that doesn't come across as natural to me, it ends up making the characters feel less like they could be actual people.

Personally I find your panels too busy at times. Text takes up way too much space and the composition of the art sometimes feels choked by the panel borders. It's a shame to see your art get squished in where it starts to lose it readability. Especially because you work in black and white, where the overall image can easily get lost.
Luckily, your contrasts are well done, so your images do still read.

One thing about your use of the manga-style speechbubbles. This might be a personal taste, but I'm not sure if it works. In a regular english translated manga it makes sense for the layout of the bubbles to be vertically orientated, because that's how the japanese language works. The translation has to fit an existing layout.
You however, I assume, write your comic in english, which would benefit more from a horizontal orientation. To me this comes across as you trying to match the manga style, instead of making an authorial decision.

In short:
Great fun comic, with an excellent dynamic art style, but too stricktly following shonen sytle conventions.

[Nabel-Mabel]

Don't worry english isn't my first language too xDD
Thank you very much for the in-depth analysis! Very awesome!

And you gave some really good points! I do like to explain a lot lol!!

I'll check out your comics as soon as i can fam!

[Nabel-Mabel]

Yep i went full shonen with it xD But it's on purpose, i just really like manga much more than western comic books.
Thank you for the feedback fam, really appreciate you for giving time to this! I know it's not easy to find time when you're a full time artist.
Thanks ^^

[dbeirigo]

I'm redoing my first episodes of this comic

Read Interplanetary Transport Team | Tapas Web Comics

I only finished the first page:

also i'm still finishing reading your comic i'll finish my critique when I finished reading all your uploaded episodes.

[VersusVII]

Thank you for your feedback. The "white walls" is something I'm still struggling, I always fear to put too much details or make it look dirty (the exterior walls are earsier to represent).

I've never considered the problem is that the chapter is too fast paced. My idea was that for a joke things escalate quickly into this no-sense, to make readers laugh. The bullies were the catalyst to lead Noah to take shelter in the church. Maybe I will expose this better.

For the character design: I wanted them to look normal, not too complicated or extravagant because they are normal people. Just Anna pops up because she is out of the ordinary.

[Nabel-Mabel]

Hi Demy!
Just read your comics ! Here's what i think:

You have a style to your art, it doesn't feel generic like a lot of comic in this site. You're only big problem art-style wise is that you often can come off as being lazy when cleaning your art. Things that can easily be seen and fixed are left on purpose. For example just in your very first panel we see lots of hiccups:

And it still persists in your last chapter like lines going on top of other lines ( even if i see it way less):

Maybe it's your art-style but for others it can come of as lazy because that's the kind of line we use in Pre-productions in animation studios when we are working on very early stage rough designs.

For your panels you should be mindful of how they come out in tapas. I think you fixed that later but in the beginning you had dialogue that was cut because of how tapas displayed your pages.
For example:

For your story, you made a mistake a lot of people do is that you explain things in your summary/synopsis and not in the comic itself. I didn't understand anything from chapter 1 and 2 until i read the summary of the comics ( but the summary is just here to make you interested in reading, not give you crucial info that without it, you would be lost).
Characters seem to know each other a lot, which is good coz it shows us they have a history. But don't overuse that because you give lots and lots of new info every panel. Characters talk about things that we haven't seen and it's hard to understand sometimes without context. They are always like " oh you know me! it's like that time in ...Etc" and we're like " no i don't know you! xD ". All of this is tied to: lack of setting. We don't know who our characters are or what they are doing. It would have been better to have made them for example go back to school after the interrogation, have some explanation as to who they are and what they are doing and then they go to the bandit camp. Speaking of the torture scene, i know a comic is not really supposed to be realistic, but that guy was falling for a very long time xD If he was falling from the Empire State Building i would be like ok, but you show us the background:

It's not very high! He should have died a long time ago xD

Also i didn't understand this panel, what is going on? Is it the other girl shooting something? If it's her, you have to show her too, because like this It's very confusing:

I also feel like a big segment in Chapter 1 part 2 is missing. When they are in the bandit camp they hide in bushes. Then a guy crushes a weird eye ( i don't know why or what that did) and then they are in space for some reason. Then in chapter 2 they are back on the ship and then back again in the bushed. Super confusing, we have no spacial awareness at all. Are they teleporting? Or are they imagining things in their head? It's unclear.

In conclusion i think that you should work on making things more clear through staging and gives us some minimal exposition to understand. You know that feeling when you read a novel and you understand every word but you still don't understand anything about what you just read? It kinda feels like this reading your comics, because it's all very clear in your head but not necessarily for readers. Try to imagine your readers are absolute idiots xD This will help you a lot ! Some people don't like that of course, that's the downside... But it's better to over explain than to not explain at all! I hope this will help!

You truly have a great style, it's just a shame you try to speedrun like this! i'm sure if you take your time in the script and in the final line art, you'll have something pro because i see that potential in you ( your character don't feel like 2D puppets like 99% of comics on tapas). What i would say about your comics, my overall feelings: it feels more like a fan-fiction of another story than the real one itself ( which is weird because you are the original author xD )

[Nabel-Mabel]

Hello Simonitropunk!

I wrote in a post here a few weeks ago that i'll only start to review pieces that will offer me a review before or that say they will do it in the future because it's taking a lot of time from me to do this everyday. If i have your guarantee i will gladly do it! Because like i said in my first post, i'm not interested in just having subs who don't read. I'd rather have someone do the opposite frankly because there's no point having 200 subs and getting 20 views for example

[Demy]

Those slicing errors are still on tapas?! Huh...they turned out ok in Globalcomix and Webtoon so I guess I overlooked it here. Wow...really sorry about that. I'll try to fix that as soon as I can. Odd that nobody said anything...

Oh the first two chapters are a little rushed art wise yeah. I've been trying to take a bit more time on the artwork especially for the later chapters! Another part of the issue is that the artstyle and direction was a little more underdeveloped compared to the later unfortunately. Like that cliff problem and the staging you mentioned might be part of that issue.

Sheesh I must have really messed up in terms of the writing for you to be so confused lol. Umm ok where to start...

The setting and characters are actually are supposed to be built up gradually. A bit of a slower pace if that makes sense? At least...that's how its intended to be. Like the next chapter has a bit of backstory for why Mara is at the Academy lol. I could DM it to you (since its unreleased) if you want if it'll help in any way with understanding? Its also why the explanations are a little sparse since there's a lot of setup that's going on and some stuff is intended to be explained later and so on. Oddly enough I've had people say that they actually like that but I didn't consider the other side of that.

Oh and there shouldn't be a segment in part 2 that's missing. Like what happened is that the pod that the bandit crushed made a teleportation field that sent them to a moon along with elements from the surrounding area. This is why they're still hiding behind the bushes in the 2nd chapter. I had a character explain it in the 2nd chapter again but I guess it didn't help. Now that i think about it, it might have been presented poorly as well. Visually at least.

Oh what's supposed to be happening there is that she is using an air spell to shoot her arm into the air as a harmless joke. Though again it was presented poorly sorry about that.

I'm glad you liked the art though! But man...I wish it didn't feel like a fanfic for you lol. Would it help to maybe redo the first 2 chapters? Or maybe a few panels? I did one before but it was mostly dialogue and cutting panels. It might be a bit of a hassle since just editing the dialogue for every chapter was a bit annoying to do with the different slicing requirements for each site lol but if it'll potentially make for a better experience I could consider it! Or maybe it would be better to just keep going as is?

Oh I'll check your comic either later today or somewhere in the weekend btw!

[Nabel-Mabel]

I think you shouldn't redo your chapters because it's way too soon to do that!! Maybe a good solution is to create like a chapter 0 before where you tell us who the characters are and things like that? I think just this will fix 90% of problems!
Also my DMs are always open if you have any specific questions or if you just wanna talk about your comic or anything

[dbeirigo]

Yeah I guess I didn't introduced the characters well enough, I could create more scenes with Interactions to show more of their personalities in the first ep, I wouldn't go as far as creating another chapter but I could expand chapter 1 to include more of a introduction of the characters.

[Nabel-Mabel]

Yo Dbeirigo,

I've read most of your comics! They are very short so it was easy to read through it all!
I really like your style it is very funny to me. I used to draw almost exactly like this in middle school and highschool!! Quick stories that go super fast and make absolutely 0 sense but it's on purpose!
Keep writing like this because it's really funny, i laughed out loud, it's the first time since doing these critiques that this happened.
For your drawings, you need to add depth to them. What i mean is that it's very 2D and so everything feels flat
Here are your new drawings:

You only use the X and Y axis so it feels like a very old 2D space video game.
If you implement for dynamic views by using the Z axis, you will have much better result and we will feel the speed + weight + force way more.

Here's a quick fix i made in 2 mins and we already feel like it's actually happening:

It's because i play with the 3D form of the object and play with the distance with the camera ( like the beams getting bigger the more they are close to the camera )

Here's a simple explination of how you use space vs how you can use 3D space:

The triangle ships in 2 dimension feel lazy but in 3 dimension they are more threatening

I hope this helps you improve!!
Also use references for poses, your anatomy is sometimes a little too wacky ( characters feel like they are breaking their bones when doing certain actions).

I guess what i'm saying is you still need some XP, so keep drawing almost everyday and you'll definitely get there!!

And thanks for the laughs! My favorite character is the violent girl

[Nabel-Mabel]

I was talking to @Demy ^^ I've done your review also though! It's message 76 i think

[dbeirigo]

Hi yeah, I will work on the z axis thanks for the advice I was think very two dimensionally.
I'm glad you finded it funny, I like non sense humor a lot also, I will work on the poses thing.

[Demy]

Hmmm...I'll consider doing a chapter 0 of some kind yeah. That may fix things a bit.

And I guess i'll just DM you with a link to the next chapter. Maybe it'll help a little...idk.

Ok I read about 3-4 chapters of your comic! I actually like it! I think the kinetic action and the linework is pretty cool!

I'm gonna give a more detailed review later since for some weird reason Tapas doesn't let you screenshot images on their app.

[dbeirigo]

I tried to make more tridimensional.

[Nabel-Mabel]

It's better! The next step is to work on the spacing of your characters/props !
You have lots of empty space, try using things like the rule of thirds to make it more appealing! Look up storyboarding principles to know more about how to use space because it makes panels way better when you master this.