I'd like a critque of this episode. Feel free to leave any kind of review
I got you briefly over in your thread, but I'll go in a little more depth as long as I'm stuck in this damn basement .
I'll start with font because it's kind of the hardest and easiest - I think your comic would look cleaner/more polished using a font over handwriting buuuuuuuuut. Your handwriting isn't bad and looks pretty legible, even on the phone - I could definitely see it as an aesthetic preference. I would increase the size a bit if you do go with handwriting since I have good eyesight and a large phone but that's not the case for everyone!
Pacing/art - the intro moving down a river is great! Really atmospheric. I think this could have been enhanced by locking the color of the water after the rapids at least (or using gradients that start at the color the other panel left at) so we can feel that the continuity of the river as we move through the panels. It felt just a teeny bit disjointed to me but I really liked the overall effect/feel.
It took a couple read throughs before I noticed the red object (larva) floating down the river in earlier panels. If I have the brightness all the way up it's reasonably clear but if the screen is dimmed panels 2, 3 and 4 are especially hard to make out. Contrast should be on your list of things to watch for especially when using a lot of darker colors that can start to blend with your line art (try some test uploads and view at different brightness to get a sense how your art is looking for people that might have different settings).
It's really unusual to see and I like it: the scroll combined with the feeling of sumi-e like perspective. The verticality felt like a natural fit for webtoon format. Nitpick - because you were so consistent with it everywhere else, panel 3 where movement was briefly horizontal felt a bit out of place.
This might just be me but a character profile with so much text to read will interrupt the flow of the story, so I'd be really wary of putting one in so early while your readers are still deciding if they want to keep going.
Intriguing start!
Seems op hasn't gotten to all of them so ill pitch in if you don't mind.
Its quite short. Don't really blame you as creating many pages is totally daunting, but it doesn't feel like a complete chapter. If it continues immediately where you left off in the next chapter than I guess its ok.
The art could be much better, but it takes everyone time to improve and not all ideas can afford to wait years until you're a master artist or something like that. I would say the worst part of the chapter was the blue backgrounds you put behind the knives when they were in motion. The color was really out of place and they looked very static. I would recommend picking a different color and adding some motion lines for the next time you make a movement panel. My favorite part was the way the glass appeared in front of the guy. Its a great way to introduce a magic system without the standard 'once upon a time' nonsense. Show don't tell, you know? Basically the art was kinda weird at times and the chapter feels like an incomplete scene but the passive worldbuilding is great. 6/10 surprisingly better than most
Crystal clear action, paneling and dialog . I like the content too - charming and funny.
It's super obvious that you're being considerate with the pacing of your jokes the way you're laying out panels - maybe you could push that just a tiny bit more with varying the spacing to add a little more dramatic pause or speed up the tempo where you want it faster. No one wants to scroll through tons of white space of course but I felt like the punchlines hit just a touch before I had the chance to really anticipate them.
Art wise, clean and clear feels like a good fit for these vignettes. I think your flat color/gradient backgrounds work much better on panels that aren't full body shots (and when Thorn was flying through the air). It's harder to visually accept those simplified backgrounds when we can see feet but no ground for them to stand on. On the flipside, including the stripe from the tent in the bonk panel took away a bit from the action since it felt like a really heavy design element. Actually, I retract that - I think it was good because you needed it for us to know he was in the same space and nothing else was there. It's late here lol! But I'm leaving the whole ramble so you get both sides of what I thought.
This might be a me thing but the shift between straight on perspective and very heavy perspective was a bit jarring. Because it felt so emphasized I caught the top of the box and the lines on the tent aren't going to the same vanishing point - this is such a quibble, please take it as such, but definitely when you go for a more dramatic perspective there is a potential for things to feel a bit off kilter if it isn't consistent!
Last thing I can think of is the establishing panel (much appreciated) has figures just detailed enough that I want to look at them but too tiny to do so . I don't know a great fix and it's not a huge problem but did strike me.
Nice work! And looks like your art got a lot sharper these past couple years, hell ya!!
Fair - it's your format! But unfortunately for me you are right. The text is tiny and some images are quite hard to parse . Sounds like you're aware and ok with keeping your audience here to desktop readers so I won't focus on comments about making things easier for mobile readers.
With the reading difficultly in mind, there's a lot in this chapter, so I'll focus on the last few pages. Actually before I read anything - it isn't clear to me if you're trying to build an audience here or kind of using Tapas as a host that you don't plan to promote. If it's the former, it's quite standard for page format comics on this site to update 1-2 pages at a time. If you space them out like that, it would absolutely help readers find you since you would show up in "fresh" on days when you post your updates. If the latter of course that doesn't really matter.
The second to last page has paneling that made me a little confused about which order to read panels in. I scrolled up a lot to quickly double check and you usually don't have page layouts that confused me but I found at least one other page where the top of the middle left was above the bottom of the top right panel. The way they are grouped and then slightly offset on this 2nd to last page makes me feel like maybe I should read top left, middle left, top right, middle right. I got it from context that that's wrong but definitely caused friction for me.
The figure drawing looks super solid and the aesthetic felt really cohesive through lineart, blacks, shading, bg textures. The art is nice and clean, polished and fits the narrative as far as I can tell from what I read!
I really enjoyed your skill with dynamic poses and panel compositions! My criticism for the art would be that the objects/people in space did not feel consistent. I think the best example is the panel where Henwyn said "not only did this idiot come back to play hero" - the bottoms of those columns strongly imply a ground plane and perspective that don't match up with the ground plane where Henwyn has the kid on the ground. And the tops of the column bases come up to Lyssa's knees there but to her waist in the next panel (plus the pillars seem like they moved away from her a bit). I got that Henwyn is bigger than other characters but when she kicked the boy down, she looks smaller than in other places. Tightening up those details and working on your perspective would make those dramatic scenes feel more real and immersive!
@Shut_in_Commie
Thanks! Though next time you might want to make sure it's okay with the op
Was going for a slice-of-life stand alone episode so figured the humor would work better with a shorter episode
I see what you mean by the blue. Been working on figuring out a color scheme for the series so hopefully that'll help. I'll also keep in mind about the motion lines.
@migxmeg
For some weird reason, I tend to be stingy with white spaces. Guess I'm still used to the traditional format. Will have to try to make them a little longer.
Maybe it would have worked better if I had muted the stripe's colors or even added a gaussian blur?
I must have redrawn that box a dozen times -_-. Wanted to make it clear what it was, but yeah I see what you mean. Gotta practice more with perspective.
Anyway thank you for the review! Lots of helpful points
these are some pretty nice crits you made! I did make some characters look larger/smaller in some panels for dramatic reasons, but i should probably lean more into it or keep it more grounded. Also that page you mentioned does seem to trip people up. Probably because its the only page that has that staggering layout. so i'll keep that in mind for later pages.
As for audience. I have no idea where else to upload this comic. I'm sort of new to this and It's not that it's an audience thing, because that would imply i have an audience lol. It is interesting that you brought up the update thing. Personally, I'm not a fan of waiting for new pages especially for something thats works episodically, but I guess people have a different mindset for places like here. should have lurked more....
Anyways, thanks for taking the time to at least read what you did. I'll try to figure things out for this site in the foreseeable future!
@chocolate Whenever you start posting, good luck!! And you should really consider posting your final version on Tapas too… it’s not too much extra work to do both and you can definitely grab some different readers over here. Our comic does a lot better organically over on Webtoon but there’s a lot of comics I see having a better time on Tapas. No way to know without trying both.
@mountainwolves for sure! So glad it was helpful!!
@alliascompany ah ya I’m glad you got some extra feedback as long as you found it constructive and helpful that’s a great bonus :). Thanks @Shut_in_Commie. I think it was starting to get late when I wrote to you… I want to qualify the comment about white space by reemphasizing that I thought your pacing and paneling/delivery was really super good. It felt thoughtful and I liked it a lot - I laughed at the “where’s - my - money” triplet which was nice given how grouchy I was. Just wanted to bring up another tool for timing you can take advantage if you like it. The Gaussian blur occurred to me - I use literally every panel in my comic XD - but I didn’t suggest it because I find them out of place when there’s no depth of field anywhere else. That was a late night nickpick on my part and I hope you ignore the whole part about that panel ;_;.
@ImTheGuySK3 Yeah for sure! I could be making this up but I think I’ve heard around that ComicFury is also good for page format post? There’s a lot of really friendly and awesome people making those more traditional comics hanging out on this forum - would recommend searching posts (or making one) to see if anyone had some advice about that. One extra thing that I didn’t have the brain cells left to write last night/this morning. If you do lean into it more, something that can sell those dramatic perspectives that make characters look larger or smaller without feeling like they are larger or smaller would be some extreme perspective and foreshortening applied to the body. It didn’t look like something you are doing in the pages I read, so I don’t know if it’s maybe not your style, but I do think it would look pretty awesome with your style, if that makes sense!
@Stargazer31 @TheDoublekey @yoshi2000man Sorry I didn’t get to you but if I need a break from drawing sometime I will take a peek :).