5 / 26
Feb 2022

Our basement is leaking water, one of us has to sit here with the shop vac to pick it up every couple minutes and it's my turn... In other words I'm bored, can't draw down here :sweat_01:, and get interrupted every 2 minutes, but I've got my phone, so maybe I can be helpful for a bit?

Please leave a link to the episode you'd like me to look at and let me know what kind of feedback you're looking for or if there are any types of feedback you don't want. I think I tend to be matter of fact but not mean? If I get any I'll do them until my turn to babysit the basement is over.

Note that I'm absolutely not a writer, just artist and have no qualifications besides reading a lot of (mostly online scroll) comics.

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    Feb '22
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    Mar '22
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I'd appreciate a review of my first episode! Feel free to give any kind of review you wish, and would feel most comfortable doing.

Alright, I want critique on this chapter (criticize whatever you feel like):

I would like critique on the first chapter. I’m thinking of revamping my comic again to make it better and then post the finish version on Webtoon. I appreciate it! I’m looking for critique on my art, font, and pacing.

Oke doke!

I get the immediate impression that your comic is not formatted for/meant to be read on a phone - unfortunately I happen to be stuck on a phone (and lots of readers on tapas will be reading on mobile as well) so I guess take this with that in mind! It's kind of hard to read so I will give what feedback I can!

Very quick thing you could do to make the mobile experience less difficult would be putting a little space between pages. It's really hard to consume content that's so tightly packed and the pacing will feel very crammed. I've mentioned before that your font is hard for me and that still feels very true!

I appreciate your establishing panels and location labels/cues. Helped ground things for the scenes! The only one that threw me off a little was the first - when I saw a middle school, I assumed that was our location but they weren't there yet - I wasn't sure if the woman taking through the speaker was in the school or with the bus.

Character designs are clear and distinctive :+1:.

I'm a bit confused what's going on when we get the eyes in the dark panels. My best guess is inner monologue but it throw me for a bit of a loop.

There's a lot that's not story content at the beginning and end - I think you can get away with it since your episode is long but it's always something to watch for that you don't break immersion too much for someone binging your comic.

Hope any of that is useful! If you're going for a bigger online presence (rather than print), it would really be great for you to look into reformatting so you don't lose out on the mobile readers :wink:.

Link isn't working! Which chapter?

Edit nevermind! I see Maggots is the chapter name :slight_smile:

Cool! This feels a bit like a cross between a novel, comic and video game - nice that you can get super polished art to augment the dialogue, pretty unique format. The art, fx and texturing looks really pro, not a lot to say on those counts besides being impressed.

For me, the biggest thing that sticks out to comment on is that your formatting took me out of the flow a bit.

Panels feel really tight with so many long horizontals. I felt like my eyes could really rest and enjoy on the panel where the corpses showed up. It looks so cool :heart_01:! But then I wasn't feeling like I gave the other panels the attention they deserved because it was one after another without vertical space.

Text naturally draws my eyes so especially in your case with art where you're using the same base sometimes, there were points where the text was on the same horizontal as the picture that it's my impulse to skip over the art and just read the text. So I might miss the expression changes. This didn't happen so much where there was more of a stagger.

Speaking of that, the repeated comic and episode title - I understand it's like branding but felt like visual clutter that wasn't adding to my experience while I'm reading the episode and was a mild distraction. I think if that was replaced with a larger space in a dark color that blended from one panel to another it would have been easier on the eyes.

Nitpick - the quotation marks felt out of place to me since it was (very nicely) clear who was talking and when it was narration.

Nitpick - the last one is that the variation in font size felt random/unintentional. When it's standard most of the time, then variations can add or decrease volume in a really nice way. When it feels like it's all been resized to fit, can take away just a little as my brain is trying to process why it's changing size.

I loved how you used zoom and variation in expression to get the most out of your artwork. Again, really reminded me of a video game in a good way.

And the episode was amusing fwiw! :3

hmm you say you're on phone so maybe my comic won't be that good to view on mobile...
but i'm not a big fan of reading scrolling webcomics either. im still headstrong on working with traditional pages

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 :cry_swag:.

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!

Oh no, this helps a lot! I’m making Tapas as a hub to host all my rough drafts, and then post the final version on Webtoon. Feel free to critique my work and further expand on what you like/dislike! I love what you’re saying so far and I’m looking to grow with that I’ve received! :sparkles:

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 :raised_hands:. 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​:+1:. 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 :cry_01:. 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!!

Here you go!
If you're critiquing the art or layout, please use the newer chapters

I'm gonna keep going because this is keeping me awake but need to add the caveat that it's 3am here and the damn water isn't slowing down so I'm grumpy :sweat_02:. Just take anything I say with that grain of salt and please forgive me if get a bit rambly at this point.

I'd love you to review my first chapter (episode 1 to 7), in particular story-wise. If you want to see my more recent art and storytelling, though, you can critique chapter 5, instead (episodes 40 to 49).

Feel free to pick one among these two and read as much as you want. Here's the link: *

Fair - it's your format! But unfortunately for me you are right. The text is tiny and some images are quite hard to parse :cry_01:. 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!

All right, time to close this - sorry comics I didn't get to ;_; but it's 5am and after alternating between vacuuming water and writing feedback I probably can't see straight and am in danger of spewing nonsense 🥲. Hope anything was helpful!

Wow! Thanks for the review!

I've used some more vertical panels on later episodes. I will take your review to heart when making next entries.

Believe me when I say this has been very helpful.

@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!