All right. Next on the list is... Burning Shadows.
Honestly I have actually tried to read this one before in the past. It wasn't bad, but I did lose interest at page 14 when I first tried to read it. It's a shame because actually the comic does improve throughout, particularly when it hits chapter 4 when suddenly there's this huge leap in quality.
Let's talk design...
So I had a lot of notes on the design in this comic as I read through, only to find that a lot of them, you actually have resolved or massively improved on all on your own by the time of chapter 4 or so. You've put in the effort and I appreciate that.
I immediately realised while writing this review that the page where I stopped reading when I first tried to read this comic was pretty much the point where the text went handwritten:
I just looked at all that tiny, curly text crammed into those bubbles and immediately went "NOPE." and closed the tab. Luckily it seems you realised this issue and changed the font yourself later on. That's a good change. Honestly I don't often advise revisiting old comics, but re-lettering some of these old pages in the style of the new ones would help with readability a lot and perhaps help archive bingers get up to date and so build your following?
The speech bubbles improve hugely later in the comic, starting out pretty terrible, but by chapter 4 they're pretty pro looking, and really just refining the shape just a little would be the final push they need. I'll discuss speech bubbles in a dedicated post on the thread because this topic is coming up so much. The ones in chapter 4 aren't bad though. They're passable and I've seen comparable bubbles make it into print comics.
The panelling improves a lot later on. It was something I was going to talk about at length based on early pages, but pretty much everything I was going to say about like... not enough panels per page for visual storytelling, messy panels, weird layouts... you've already fixed! Chapter 4 suddenly there are these lovely neat layouts with clean, consistent guttering. Looks great! good job!
Art:
The art is overall pretty good! Especially in chapter 4 when everything really tightens up nicely and the characters get better integrated into scenes. Colour palette is solid, style is consistent.... yeah it all works. If I could advise one thing, it would be to vary the shot distance a bit. There are a lot of mid-distance shots, and a little more use of more close-ups and wider establishing shots wouldn't go amiss. The composition is a lot better later than early on, like I was going to comment on how the camera has a tendency to frame one character at a time rather than showing where characters are in relation to each other in a scene, but like a bunch of other things, that seems to suddenly have been fixed in chapter 4, when the framing of scenes and the angles are used really effectively to tell the story.
(What even happened between chapters 3 and 4, did you like... eat a copy of Making Comics by Scott McCloud and absorb all its wisdom? The jump in quality of visual storytelling and comic design is frankly one of the most impressive I've ever seen)
Storytelling and Writing:
There are some pretty glaring grammar issues early on, but it's an aspect that seems to have improved, so good work there! The dialogue later feels more natural and fluent, after feeling a bit stilted at the start
The storytelling is one of the core issues with the comic, and the main reason is this: Flare is doing things, and the things are interesting, BUT so far none of the things seem to have any sort of lasting effect that changes her circumstances or get me invested in how she's going to solve the problem. There's also a lack of a sense of any ticking clock, looming danger or important thing Flare needs to do, or a strong desire or need on Flare's part to change her circumstances due to some big dissatisfaction with her life. Sure, she wants to find the mysterious man, but really it's because she's curious, not because she or the audience knows anything bad will happen if she doesn't. This means there are effectively no stakes. Conflicts all resolve themselves extremely quickly and easily in a way that makes it hard to feel worried or intrigued.
A really good example is when Flare arrives in town after being trapped by Shade after a fight she started. Her friend, who we, the audience, have never met before and have no emotional attachment to, tells us she was gone for a week and he's upset! She's shocked and angry that she's been gone for a whole week but... well... there are no consequences. She doesn't have a job to lose, she's missed no important events, nobody's been running around posing as her during that week and her other friends don't seem worried. Then she's all determined to find Shade and she just... gets told where he is, like immediately by the kid she's already talking to, and he's actually there. She finds him basically immediately without any hitches. It's way too convenient.
Similarly you get a sequence that goes like: Angry townsperson comes to tell Flare the pub she was in several hours ago is on fire and the townsfolk suspect her! She needs to get rid of the fire! Flare's friends immediately intimidate the guy out of even trying to hurt Flare, and Flare, sighs and goes to help. She arrives and... the townsfolk all seem pretty respectful, honestly. Nobody shouts at her, the guy she meets doesn't seem angry or suspicious towards her and she goes in, gets rid of the fire, nobody except Shade, who clearly doesn't understand that she's apparently immune to fire, seems worried to the point that he stops worrying seeing how calm they all are. Then Flare stops the fire and wanders out without a scratch on her just looking a bit tired and shaky (but she still has enough energy to fly off immediately). The overall impression is that the guy who came looking for her is just a jerk, the rest of the town respect her and that there wasn't really much of a threat to Flare; the problem was easy for her to solve.
There are a lot of things like this throughout the comic, where an obstacle is set up, but it's resolved almost immediately without complications or lasting effects that make Flare's life more difficult. As painful as this can be for any writer, and
I totally empathise here because this was a huge problem with my comics in the past: You need to make your protagonist's life difficult. I know that's hard when you really like your protagonist and want the best for them, and especially if there's an element of power fantasy to the protagonist that makes you feel empowered writing them bulldozing their problems in a way you wish you could, but it's necessary for them to struggle and get knocked down now and then to give their victories impact. They need to face a problem that with the current skills, emotional understanding, knowledge and equipment they have, they cannot overcome, and they need to go through some kind of challenge or quest that changes them, maybe causes them to lose something they care about along the way, and then to succeed only after this gruelling ordeal.
So my closing comment is really that the improvement in the visual storytelling in this comic is amazing and I'm super-impressed by your dedication to getting better. The next area for improvement is storytelling. I'd personally advise picking up a copy of "Save the Cat!" by Blake Snyder. It's a book on screenwriting, but it's just generally useful for learning about the mechanics of how to tell stories, and since comics are paced similarly to films, there's a lot of applicable advice in there. Keep up the good work!