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MarvinDziamski
Sep '23
3

Hello i make the Comic
Captain Pigeon



Could someone give me honest feedback?
My comics genre are Comedy and Action i feature a lot of memes and popcultural jokes, so i expected to go an easy way to get a decent amount of subscribers fast (200-300 in one year).

I promoted every new episode on discord, reddit, instagram and twitter using every webcomic related subreddit and # i could find.

all comments are positive so it doesn't seem to be hated or disliked but just unacknowledged.

I just don't understand HOW or WHY it's not as expected.

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    Sep '23

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    Sep '23
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darthmongoose
Sep '23

All right... I'm going to be honest, so some of this may feel harsh, but it's all fixable stuff that you can hopefully work on in the future.

There are a few major areas that hold this comic back:

Format:
Gag comics aren't that big on Tapas generally, and when they are, they tend to be much shorter and more suited to sharing on social media. The jokes in this comic are largely pretty simple, things like lolrandom nonsequitors and similar but you're often telling those jokes with way more setup than they really need, and quickly it has too many characters and too much reliance on having read previous strips to make the jokes easy to share on social media just on their own. It's a format that might have worked well ten or fifteen years ago, but modern comics really need to either have a stronger plot so people feel compelled to really dig in and get invested in reading all of it in a linear way, or they need to have as many pages that are standalone and easy to share on social media without needing any context for the joke as possible. On a modern platform, this feels awkwardly in-between those two styles.

Genre
Superhero parody is like a trap genre. Everyone thinks superhero parodies will go down well, because superheroes are popular, and they're easy to make fun of.
The problem is that people who don't like or don't care about superheroes won't read something that looks like it's about superheroes, people who do like superheroes want to read more sincere superhero content and won't be interested in parody unless it's also a good superhero story with strong characters and plot (like say the original run of Gwenpool), and because superheroes are so easy to parody, it's really hard to do a lot that doesn't feel stale and like it's been done before. I didn't feel like this was making any jokes I hadn't seen in superhero parodies before, because the jokes are largely riffing on old superhero tropes.

Presentation:
This is probably the weakest area of the comic. It looks very rough, but not rough enough for it to feel like deliberately bad art, like Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff or something. Even before you start reading, the title on the cover is visibly not centred and looks like very little effort was put into picking a font or style that reflect the tone of the comic.
The panels are all kind of small and not using the full space, but not for any obvious reason, the speech bubbles are rounded squares or default ovals with enormous triangular tails and often too little or too much padding for the text to sit in them comfortably. The art largely looks unfinished, with wobbly, thin lines without line weight variation, garish colours, backgrounds that feel bare and under-detailed etc. Simple art isn't necessarily an issue, especially in a gag comic, but it still needs to feel finished, with tidy linework, a cohesive style and colour palette, and backgrounds that create a sense of depth using more muted colours. The later strips are better than the early ones, but still have a lot of the same issues.

Anyway, I hope that's helpful. I never really felt like I was the target audience for this comic, in spite of being a superhero comic fan who enjoys Marvel movies and stuff. The humour felt a bit too old fashioned for me, even though I'm 38 years old, the snarky, flippant tone made it hard to get invested in the characters emotionally, and the presentation felt like it really could use more attention and care.