Wednesday Ash Webcomic Reviews [status: OPEN / New CLOVERLINES!]

[WednesdayAsh]

Hey guys!
Hope you dont mind a couple of ads before the review stuff

Read on as I put my money
where my mouth is and show you my baby,
Cloverlines!!!

[NEW EPISODE 13 Jan 2016]

I also write for Tapastic Staff Pick,
Entytas!

And now to the review request information!

---

Hello,

I want to critique your webcomics on http://wednesdayashwrites.tumblr.com/.

There will be two types of reviews.

1. Arc review,
or at least a series of pages to focus on.
(Not the full long form run)

Does your webcomic have a couple of episodes (or pages) that make up something resembling a tv episode or well a "story"? Block which chapters / pages / tapastic episodes you want me to focus on and I'll base my critique on those pages.

2. Gag analysis

Send me a gag from your gag-a-day strip and ill try to analyze the mechanics of the gag to see how it works, if at all. There will be art comments but the focus is on the writing.

Where will it be posted?

I will post the critique here as well as on my tumblr.
http://wednesdayashwrites.tumblr.com

What's this about StArt-Faire Manga Magazine?

Yes! I'm now a monthly contributor to StArt-Faire! Where I'm writing a webcomic writing column. The best of the best I find here has the potential to be shown as an example of things done right, even if I'm pointing out the flaws in your work, the depiction over on StArt-Faire will always reflect the inherently good nature of your webcomic, if only for some slightly forgivable flaws.

But if you want to opt-out of being featured on StArt-Faire, please specify in your request please!

How long will the critiques be?

Not very long, im not one to ramble. Ill frame my critique as sharp and accurately as I can make it.

What if you love my comic

You'll get this!

Congratulations to Floral's "Glamour" on being the first to earn that distinction

Current list of comics I love:

1. Floral's "Glamour"
2. It could be yours (will look back on my reviews to see if anyone else deserves this )

Request form

Type: [gag or arc?]
Webcomic name: [obvious]
Creative team: [writer? artist? single creator?]
Link to series: link to the whole thing
Which pages / which gag: [specify a block of pages you want me to critique or which gag]
Other: [misc stuff ya wanna say]

First three gags and one arc replies gets a review, then ill close it

Current status: OPEN for 3

Love,
Wednesday Ash
Writer,
Cloverlines / Entytas / The Confounding Chicken-Man
http://wednesdayashwrites.tumblr.com/

[mariusthered]

Type:Arc
Webcomic name: Talesfromswipecity
Creative team: Aron mason
Link to series: Talesfromswipecity
Which pages / which gag:Season two
Other: I already know you may spot some grammar problems.

[WednesdayAsh]

Critique of
Aron Mason's
"Tales of Swipe City: Season Two"

The SinCity-esque format of Tales of Swipe City (ToSC), a sci-fi crime anthology, serves the tales its telling well. Is it the criminals that make the city or the city that makes the criminal? The question really highlights the moral grayness of the gruesome sickening tale told here by Mr. Mason well.

Unfortunately, I wish I could get into the actual tale...

Sloppy lettering and lack of copy-editing hamstring the story so much I spent more time counting typos and punctuation mishaps than getting in to the unremarkable, competently written tale of how Mr. Francisco saved Ivana, and Ivana's subsequent prison operation.

If there's one bright spot in ToSC, it's that that the use of mixed media in creating the Gumball-style backgrounds is executed quite well! I only realized it was not necessarily drawn after getting mad in the typo hunt tying to find other mistakes.

Continue refining the mixed media technique, have some copy-editing, and ToSC has the potential to at least become interesting. Otherwise potential readers will just be hung up on the childish spelling mistakes.

Read ToSC: http://tapastic.com/series/TalesfromSwipeCity

• Wednesday Ash

[ragraphx]

Type: arc
Webcomic name: MIGHTY GLAD
Creative team: RJ - A-verse Comics
Link to series: MIGHTY GLAD
Which pages / which gag: First chapter, all the pages. 40+ pages, it reads really quick though.
Other: This is my first draft, I've got two or three more pages left in the chapter then I'll go back through rewrite and retweak pages, any feedback is appreciated.

Thanks!

[WednesdayAsh]

Critique of
A-Verse Comics'
"Mighty Glad (2015 run)"

Cinematic approaches to comics are always a mixed bag for me. On one hand it presents the opportunity for artists to widen their wings and create beautifully rendered panels, of which Mighty Glad has a lot. The chance to create panels unhindered by the more goofy aspects of comic lettering is very alluring and pleasing aesthetically. However when this approach is applied to a hobbyist webcomic you are left with an extremely slow moving "tale" which is akin to watching an 4-6 minute movie stretched out to 11 months in real time.

Don't get me wrong, what exists of Mighty Glad is extremely good to look at. The character designs are distinct, the coloring is spot on (harder than you think!), paneling is great, A-Verse Comics really knows how to make those action sequences shine. However the writing is extremely inefficient. For example the desciption of the comic mentions that they must "battle their way through an unforgiving land of beasts to return home". Where and/or what is "Home"?!

I get it, hobbist webcomics do not have the time to produce "pro" panels at a clip to please the naive consumer, the perspective of which I am writing right now. But, this I think should galvanize the creator to create more compressed, efficient tales that would make me wanna care about The Mighties of Mighty Glad. I suggest, should A-Verse decide to continue with Ellis style decompression, the writer of the tale check out the "First 10 Pages: 5 Major Rules" video. Cause all I can tell you right now is Mighty Knight is confused and Mighty Blue Girl should spout more exposition.

• Wednesday Ash

[tableflipstudios]

Type:Arc
Webcomic name: :EPOCH Files
Creative team: Table Flip Studios
Link to series: http://tapastic.com/series/EPOCH-Files
Which pages / which gag: Chapter 3: River
Other: Still ongoing series

Thank you for your time!
- Grim

[ragraphx]

Thanks WednesdayAsh for the review..

The chapter definitely needs a lot of tweaks but you are asking the right questions I want the reader to be asking...

[WednesdayAsh]

Critique of
Table Flip Studios'
"EPOCH-Files (Chapter 3: River)"

Oh I love me a space western, and the first few pages of this work performs that deceptively tricky job of establishing the hybrid genre well. The art is clean, crisp and bright, which I (and the mobile platform) favor, with a little bit of tweaking I can totally see this as a LINE Webtoon or something, which is high praise if the creative team was aiming for commercial aspirations. Although to make this properly work for mobile, it pretty much has to be formatted for mobile. It would involve a lot of cropping and additional art to create some talking heads for most of the dialog but I believe this would be worth it to aid readability. Cause in its current incarnation...it's kind of a chore to read.

But alright, maybe its just formatting lets get on with the story. Unfortunately the pacing stops dead when River reaches the planet, a lot of wasteful panels is dedicated to depicting the emergency landing, River looking around (at an empty planet?), going into the warehouse. Worse still, it progresses from wasting panels to straight up confusing panels when the girl in the red hair shows up then another flashback(?!), this breaks up attention way too much for the mobile comic form I believe. The current chunk of story in the present timeline didn't satisfy enough plot progression to justify another flashback. I'd hope chapter 3.5 would help but...

It's a sentai show now?!

Suddenly it's cluttered, comedic, chaotic, and it utterly lost me. Perhaps the length between the chapters (4 months) had something to do with it but the most important thing is that it lost me, which severed any tie I had to the River character which was built up elegantly in the first half of Chapter 3. My advice is to commit to one main protagonist and limit it through her eyes. We're all novices here in terms of literary skill, more illustrators than writers, so don't overextend yourself in creating a multiple protagonist work (just yet).

• Wednesday Ash

[WednesdayAsh]

I'm asking the questions you want yes, but not necessarily in the way that you want tho.

The question of where is "home" is not coming from reader curiosity but rather an editors frustration. Most reader's would drop this cause you didn't even glimpse of what home might be, the goal is unclear and it's been 10 minutes of the film already.

[tableflipstudios]

Many thanks for your time!
- Grim

[Jewe11s]

Type: Arc
Webcomic name: The Chronicles of Oro
Creative team: Myself, the all powerful creator lol
Link to series: tapastic.com/series/chroniclesoforo
Which pages / which gag: If you could review chapter 1, that would be awesome!
Other: Woo!

[Jrej]

You already got a lot of requests. If you have time please consider having a look at my comic.
Type: Arc
Name : Shades Of Men
Team: Jrej (myself)
Link: Http://tapastic.com/series/shadesofmen-pages
It makes more sense if you start from the beginning but otherwise things get heated from chapter 4.
Thanks for taking the time to do reviews. Feedback is always appreciated! Good luck!

[jamieme]

Type: Gag.
Webcomic name: IRL
Creative team: Jamie Me
Link to series: http://tapastic.com/series/IRL
Which pages / which gag: The Perfect Girlfriend: http://tapastic.com/episode/243526
Other: It's NSFW.

[WednesdayAsh]

CLOSED FOR NOW, PENDING WRITING THE CRITIQUES

• Wednesday Ash

[iasucomic]

Type: Arc
Webcomic name: The Vapors
Creative team: Just me
Link to series: Here ya go!
Which pages / which gag: Pages 1-37
Other: The Vapors will be a miniseries eventually, but for now only the first chapter is out, so let's call that the first "arc".

Edit: oops, shoulda read the thread first, didn't notice your last post. Should I remove the request or can I leave it up for the next round of reviews?

[WednesdayAsh]

Critique of
Jewe11s'
"The Chronicles of Oro (Chapter 1)"

Portal fantasies are something I aspire to, I've always wanted to write one and I've had an idea kicking in my head for a while now but I've always been afraid to follow through because of the sheer difficulty of executing the introduction to these things, the good and bad plainly shown by Jewe11s' "The Chronicles of Oro" (TCO).

The introductory prologue is beautiful as much as it is cinematic. I'm not schooled in the ways of Tolkien, but I liked the way the creation myth is explained with minimalistic art and black background. It elicited a very epic feeling, in me. I'm locked in at this point.

The art of the lush fantasy forest side of the world is wonderful, and not just aesthetically. It's also wonderfully abstract enough to be sustainable. I'm always on the lookout for over complicated BGs by ambitious artists, waiting for the inevitable decline in quality chapters ahead which happens sooner more than later. Kudos for this artist to find a method that is sustainable, productive and consistent

Then we get to the flip phone.

The hard thing about portal fantasies is that you have to start by introducing two worlds, TCO attempts to do so by switching world every 2-3 pages and it just doesn't work. There is no rhyme and reason, to borrow a film term, to the cuts. No sense of continuity whatsoever every between the transition from the fantasy world to the real world. It really gave me a sense of whiplash and made me a bit nauseous, which undermines what can be described as competently written dialogue on the page. It might be easy to consume if you are following this as its being produced, 2-7 days a page, but if you are binge reading this, it becomes unbearable!

If your artistic decisions have undermined the story, the form has failed in delivering the content.

If I were this creator's editor with access to somesort of story board, I would tell her to restructure the series this way:

1. Epic Prologue
2. Modern World Intro to Fall Down on the Cracks
3. Fantasy World intro to some sort of undeniable noise outside
4. Put page 32/33 here.
5. FIN

With the requisite hints in both world alluding to the existance of the other. On a more granular note, the final art of the chapter of chapter 1 should include an inset of the elf ears to emphaize their alienness, cause at the moment the main protagonist looks non-chalannt at the two good looking dudes.

It also is reccomended for the artist to study the basics of film editing, cause with the popularity of the cinematic form of comics, film fundamentals become essential in the webcomics arsenal. Start with this: Why Movies are Two Hours and Early Editing Techniques - Frame By Frame

Point is: learn editing.

• Wednesday Ash

[Jewe11s]

Thank you so much for the review and the advice!
I really appreciate the time and effort! <3

[WednesdayAsh]

Critique of
Jrej's
"Shades of Men (Chapter 4)"

Chapter 4 of Jrej's Shades of Men (SoM) does not give a good first impression on mobile devices. Too much content for too narrow a canvas makes every thing seems smushed up together, then again the setting it self is a smushed up Parisian subway station so perhaps the aesthetic choice here is fitting.

The beginning sequence isn't really convincing but kudos to the artist for even attempting music in comics, I'm making one of those my self, and I know it's hard to execute but is the blonde kid strumming the bridge in the long shot of the guitar strings? But I digress.

Where SoM shines is in its action sequences, you can feel the dynamics of the moves and the impact of the blows. The fight is portrayed well on the page using extra panel information to convey the sheer destructive power of what is happening. If you wanna crib some notes on how to depict action using limited time and resources, SoM is a good teacher.

When the sheer action dies down, the pacing still keeps up with the terse dialog as the panels cut to more varied and longer time-frames. Good mastery of editing here. Unfortunately the chapter ends in the most unfocused single page splashes I've seen recently. There's nothing in the center! I'd recommend putting the bubbles in the middle? Just anything for the eyes to have a comfortable reference point.

If there is one thing I'd change about SoM is to format it for mobile. At the current incarnation of SoM, the classic page style isn't serving the compressed content well, the pixelated cover pic also isn't giving a good first impression. You really have to dig into this comic to get into it, I wish it was just more accessible.

• Wednesday Ash

[WednesdayAsh]

Critique of
Jaime Me's
"IRL, episode 1: The Perfect Girlfriend"

Johnny Carson once said "If you buy the premise, you by the bit". And the premise of "The Perfect Girlfriend" is a ubiquitous and nebulous one, especially in the gamer community. From title to the opening musing by the lead character, the strip manages to narrow down which "Perfect Girlfriend" the strip is addressing.

The foil character here is so economical it deserves to be made an example of efficient dialogue. Kudos for not over-stuffing with needless banter here.

Unfortunately the direction of the punchline is where the gag falls down. It's not immediately obvious what it...is. Perhaps with question marks on each individual item, and putting the item closer together at the head of the main protagonist it will give a clearer view of what the punchline is "He's contemplating a relationship with a guy for video game and other guy benefits."

I would enhance the gag further by having him look at the word "Anal?" maybe even change it to "Anal?!". Then the punchline becomes "He's contemplating ANAL?!?"

Be aware of how you can heighten the gag to its full potential, sometimes its the little things that create the full effect of the gag.

• Wednesday Ash

[WednesdayAsh]

Critique of
Ben Saint's
"The Vapors (Chapter 1)"

Usually when I'm writing these reviews, I'm taken out. Something in the work takes me out enough to open a notepad and start scribbling editor type notes, a misplaced panel here, "interesting" art choices, etc, etc. But with Ben Saint's "The Vapors" that didn't happen, I went from cover to cover of chapter 1 without taking a note and that says something about the quality of work on display here.

The penciling and inking is spot on, I like the use of patterns as shading, it's so dark and black, inking this must be murder, especially when it goes to the meta stuff with change of ink styles with the female protagonist's art work. Art wise The Vapors, for what it is and what intends to do, is unassailable.

The art, is unassailable. The dialogue and textual work isn't.

For example: "Be nice to meet more like-minded people"

It's sounds natural, but the thing about natural sounding dialogue is that it doesn't read well "It'd be nice to..." while more "proper" doesn't take you out of the comic wondering what the male protagonist is saying. Sometimes literary protagonist's are going to be more proper than reality, its okay.

Also when the concept of rating the bodies of people by the male protagonist's come in, there isn't any barometer of what these numbers mean. Yes we are shown a gaming screen with the same scale of points being used, but in the game it denotes "Damage" and "Time", not something like "Performance" or maybe even just "Rating" which would give contextual continuity when the protagonists starts using points to rate human beings.

All the high-points occur when Mr. Saint focuses on non-dialog story telling, using the comic medium to its full potential. Sometimes I see to many comics that are talking heads and massive dialogue, this isn't it and should be commended.

"The Vapors'" chapter one unfortunately doesn't serve as a good pilot for an on-going concern. There is nothing that's compelling me to read Chapter Two. All the questions seemed answered already, "these wretched little people live wretched little lives" that's it. In screenwriting terms, there is no inciting incident. These two live perfectly comfortable damaged lives, with nothing (yet) to disturb their balance. A forced move perhaps, maybe a roommate that forces himself upon them.

There's Zim and GIR here, but no Dib.

• Wednesday Ash