What draws you or turns you away from a comic/story?

@TheLemmaLlama any pronouns
Tue, 18 Jul 2023 09:32:57 +0000

@TheLemmaLlama wrote:

Draws me in:
A clear sense of vision. A comic captures me when it gives me the impression that the creator knows exactly what they're going for, they want to make me feel X and they're going to deliver.

If I open the comic and I immediately get hit with vibes, or feel something

If I see a piece of conventional wisdom being subverted right out of the gate, in a way that feels like there's a coherent stance behind the subversive take that will get gradually revealed

If I immediately see something unusual/resonant about a character's personality/attitude/etc, that feels like part of a coherent psychology that will get gradually revealed

If I see an interesting piece of worldbuilding (that feels like part of something greater that will get gradually revealed yada yada XD)

Interesting format lmao

Plot hooks I guess, but honestly not required if you nail one of the above instead? XD

I'm probably being a nebulous, but it's really not a clear-cut thing; no-one ever said drawing people in will be easy! XD

Turns me away:
There are two main ways to get me to drop a story; (unrewarding) mental load and boredom. The former works faster than the latter, but the latter will still cause me to slowly drift away

Mental load is about how difficult it is to get through a story without giving me a headache. If it's too confusing or takes me too much effort to understand what's going on right from the start, I'm gone :'D Common culprits include:

infodumping

corollary: too many characters/etc introduced at once

hard-to-follow format, hard-to-read texts etc

If you think judging comics by art skill is rude, wait till you hear that I'm more likely to drop a comic if it's black-and-white :'D (For some reason, my brain just finds it harder to parse black-and-white images T_T)

Too mysterious; I have literally zero idea what's happening and why

Purely visual comics (no dialogue/narration) where the art is not skilled enough to convey what's happening

Boredom basically happens when there's an extreme lack of that vision I mentioned above. Stuff can happen on paper (e.g. characters fighting), but if I see no purpose behind it, not connecting thread, no particular thing you're trying to evoke by showing me those things, I'm gone

Might also be worth noting that while lack of boringness draws me to a story, lack of imposition on mental load by itself does not. A comic can be very easy to read, something I can pick up and breeze through, but I might still drop it if I feel like I have better things to do. I personally don't tend to marvel at technical competence like "wow, this comic has clear presentation and readable text! I really like this! I want to know what happens next!?”