Aside from art being the main qualifier —a block of text explaining the worldbuilding, all in the very first chapter 
I'd prefer to get the very basics and find out the rest as I read more, instead of dumping strange names and powers onto me from the get-go. Typically, I see this mostly in the villanness/isekai/dungeon comics.
I remember it used to be big back when Homestuck was big. It and Ava's Demon were big popularizers of said format, though that format's died out for the most part it seems after the popularity of those two comics faded.
It's so funny, mine is literally the reverse. Because I am dyslexic I struggle to read scrolling panels and they give me a headache. That's why when I did full page for my comic, I use less text per page, and bigger balloons, so they are easier to read (or at least as easy as they can be because you're right, you do have to zoom in).
I could never really get into Hoemstuck mostly because of how clunky the Pesterlogues could be, actually.
i read it while it was on its second last act... i admit i skipped a lot of the long pesterlogues. maybe thats why i never know what was going on
I don't know if this is in my head or not, but a long vertical panel on a landscape with one single word balloon before we enter our story about some reincarnated hero in a European court setting or dystopian fantasy just turns me off. I see so many recommended content from Tapas fall into these tropes so hard the stories seem like carbon copies of the same two or three ideas, down to formatting and the way they are translated, which I think does the creators of this stuff a disservice. I don't know if it is the same teams behind a lot of this, or what is going on, but it is clear the artists and writers can engage and entertain huge audience. So why box them in like this? It just feels like a shame to me. But I am pretty new to the site, so I may just be way too surface level in my understanding of how feeds, etc work.
Shaky art, basic spelling and grammar errors, unclear reading order. Long stretches of white space if it's a scroll comic. Right-to-left reading direction if it's not translated from a language that reads that way.
Bad color choices really turn me off. I’ve seen so many give off big MS paint energy regardless of the quality of the art itself.
I’d rather read (and tbh do often) a comic with a nice palette and not so great art than a nicely drawn comic with weird MS paint colors.
I’m also not a huge fan of it when a comic takes forever to get to the actual point. With any medium you have VERY little time to engage the audience which is why writers really think about their first sentence, directors will think about their opening image, but in comics I feel like people get tooo comfortable thinking about how THEY know where the story is going but don’t really think about setting up the reader’s expectations of the story to come. I love it when a comic presents the conflict right at the top.
Design:
Too dark, not enough contrast
Font too small
Content:
Characters / themes I can´t relate to
Too many characters
Too much text
Here are some things that can work for me but usually put me off,
it depends on the context:
Politics
Religion
Violence
It probably just feels cringy when you write it.
I feel like that too when I write dialogues, everything I write feels cringy or bad but
I know it isn´t so bad
Badly written and irrelevent opening narration crawls with scruffy looking art is definitely one for me. The art being stylised in some opening narration sequences (like say Zelda: Wind Waker or Undertale) shouldn't be an excuse to do really scribbly art, or to try digital painting for the first time ever with no idea what you're doing or to throw a horrible photoshop filter over it. It just makes a really bad first impression.
Hard to read text, poor text formatting and bad font choices have been mentioned a bunch of times in the thread already. Yeah... Just... ugh. Please, put some effort into making your comic readable.
Traced or copied art. Sometimes I see a comic that at first glance looks remarkably well-drawn (it especially might have a strikingly well-drawn character on the cover, often weirdly paired with a very amateurish font and background), but as soon as you try to read pages you can't help but notice that the art is really sparse and inconsistent with a lot of panels that use generic stock images with a text overlay, the same character seeming to change in how they're drawn from panel to panel, parts of characters being really well drawn with perfect perspective and crisp detail while other parts of them look floppy and poorly-defined or different characters look like they came out of totally different comics, and the poses or expressions don't quite seem to reflect the tone of the dialogue. Sometimes the angles characters and backgrounds are drawn from don't match, or even if they do, there's just a weird mismatch in detail level or style that feels "off".
It not only harms the overall immersion and visual storytelling, it just generally feels like "ugh" when the artist is avoiding using art to express themselves and worse, stealing from other artists. I'd legitimately rather read a comic that was drawn to amateur standard but with consistent care and passion and a desire to improve than this.
When it starts with long ass exposition that just keeps on going. I can try to follow and give it a chance, when parts of the text are at least spread out through the page in a nice, easy to follow way, but when I am given just a wall of text to read with nothing interesting going on around it, I cannot focus on that and read it and if I will read it, I'll probably forget everything within the next five minutes.
Comics that make fun of themselves, like pointing out “oh this is such a cliche like out of an anime”. If you don’t have the confidence in your work and need to make fun of it in advance, why should we, the readers, care?
What turns me away from comics is...
1)Art that doesn't appeal to me. Sometimes the drawings are hard to follow. Sorry! The art matters.
2)Too long of a world building introduction. Gets boring. (as everyone has mentioned)
3) Can't relate to the characters. If I'm not feeling the characters I don't' read it. 
4) Highschool or younger comics. I'm 33 a full grown woman and don't care about those teen/kid genres.
5)Hard to read font. Too small or bad font choice.
I will grow this but for now this is my list!
closed Feb 23, '22
