“Why won’t you read my comic?” A thread for getting honest reader first impressions

Thanks for the criticism. I totally see how the world building is confusing, so I'll go back and make things a lot clearer. Also, the line width advice is really helpful!

@PaulDevers
Thank you, too! I've been working on making the presentation of my text better, and I'll try to be more thoughtful in how I use thatching.

donno how to put it without making i sound like an argument, ok so addressing your review. not your taste? very understandable, this is a really good reason

the pallette, ok this.... I am actually emulating that the main character and his Brother don't entirely have a lot of money. the mishmash of everything shows that either they have gotten the stuff used for a very cheap price, free or just given to them.

the other comment about being unsure that i am still doing it in colour has shown me you didnt make it halfway into chapter 1. originally, chapter 1 was fully black and white, after deciding to switch to colour part way in chapter 2, i started to go back and colour in the older pages, this process is not as important as the continuation of the story so pages get uploaded at random.

yeah...

Yeah this is something I've always regretted, I really should have made his character design more gruff I can't go back and fix it so I'm just trying to work with it moving forward. Thank you so much for the feedback!

As for your comic I really don't have a lot to say mainly because I think it's a pretty interesting comic, I do think that the start can be a bit confusing but also because of that you manage to hook readers, I read quite a bit. One thing to keep in mind though is the inconsistency in art style, sometimes it works in intense scenes to have more loose lines but other times the inconsistency can be a bit distracting, like one panel has lineart, the next is kinda lineless, in "Strange intentions" the borders are this brown texture for no reason? I think it's fine to be flexible with your style, like drawing certain important scenes with more effort, fast scenes with looser lines and emotional scenes with softer liners/lineless but try to be consistent in the scene itself.
Otherwise I think your story is pretty good so far and while it's not really the type of genre i like I might go back to read it when I can.

@BobbyjoeXforgotensb
I guess that makes sense when it comes to the mismatched patterns.
My opinion/critique still stands on the colour palette though, I just gave their room as an example (I even said the blonde brothers room works fine). Either way it's just my opinion on why I won't read your comic, you don't have to agree with it really that's fine.

the reason it's flippant is cuz it's not what it seems... is all I say now

Hey thank you! I absolutely agree about the tropey-ness of the first chapter. Ironically, I am also really not a fan of starting out with a fight scene! But we were new writers and saw the advice everywhere so we were like, "welp, I guess this is how you get people interested right??" I'm glad chapter 2 was a little better for you, that seems to be the consensus of when people start liking it more. I'd like to think we got better at showing depth, especially in our more recent work 8 chapters in.

Took a look at your comic too, and honestly I'm charmed. I love your visuals and your pacing, I can't wait to see where it's going! You have a lot of nice intrigue going while giving us enough information to satiate us for now, and I know that can be a really hard balance to strike, so I appreciate how you've executed it here. Honestly the only nitpick I have is that some of your bubble tails make my eyes linger on them for too long, and there was a page or two where your bubbles conflicted with the flow of the art on the page. But that's few and far between.

I wish I could give you better feedback on this, but I guess because it hit my tastes pretty well, it's hard for me to say why I would pass on it! I hope you'll get some other feedback too!

Honestly, now that it's all actually UP on Tapas, I think it'll be fine if you don't revisit it or at least wait awhile until you really feel the need to. I think I would've lost interest had you asked us to read it before the reveal happened, but I was able to stick it out because I was interested enough in the story and concept that it kept be going.

I think in the future, if you do decide to shorten it (no need to redo everything of course, keep all the pages you can) maybe try to combine scenes and important dialogue while trimming some of the fat. I know that's kinda vague and still really hard to do, but I think all it needed was to be more efficient.

Thanks! I'm curious as to how far you read? I did go into the magic system building more in ep2, I was trying really hard to avoid the typical info dump prologue. For the world building and magic, I was aiming to give the bare bones, leave a mystery, I want to focus on being character driven. But if you have any comments as to what you wished to see more with the magic/world context, let me know. As for the character, he's morally grey, like most of my characters. He's supposed to be someone whose trying to be the perfect hero but has issues of his own that he's not addressing, however he does genuinely feel the need to help people who've been wronged. It's a fiiinne line, viewers are supposed to find him questionable at times, but he also does good things and have moments of lucidity and genuine compassion. If you have any tips on making him more sympathetic without losing his questionable side, don't be afraid to let me know!

As for yours, I find the art style execution to be really polished, I like how you pay equal attention to backgrounds. I might not read it because I don't feel an emotional attachment to any of the characters, none of them speak to me, though the MC's kinda interesting. I feel the character expressions and their emotional believability can be pushed, but this isn't a glaring issue.

@Pandastrophic Thanks! I'm glad to hear people who normally don't read this genre like my story, I did try to write it with cross over appeal. I'm curious as to how far you read? Which scenes has the most glaring style inconsistency? Lol you should've seen my old version, it straight up went from full painted scenes to soft lines to hard lines I tried to fix a lot of those mistakes, but I missed a few panels clearly.

@Pyomatic You got a unique style or charm and strong start, however this art style simply isn't what I'm used to looking at (but this isn't a deal breaker necessarilly). Also there's a lot of panels crammed into a page in some areas. And I find the equal line weight for everything tiring on the eyes. I like your backgrounds, gives a sense of the world. I stopped reading at the read pages, cause I find it too hard on the eyes. I know red lighting can be used to convey certain strong moods, and in certain movie scenes it can work super well. But what's happening isn't hooking me enough to brace through it. Overall I think it's a good story, but I didn't read it very far cause it's not my cup of tea, I see it can appeal to a niche.

Thanks for the feedback! Can you clarify which fight scene you mean when you say it could've been avoided? I'm assuming you mean when he fought with Garrett (the unicorn boy), but I wanted to be sure.

And yeah, the fight scene energy is a known issue! Definitely working on improving that. I think I did better in the more recent ones, but I still have a long way to go.

For your comic, I think it's really cute and charming. You need to work a little on making the dialogue flow and not be so repetitive, maybe dial back on telling the audience how to feel about a character like Lily. We should be able to see her act naturally and come to our own conclusions rather than being told how she should be perceived all the time, you know?

I would definitely focus on your art more where you can--there are some spots where the expressions don't match the dialogue or the context of the scene, and there was a case where I had to read ahead a couple panels to understand what was happening (like when she used the vines to restrain that guard, I didn't know what I was looking at when the panel zoomed into the ground to show them sprouting. I had to look ahead and then go back like, "Oh, those are vines", so maybe showing them just breaking out of the ground instead of already out would've helped). I think learning some fundamentals of realism would help ground your stylistic work, too. When you learn just from anime or styles that are already very simplified, you end up mimicking them without understanding what makes them work in the first place.

I admittedly only read Ch0, but as I've done more of these I've given them more of a chance so I'll go back to yours and read more later today.

I try to write morally grey characters a lot too, and I think it can definitely be tricky. From the little bit I've read, it felt more like his morality was all over the place, rather than sprouting from his own worldview, if that makes sense? There were a couple points where I got the impression you picked dialogue to make an otherwise okay-guy seem more questionable, like when he was referring to his experiment as a secret weapon, rather than a way to become an angel (it's all in the phrasing I think). And I think because of that, his hero complex ended up coming off more disingenuous than you were intending? I really felt as if he was doing it for all the wrong reasons (most of which using it as a self gratification and validation) with almost zero of the genuine selflessness that a hero is usually attributed with. In all his inner monologue, he was talking about how he deserved to be an angel for doing things for people and focused completely on himself rather than the people he was actually helping... so it was hard for me to have sympathy for his situation. Kinda gave me "nice guy" vibes.

I think I would have been more sympathetic if they had told him he had the chops, groomed him to be one, and then never delivered on their promise and just used him until they didn't need him anymore. That way he doesn't feel like he deserved something grandiose out of just doing the right thing while he was living and the onus is on SEE for breaking their word and emotionally abusing him.

Based on your opening scene to the series, that may have even been close to what you were going for. But because SEE and the specifics of his circumstances weren't established, I had to make my own conclusions based on what information was given to me. We're told that he trained with them for 8 years and did their bidding, but not of why or what they promised him. Was he justified in expecting to become an angel? Or did they never tell him he could and he just thought they would let him be one with enough effort? Why does he want to be an angel so bad anyway? Maybe a short flashback of his time with some of the SEE characters might've helped instead. It could've established the basics of what this organization is like, how they treated him, the expectations they put on him, and the ones he put on himself.

A lot of world building is figuring out what the audience needs to know to understand the world/characters versus what is interesting enough to be left a mystery and discovered over time. This is a really hard lesson I've had to go through myself, because I screwed that up in my story. I made my main character's motivations and past a mystery because I thought it would make him cool and interesting, but instead it just meant nobody was invested in him unless they liked his archetype. They didn't have context for his actions so it didn't matter. My creative partner and I have to do a LOT to try and make up for that lost time, and we're still paying for it 300 pages later.

Okay I'm gonna stop rambling now and read more of it.

Here's something that might help with expressions! It was my go-to for a long time. I think your problem right now is that you have a lot of the generi-expressions she talks about.
https://lackadaisy.foxprints.com/exhibit.php?exhibitid=3337

As for the dialogue, I think it felt repetitive especially with the guard because he kept going "This vixen!" or "This bastard!" or whatever expletive. The more I think on it, I wonder if you're just including too much in dialogue? There's a lot of words that can be trimmed without losing what you're trying to convey.

Let's try this page:

I would rewrite it to be something like...

panel 1
Aku, thinking: ((What a handful...))

p2
Aku: Please allow me to apologize on her behalf!
Guard: Huh?! Why are you apologizing?

p3
Guard: You're not responsible for her actions!

p4
((remove the thought bubble from this panel))
Aku: No, but she's a friend and we're... working on it. (change expression to a nervous smile or something?)
Guard: Why even be friends with someone like that, though...

p5
Aku: ((Who knows. Maybe it's because when I first saw you...))

p6
Aku: ((You seemed so lonely.))
Aku: Shouldn't you return to your post?
Guard: Shoot, you're right!

Everything is shorter and you haven't lost anything! Plus, there's no need to explain how a character is feeling, just what they might say or think in that moment. Try saying the lines out loud when you write them and think to yourself, "Is that something I would say in conversation?"