Love your webcomic reviews :) IDK why but seeing them just makes me happy, and inspires me to work on my own stuff
Thanks! Reviews inspiring people to create is the best thing a critic can hear, and I appreciate it a lot!
What is it: An action series about professional boxers with anime-style superpowers
The Good: Distinct exaggerated art style with good cartooning. Fun action scenes. I’m a sucker for Punch-Out! references.
The Bad: The fights are fun but lack tension; I never felt like Aster might lose or even that she’d come up with a creative/interesting way to win. It’s still early going in the comic, though, so that might change.
You should read it if: You wanna read a cartoony comic about people punching each other in the face with superpowers.
Sometimes you just start drawing and you just keep drawing and then you kind of forget what your plan was so you flip through your art reference folder and see a tutorial on something and then you’re working on and off on something with no plan for like a week and then you finish shading everything lit from the top left like normal you notice the arrow you’d drawn for yourself to remind yourself to put the light source on the bottom left because there was a magic circle at some point in the plan and then you’re just kind of like “fuck it” and throw down some brushes to make a wall and carpet and you upload it to tumblr with a rambly self-depreciating explanation of whatever the hell this is.
I have absolutely no idea what the fuck is going on in Gunnerkrigg Court right now, but I appreciate this dude’s character design. I have zero context for anything happening in this flashback, but even though this dude is in shadow, I can see just enough of his silly mustache to ground myself in roughly 1900 give or take twenty years, and that this dude is some sort of military from the coat. It’s nice in a flashback that’s meant (?) to be mysterious when information is being revealed to you slowly through inference.
Disregard this message if you don’t do this sort of thing, but i was wondering if there would be any feedback i could get in regards to my comic? I am almost finished drawing the entire backlogue, so if feedback is received it will probably be applied towards the sequel. Feedback or not, I love your page very much, it’s introduced me to saffron and sage(of which i am very fond of the character designs and humour) and out of placers(weird creatures my beloved!)
Thank you for your work!
https://m.webtoons.com/en/canvas/piebald-dove-plea/list?title_no=621921
Hey, thanks!
So, lessee. Your comic is called “Piebald Dove Plea”. Bit of a weird name, for a bit of a weird comic. It’s dreamlike, and to be honest I’m having a lot of trouble following it.
Some of that is that it’s literally difficult to read. None of the dialogue is appropriately sized for the word balloon it’s in here, and panel three has some (black) text escape the balloon into the (dark) background, so I literally can not tell what this dude is saying.
And I can see that this is something you’re working on, there’s a notable improvement between pages ten and page fifty-one (I like the “feathery” word balloon in the fourth panel here!), but even on the later pages there’s a lot of issues and even some words escaping the balloons again. And it’s pretty clear why this is happening: These word balloons don’t fit the shape of the dialogue well at all. I spent some time trying to fix them, and while I’m not a letterer and I’m sure someone else could’ve done better, it was rough trying to get that text to fit nicely.
I think this does look a bit better, but that’s mostly just because I’m using a better comics font (Anime Ace 2.0 BB from Blambot. It’s free!), and maybe that I split “to sink them into cockerels” a bit from the rest of the monologue to make it hit a bit different, but I’m fighting to squeeze the square text into the round balloon. I cropped out Panel 4 because I was too scared to even try.
My own lettering is actually pretty trash, to be honest, and I’m sure all the real artists in the audience are tittering to themselves at those fucked balloons, but I think this is still enough to illustrate my point. I typed the words, then I drew the bubbles, then I drew the little rabbit doodle, and everything fits so much nicer and I can properly draw the rabbit there because I know where it fits. It’s way easier because you’ll see balloon/dialogue issues when it’s easy to fix and not when the whole goddamn page is done being drawn and you can’t change it. For the first panel in the example, simply moving Dorcas a bit to the left would’ve made it way easier for you to fit the dialogue in, but it’s a huge pain to do that now.
For newer artists, it’s usually best to focus on fixing on thing at a time, and fixing up that lettering is the think you should focus your energy into before moving on to other things. It’s a small thing that’s relatively easy to learn and makes such a difference.
Tonight, on a very special Saffron and Sage, bet you didn’t think that sword was going to come up again. Or maybe you did. I don’t get a lot of comments on my comics so I kind of assume you’re all just sitting there silently basking at our greatness. Bask more at SaffronComic.com!
ALTHappy launch day!
SpiderForest Webcomic Collective is delighted to introduce to you Threads: Immortal, our new anthology filled with 16 tales of undying gifts and curses, gods and mortals and all those living in between and the beyond.
Check us out at our Kickstarter and spread the word! We got all our previous anthology collections up for grabs and even a library of select members’ stories!
SpiderForest's newest comic anthology just launched! Our collective put together some really amazing stuff this year, please check it out and help us spread the word!
I’m not in this one, but it’s still probably going to be good!
Breaking: John Allison’s comic starring public domain character Conan The Barbarian has been shut down by copyright trolls with an ambiguous claim to the character in the US.
oh my god the last S&S has absolutely slain me. you've spent so long carefully setting up this whole scenario, getting everything in place, building up all the details to make the dating show premise make sense. the reveal that there is actually someone else who is named Saffron and all of this was pointless is so abrupt, such a sudden halt to all this momentum, that it is HOWLINGLY funny. it would not be nearly as good if there was less setup for the game or more for the other Saffron.
Thanks!
We know Sinfest is dead, but I just thought it would be interesting to note that Ishida is endorsing esoteric/occult nazi shit in the strips now. Like, literally celebrating "hyperboreans" and a "thousand year reich".
Honestly, I don’t think it’s actually interesting. I said for a long time that the only place left for Tats to go was overt “The Jews are evil” racism and then he finally went there and everything else now is just different flavors of it. Nazi does nazi things isn’t really news
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