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Unironically looking for critique/help with a comic (Concept updates on pg. 2)
Fugitive
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Registered User regular
First new thread in years, woo
I'm doing the art, my friend is mostly doing the writing.
I'm completely new to this, so I'm trying to learn as I go. My biggest concerns are layout, pacing, readability, and how the text fits into the bubbles. I know this is par for the course for the AC, but I'd really like to know what is working so far and what isn't in terms of art, and to a lesser extent, the writing.
Also, does anyone have any good font recommendations? I'm trying to dig up the free font-maker that was going around on the forums a while back. And does anyone know a good way to get the "white outline" effect inside the coat? Right now I'm just selecting the lines and coloring them white on the line layer above.
I'm doing the art, my friend is mostly doing the writing.
I'm completely new to this, so I'm trying to learn as I go. My biggest concerns are layout, pacing, readability, and how the text fits into the bubbles. I know this is par for the course for the AC, but I'd really like to know what is working so far and what isn't in terms of art, and to a lesser extent, the writing.
Also, does anyone have any good font recommendations? I'm trying to dig up the free font-maker that was going around on the forums a while back. And does anyone know a good way to get the "white outline" effect inside the coat? Right now I'm just selecting the lines and coloring them white on the line layer above.
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Oh, and I like the art. Stark black and white isn't exactly easy on the eyes, but I think your execution is pretty good.
EDIT: By "isn't easy on the eyes," I don't mean that it doesn't look good, but that it's a little fatiguing, at least on my monitor - but my contrast ratio isn't the best in the world.
The font is fine for me by the way. Also,
"No way man that's not even a thing" sounds suspiciously straight out of Achewood!
As far as the writing goes, I thought the humor was pretty good. I enjoyed the two pages you posted.
The one thing that was not clear to me is what exactly happened on the first page in panels 6 and 7. When the mindflayer says "Whoa," I was a bit confused as to what he was whoaing. Also, I thought he looked like Zoidberg from Futurama.
i like the art though, i'm digging it
Yeah, font-size is an issue I'm dealing with. I went through several of Blambot's free fonts, but most of them just don't quite work (too small, too "Sunday comic", too novelty). I'd like to do hand lettering, but I also don't have the best/most consistent handwriting. I know there was a free program or a website that you could convert your handwriting to font, but for the life of me I can't remember the name of it or where to find it.
I'll have the first half of the chapter wrapped up by next week
GuyBell/jpeg: Thanks, I always feel really stilted and awkward when I have to draw purposefully and within the boundaries of panels, but I think it's loosening up.
I think this is pretty terrible, the art is very poor and flat, and the writing needs work. There is just too much profanity, every other word out of these guy's mouths is fuck or shit or tits.
This is way too contrasty. It's tiring to look at it.
Come on, do better.
so i notice you chose to deride the opinions of everyone else, then not actually offer any useful feedback!
constructive criticism is one thing, but criticising just for the hell of it then not backing it up with specifics is not really helpful.
"the art is very poor" and "the writing needs work" are not really useful at all; what exactly do you not like about it? How would you improve it?
i'd hardly call "tits" profanity, and fuck/shit are often part of regular conversations (in my life at least). profanity is something you can choose not to like, but the writing is not made "bad" just because of a few swear words.
anyway, i'm a big fan of the style for the most part; with high contrast stuff (especially in black and white) panels can easily become visually cluttered when there is a lot of detail (e.g. in the 2nd panel of the 2nd page it took me a second to realise the lit cigarette was not a tiny speech bubble). I take it you're trying for a mignola-style look? (man his name comes up a lot).
i'm not sure whether anyone else will agree with this, but personally i have an urge to take an eraser to the little overlaps in linework here and there (e.g. the shirt stripes continuing into the waistcoat in the 1st page's 2nd panel). could just be a pet peeve though!
the writing i really like; obviously its pretty conversational, but the whole "banter" thing you've got going makes for interesting reading. i'll throw my hat into the ring for the readability as well though; its a little hard on the eyes because the font is so small.
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but sadly they must have gone pay-only
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Fug, I like it a lot, but I've got one little toothache- I am seeing some nasty-ass fill bucket halos. Also, clean up your stray line tips, come on now.
I hate to say it but.... Zoidberg. If Zoidberg was on an Adult Swim TV show... which is cool in an "Allan Moore will deconstruct you!" kind of way.
Fletcher and Iruka: I'm never really sure how to handle the whole panel-clutter thing. I basically put the huge swaths of black in to absorb space and add atmosphere, but also because I'm terrified of just having the characters floating in a white, endless purgatory. On page 2, panel 6 I just had a few bricks in the background. Does that work better, or should I use background elements sparingly? (And yeah I definitely need to widen those gutters, since I had to double check that I was counting the panels correctly)
And I cleaned up some frayed lines. I'm still trying to find a way to keep the life of the pencils while not making it look half-assed.
I think the design for the squid is going to change too, since it seems to be invoking a major Zoidberg vibe in a lot of people.
like I said, Allan Moore did that kind of thing, and its partly why he's so famous- deconstructing characters and whatnot.
edit: also, my first thought was Cuthulu type minion, but that last panel screams zoidberg
It's a little harsh on the eyes. Most panels are split pretty evenly between light and dark and when you are working with straight black and white that doesn't look very good. I would be more cautious about the use of full black in the future.
A couple examples that are much easier on the eye (and god, help me for bringing this up... hopefully it doesn't bite me in the ass)
that said, even in the comics this guy did, there were a number of blindingly awful panels due to the self-placed restrictions.
Until this, I thought that WAS Dr. Zoidberg. Not only in the design (which is very similar), but one of your characters (I assume the Zoidberg looking one) is named "PHD".
The environment stuff espeically needs work- even patches of patterned detail, with sort of a sloppy hand that gives no dimensionality- it could work, but it's not given the sort of spit and polish required to make that work as a concept- what should come across as style comes across instead as lazy.
The characters are a bit better, but again- I'm not feeling the finesse on the lineweight or design that I remember you having, which it desperately needs. And I see it in spots- the skull-faced guy's hands are drawn pretty damn nicely in almost every panel, for instance- if the rest of the character and environment design were as well drawn and thought out as that hand is, you'd have something going.
IIRC you used to have sort of an Andy Helms thing going on, and I think- even if you want to get away from that sorta thing- it would be worth your while to go back and study some of his composition and line design choices, just figuring out how to do something that's simple and effective and kinda loose, and still retain more sort of life and belivablilty to it. I think you're getting killed by being too stiff and literal in your thinking- you need that little extra bit of thinking that will prevent things from getting stagnant.
I think you'll get it sorted out eventually, because if I look at your old stuff, it doesn't nearly have the same sort of design/polish problems I'm seeing here, and I can only assume it's because you're not spending enough time sitting down and working these things out.
http://www.iseenothing.com/artchive/fugitive/anxiety.png
http://www.iseenothing.com/artchive/fugitive/ChickenChoke.png
http://www.iseenothing.com/artchive/fugitive/Partner1.png
http://www.iseenothing.com/artchive/fugitive/MooseVSCarry.png
There's just so much more life and feeling of solidity in these old pieces (these are all at least 3 years old) than there are in this comic, you just need to reel that back into this work.
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But it looks like your brush was probably 100% hardness. The blurriness feels more like bad aliasing, or poor edge fidelity, than actual softness. Did you draw this larger and then shrink it?
I know you're not going to redo this with vectors, but I think it would look pretty slick that way - nice and crisp.
iglidante: Yeah, I scanned in the inked pages at 300 dpi black and white, and resized after doing some editing with a hard brush. For some reason I've never been able to avoid the blurriness issue regardless of what kind of sampling I use.
The text thing I don't get, though, since I put it in after resizing, and it's all done with vectors. It might just be too small. I doubt it's the filetype, since I'm saving it as a PNG so compression shouldn't be that much of an issue.
I think the text is just too small. You're not giving your letters enough room to breathe.
Some of the "strokes" in your text don't even have spots of pure black, and a lot of them run together. Even a small bump in size will look better. You've got a ton of play in those bubbles anyway.
I actually like the stark b/w but agree about the fuzziness; stark b/w works better when it is starker & crisper. This is good stuff, mightily taken away from by what reads like amateurish artifacting.
No issues with the profanity -- the dialogue actually feels brisker and more entertaining in the more profanity-rich spots. For me, anyhow.
The black areas can be a bit overwhelming, but I think it can be remedied pretty easily by just adding a few white details in the seas of black. For example, the last panel of the first page, could have a few hints of white bricks and whatnot in the large black areas.
Also be mindful of where your word bubbles are pointing because panels like the last one make it kinda hard to tell who's speaking.
I wasn't floored by the dialog, but the art is nice and was enough to keep me interested. More Fug art is always welcome.
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My problem is usually when I scan in gray scale, it shows all of the areas where the inks aren't pure black, so a lot of the time it washes them out, and when I play with the levels to try and darken them, it also brings up lines where the pencils didn't completely come out. I guess I'll just have to play with the levels on a per-page basis.
I experimented with some different approaches to resizing. The one on the left is resizing from a gray scale image with bicubic sharper resampling, the other one is resized from a black and white scan with bilinear resampling (I used bicubic on the page I already posted, and bicubic sharper looked exactly the same)
I can see a difference when compared side by side, but it hardly seems night and day to me and I'm wondering if there's a better way to get that cleanliness that you guys are talking about.
Wassermelone: Thanks for the links. I've been sort of casually following Guy Davis, but the Nick Stakal work definitely illustrates to me how an overabundance of stark black and white information can be tiring and confusing.
But it might just have to do with the fact that my wrist/arm jitter for some reason
I like this, by the way, the writing's good and the art's so close. It just feels a bit stiff and uncertain - I agree with bacon, your earlier pieces had a more confident line.