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New Webcomic - Original Gamers
ogmaster
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
When Original-Gamer redesigned the site, we also started up the comics. I'd like to get some opinions, hopefully not painful just fair, about the comic. It's in the very rough stages but I have some ideas with the comic. And it does work similar to other webcomics:
Thanks in advance for those that go easy on me.
Thanks in advance for those that go easy on me.
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Visit my blog for review, videos, and video games news,
www.original-gamer.com
Because that's about how serious it looks like you guys are about making a web comic worth looking at.
My completely unsarcastic best advice is to stop wasting time on a comics feature and focus on the news/blog features to make your website not a pointless redundancy of kotaku, 1up and cheapassgamer.
...and honestly, the writing needs some work too, man. Especially that last panel. The punchline (final speech bubble) is a mess. It doesn't even read smoothly.
You have a lot of click-through videos and reviews... enough to keep a reader clicking for a while. Focus where your content is and fine-tune your web-site so its a bit more visually appealing and you'll be off to a better start, trust me.
(Also - take the extra .com out of the link in your sig)
Does Eagle Bear live in Japan?
Edit: scratch that, it even looks copypasta.
If you're going to make a web comic, either go all out or go home. No copypasta. No gradient fill background. No head-shot only frames. A comic of such poor caliber is going to hurt your image, not help it.
this is a forum where we give constructive feedback to artists looking to improve their work
if you want to get feedback on writing, i'd suggest writer's block
if you want feedback on the art in this comic, i suggest telling eagle bear to come over here and post stuff him/herself so we can give him/her some crits.
I'm going to have to disagree with you there Lex, I think it falls woefully short of where a good comic should be. The idea has potential but it was so woefully executed that it has no hope of drawing a laugh.
i think from a writing perspective you need to focus on making the jokes relevant to recent new stories/announcements; i'd imagine the sort of people that scour your site for news are probably aware that your star wars comic is ridiculously dated.
from a visual standpoint, things are pretty dire to be honest
the combination of completely copy-pasted art, cheesy gradient background, awful punctuation and strange text placement (which also makes your writing look worse) all make the whole thing look painfully amateur
frankly i think you need to either tell eaglebear to step his game up, or find someone else to draw the comic
Webcomic Twitter Steam Wishlist SATAN
Here's a little background on everything. Earlier this year I seeked out an artist and found a kid that came up with a good look. He came up with a look that I liked and he was up for it. Well real life got in the way and he quit. A guy on my site invited me to a local Manga group that are independent artists coming together to make some manga and share ideas. I went there in hopes to find an artist and Eagle Bear decided to join up. My idea was for him to take these characters, which I love, and kind of make them his own. So yeah it's rough looking and the jokes are outdated but we're going through some of the strips I had already created so that we can get our flow going in order to make the process somewhat automated.
Here's the last one we did:
By all means, the more info the better because while everything else on the site I am an expert on, this is the one where I'm still in the dark about.
Visit my blog for review, videos, and video games news,
www.original-gamer.com
Now while the rules state that we shouldn't just tell a person their art is terrible, because it is not a proper critique, you are coming in as a website owner and are in a sense dissassociated with the art. Therefore my critique can be disassociated with the artist.
I am a bit of a business man however. And so since the artist is unavailable for critique, I can critique your decision to pursue this comic.
Don't.
Or at least drastically reconsider your intentions with the site. If you plan on tackling all thing "gamer" related than you will be hobbling the rest of your site which seems of a decent quality design to an "artist" that is not of a calibur worth supporting.
As the others have pointed out, he is using cheap tricks to produce bad art that is unappealing in every sense. The lack of effort on his part will eventually relate to a lack of effort on your part. While I understand that you may not have much to offer an artist (which most likely is nothing other than the possibility of publicity) it doesn't mean you should sell the rest of your site short.
Until you find a better artist my recommendation is that you remove the feature.
As for artistic commentry it's pretty much been mentioned, but your artist has locked himself into 4 panels, but is only actually drawing one. Why? Is he pressed for time? Have you guarenteed daily delivery or the browsers get their internet dollars back?
Lets see the original artists designs. Do Harlem and Dude look at all better? Is their apartment situated in an amorphous blue heaven that descends into pure white joy? Else why the repeated blue to white gradiant other than the fact that he has no ability or time to attempt a background and is using a photoshop gradient to "flare that bitch up".
What sold you on this story, that you are so dedicated to the characters of homoerotic black guy, or dude in yellow shirt and khakis. Is there a tragic backstory that we are unaware of? Is there anything that dissassociates them from the now common template of every gamer comic of "here is two guys and they like to play video games." Or is the humor found in a sarcasm that transcends our understanding. That these characters are so awful and stereotypical that it is itself the punchline.
When your artist is cutting and pasting please ask him to at the very least "Cut" closer to the outline, as you can still see the blue halo around Dudes head as he moved him further down the gradiant.
Also Dude appears to have an elbow in the middle of his forearm. This might be an affect caused by the lasers shooting out of his computer screen.
I would expect to see a comic like this on Comic Genesis or Drunk Duck or some other Free web comic hosting site.
For a site that is trying to generate views and attract consumers I would expect something more polished. Not just regarding the artwork but also when it comes to something as simple as gutters and word baloons.
I only mention this because expectation is often the fundemental factor when it comes to satisfaction. If a potential consumer goes in expecting an 8 or 9 and ultimately finds a 6, even though a 6 isnt necessarily bad their expectations are not met and they will leave your site unsatisfied.
You mention you know this comic is in the rough stages of development so I would probably suggest not putting it in the site until you have the rough edges ironed out and can present something that will help sell your site and keep people around.
Lack of effort. Which happens to be a key indicator of how much someone wants to improve. If you can't bother to fix the easy technical stuff, how can we think for a moment that the guy doing this wants to improve the things that require talent and practice?
just fyi
you are not the artist
so nothing we have to offer you here is going to be of any benefit to you as the writer of the comic.
if you want feedback on writing, go to the writer's block subforum
if you want feedback on art, get eagle bear to join the forums and make a thread, and we can help him or her
but really, this isn't the place to post this sort of thing unless you're the artist looking to improve.
best of luck