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The Dungeoneers
JerichoTheKing
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
We've departed from our usual sucky hijinks for sucky noir hijinks.
Slowly getting better at the drawing, but not by much.
In part one, Corbin takes the first step into the seedy world of underground tabletop roleplaying.
Is it clear that he is showing the secret hand signal to gain entry, or does it just seem like he wants to get it on with the bouncer? A friend of mine thought the latter, which disappointed me a bit because this is probably my favorite of all our strips thus far and I was hoping it would speak for itself without explanation.
Slowly getting better at the drawing, but not by much.
In part one, Corbin takes the first step into the seedy world of underground tabletop roleplaying.
Is it clear that he is showing the secret hand signal to gain entry, or does it just seem like he wants to get it on with the bouncer? A friend of mine thought the latter, which disappointed me a bit because this is probably my favorite of all our strips thus far and I was hoping it would speak for itself without explanation.
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I thought the narrator was a woman. She calls herself a "bird", and it seems like the guard is checking to see if she has a penis. Whem she doesn't, the guard's facial expression is like, "Okay, what's this chick doing here? She doesn't belong in this place I'm guarding." And then the sex thing at the end is a solicitation: if he let's her into the club, she'll "let him in" too.
I see. I didn't even stop to wonder if it was clear that it was a gay club because... I don't know. I thought that the name PULSE, the line that the guy is trying to look tough but is trying to feel our hero up, and the dangly earing gave all of that away.
Ya know, I didn't even consider the metaphoric connotations. I just kinda replaced "guy" with "bird" because the dictionaries said that's what it meant, and substituted "buzz around" for "come around" for the same reason. Your writing is much cleaner than mine...
Hmm.... The joke was supposed to go: Corbin (who in previous comics is not hardboiled in the slightest) has to make the most immature gesture possible while talking like a caricature of a tough guy detetctive type. "But I know the score" is supposed to be a "but I'm a badass, and I know what's up," sort of line, but coupled with the "doing it" gesture it just seems silly. That was the idea.
Of course if it seems like the mystery here is that maybe he's really a woman... yeah, it kinda throws everything off.
Well, I figured that was the universal sign for fucking. While writing the strip, I suggested to the co-writer that instead of saying a password or flashing an invitation, he should do some sort of secret gesture. We both thought of the same thing at the same time, so we went with it. Of course, we also knew all along that it was supposed to be a gay club. I think the next installment might say something about how secret gestures and answering riddles can only get you so deep to clarify the point of the final frame in this strip.
We might end up taking this thing into a more serious direction, as the rest of the comics are random and ridiculous and... not really funny to readers a lot of the time, but are to us. As long as we're not making people laugh, might as well do it on purpose. I appreciate the feedback.
it was pretty clear to me right off the bat that he was making the "insert penis here" hang gesture but maybe not everyone has seen that?
some of the writing is a bit awkward, like the opening part "the wind was blowing like the hooker down the alleyway. she didn't know i saw" it's just really awkwardly phrased. i had to read it twice before i caught on to "ooooh blowing, okay...that's awkwardly phrased"
The First
Don't Hate the Playa, Hate the Game
The Second
I didn't think of a title and Corbin never got back to me
Melodic Abuse
In Which a Great Evil is Unleased
My Friend, George Lucas
Status Update
A Big Decision
The Pendulum Swings Low
At the Career Fair
Tripping on a Womprat in a Sith Lord's Heart
Guitar as a Violent Innuendo
Second Opinion?
What critique can I get on the typical strips?
How can we improve?
Is it too much like other comics? Are the punchlines too vague? Does it seem like we're getting closer to or further away from becoming a genuine webcomic?
What makes a genuine webcomic?
What does it mean to be?
Where are my shoes?
Some of these are kind of oldish jokes, and are unfunny because I've seen them done repeatedly before. Others I feel are close, but not quite; like you have a vague idea of a potential joke but resort to some big shaky contrivance to try and get it across. This is really vague, bad feedback, I realize, but I'm having a hard time decently quantifying "almost but not quite."
Like, A Big Decision. I think there's a potentially funny joke in this strip, but there's too many angles of attack. You're simultaneously making a coathanger abortion joke, likening the failure of having a son to the failure of polarizing the beta ray, and implying a sort of Dr. Membraneous evil scientist snobbery on the part of his dad, who is all man why is my son so stupid he can't touch a beta ray without polarizing it even though it's an easy mistake. I think if you focused on one of these, and made it zippier, it'd make for a much funnier, accessible joke.
I did chuckle at "I brushed too hard."
I'm curious: are you looking for feedback on your writing, your sequential storytelling, or your art, specifically? All of the above?
On the art front virtually everyone here is going to recommend you suck it up and practice drawing traditionally, from life, before jumping into trying to find a style. Your drawing is promising but primitive right now, and smacks too much of trying to echo PA and other webcomics, which is making it look samey and undistinguished.
Minorly, and personally, I'm hating the /italics denoted with slashes like a typewritten manuscript/. It distracts me. Use a lettering font with an italic and/or bold variant and get friendly with it.
Welcome to the AC, BTW.
Take a look below. These kinds of strips have really been done to death. A lot of people seem to take Gabe, add another level of ridiculous/randomness to him, then put him next to a straight man. This is cliche, now. Give us some background to the characters. Make us like them by showing different sides to them instead of just WOW THAT'S WACKY.
And also:
Not sure if you were "inspired" by PA or just happened to make the same joke, but watch out for this stuff. Seasoned comic readers will pick this stuff out every time.
A lot of your strips lack context. The guitar one seems like the kind of strip that would be a 7th or 8th installment of a long-running gag. Why is it a guitar? Why does the guitar hate him? I couldn't laugh at that strip because I was try to figure out why I should. As for the "Juice of love"/pepper spray one, I'm pretty sure you started this without a punchline in mind and didn't know how to end. First of all, why would he think pepper spray was "love juice", when he clearly knows what pepper spray and its effects are? It feels extremely tacked-on. Secondly, the second panel in that one is confusing as hell. I thought for a second that the crazy guitar face was relevant....it wasn't.
The Lucas messages one was great. The Mario one could use some tweaking, but was also pretty good. Awesome material for both. Though I think Lucas should have not been saying anything in the last panel. It's kind of ironic because the best scene in Episode 3 was when Padme and Anakin didn't say a goddamn word and showed emotion with their eyes only.
The Lucas press conference strip - I have no idea what's going on there. The opening conversation seems like an inside joke nobody let me in on, and the end seems to depend on that? I don't know.
Doppleganger: This was very bland humor. The punchline is so standard, it could really be applied to any situation. My general advice: stop resorting to violence for a joke. It's cheap and shows you weren't willing to put a lot of thought into something. Gabe's punching the book into Tycho's mouth is over-the-top, and works because we know of Gabe's love for Star Wars. It just seems lazily added here.
Squid's interpretation of the abortion one is spot-on, IMO. Too much going on there. That's in addition to the fact that I have no idea who the dad in that strip is. Why is he relevant? Maybe, in the second panel, you could add something in there referencing that he's a scientist/madman or something. Maybe like "I have a _____ at home that can do this for free" or something. Again, context is KEY. We need to know what we're reading about and what we should be laughing at.
My biggest advice, overall, is to remove yourself from your strip. Finish your first run at it and walk away for 8 hours. When you come back, does it still make sense? I assure you you'll find clarity issues. I have the same problem...I get so wrapped up in the joke, I forget that others aren't thinking about it for hours like I have been. Have some friends or less-than-friends (better) read the strips. As follow-up questions: "did you get the joke?" "What could make it clearer for you?" Remember, without clarity, humor falls apart.
Keep doing that, over and over, you'll get the hang of it...and keep posting your your progress here! We are here to help you improve, so feel free to run things by us and we'll give you nothing but honesty. You have a lot of potential here, but I think you need to find something about this strips that is unique to you. Right now, it seems very run-of-the-mill, and I think you can do better than that. You have good ideas - now just work on getting them across and making us laugh at them.
edit: got a bit carried away there
I never realized how many jokes are packed into A Big Decision. I thought there were two jokes - one, the discreet abortions are done at a coathanger shop. Two - deciding not to get the abortion even though there was a good reason was a mistake that haunts the doctor. "I just polarized the beta ray" used to be "I just crashed the car," but my co-writer suggested we go with something less common and something more mad science-y. That strip is still my favorite of them all (next to the Dungeoneers Part One).
Agreed. But strip day came around, I'd just dyed my facial hair, and that was the best we had.
Hm. Indeed. I left out the first part, because it's one I like less. Corbin says he met someone at the guitar store. Jericho says he didn't know there were girls in guitar stores. Corbin says it's not a girl, it's a guitar. Jericho asks how the sex is. Corbin says it hurts a little, but the clothes cover up the bruises. Um.... I guess the running thing is that Corbin has a guitar that abuses him... hmmm. That doesn't sound funny.
Thanks again for the feedback. There is no genuine criticism that will be "too harsh" for me. I'm already aware of where we stand as far as comedic and artistic appeal, which is why I finally decided not to wuss out and actually ask you guys for direction rather than continue fumbling in the dark. Friends pretty much say, "Cool, keep it up," which is not helpful at all.
Oh! The Lucas press conference strip. That went up the week after this news came out:
So that's that one.
I do feel that outside of this latest project (the dungeoneers) the other side of what we've been doing has been moving toward a more central idea of what's funny in the cultures of the things that interest us. The Mario or even the Lucas strip is a pretty good example of that. I hated when we first started, having all these jokes about games or movies that were years old. I want to be as current as we can be with our jokes and as far as our inside jokes go I think we were hoping the readers would grow with us and eventually there would be no need for explanation. I do see where we haven't really given one though.
I am actually the bigger culprit here as far as that goes. Generally either Jericho or I will have an initial idea about a joke or something funny that we thought of. We'll discuss it for a bit and historically I think I'll jump on an idea that I think could work and we run with it till we have some modicum of a joke. I think part of the problem that you guys have pointed out stems from me being a huge fanboy. I revel in all things I enjoy. PA is high on that list. Distancing myself from that and trying not to directly emulate those guys will be a big part of how we grow from here on out. I've recognized that from the beginning and thought of it as kind of a growing pains kind of process where we start out trying to do something that we know well and through that process grow into our own entity. We've never had a timeline on when this thing gets to where we want it. I think our goal from the beginning has been to have a steady stream of content that we can build off of and offer to anyone that comes to the site. I do feel encouraged by the positive feedback though. Thanks to all who help. Aaaaaaand you guys should come join our dead forum and bring it back to life. :winky:
The second part of that sentence is where you are going to run into problems. If people have to have the joke explained on a routine basis, or if they don't immediately "get" your strip/joke, they won't stick around for long. As I said in my previous post, you guys have some good ideas...most of which have awesome jokes and delivery hiding in there somewhere, but you need to step back and make sure you are being concise and super-clear about what you want the reader to laugh at.
I'm not trying to be mean here, but all of the best intentions in the world will not make your comic funny to others. It's great that you love the material you're working with, but if you're looking for readers and popularity, you're going to have to find a way to port that over to people who have never seen a single one of your strips before.
Do you guys storyboard? Toiling over a script and picturing the panels and pacing (if not actually sketching them out) can work wonders for what you need to improve on. It helps with timing and with the information your reader will need to be able to get the punchline.
I get what you're saying, and you're not being too harsh at all. I've always felt that we weren't going to be good in the beginning and that it might take awhile to get there. Like I said we were hoping that might happen. I think now we're starting to see that maybe we need to do some things differently in order to grow more.
At this point we're realizing that our inside jokes aren't going to make good material to read. I feel good about how we're starting to think about our ideas and even just reading some of the responses about the dungeoneers and the other strips has me excited about sitting down to write the rest of the ideas that we've got in the bank now.
Also, I forgot to post part two.