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Post Lurk Comic Art Sprinkling
El
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Well, sprinkling is a nicer word than dump. 
Okee, I'm quite scared right now as a lil newbie, having seen the amount of locked threads on this board...but I've read the rules and hopefully I'll fall within them. ^_______^
I have two comic projects, both of which I collaborate on with my fiance and what follows is some artwork from the more recent of them, The Broken Mirror; (it's a graphic novel type project and not a gag a day strip) and I'd hugely appreciate comments and criticism on the art and other comic-related aspects - composition, dialogue/narrative, the flow of the story etc.
These are in order, though not necessarily consecutive - there are 41 pages in the archive so far [mini plug]if you like the look of them, the site is linked in my sig with The Broken Mirror banner, or even if you're interested enough to have a look and perhaps give some feed back on the work there at the moment as a whole.[/mini plug]
Thanks for looking.
Okee, I'm quite scared right now as a lil newbie, having seen the amount of locked threads on this board...but I've read the rules and hopefully I'll fall within them. ^_______^
I have two comic projects, both of which I collaborate on with my fiance and what follows is some artwork from the more recent of them, The Broken Mirror; (it's a graphic novel type project and not a gag a day strip) and I'd hugely appreciate comments and criticism on the art and other comic-related aspects - composition, dialogue/narrative, the flow of the story etc.
These are in order, though not necessarily consecutive - there are 41 pages in the archive so far [mini plug]if you like the look of them, the site is linked in my sig with The Broken Mirror banner, or even if you're interested enough to have a look and perhaps give some feed back on the work there at the moment as a whole.[/mini plug]
Thanks for looking.
El on
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Narrative: It may be that this kind story may just not be my thing, so take this with salt, but I did find the narritive to be rather slow. I looked through your archives and did not get the sense of much story taking place yet. There are 41 pages there and they all feel introductory.
I hope this does not sound too negative. I do like your art, and would like to see more.
Kewop Decam - thanks. ^^
Mertzy - Sorry to hear that - if you do figure out what you think is wrong there, angle/colour/shading, please do post again.
Spilltoy - Ehhhm...it's an English turn of phrase perhaps? Meaning to clean the cage of a pet guinea pig.
MagicToaster and Offworlder - yeah the pacing is slow, though I guess it's a question of whether that's because this is intended to be an epic, story based comic, as opposed to a short form humour/gag strip; for both comics, a lot of time is spent on developing characterisation, which consequently slows the action...for now. In the case of this story, the whole of volume one is effectively a prologue, and it's got a bit of a way to go yet. Also, this is a futuristic comic, charting the steady descent of a society into a dystopia...the technique is more or less a stab at making that more chilling and believable by having some very normal events and conversations (mostly in the case of Xara's family,) early on. Any more developed suggestions on reworking the pacing, though, would be more than welcome - at the moment, seeing as its still early days with this, I'm trying to get as many opinions as possible to give the story a wider appeal.
I hear you on the small/distant characters, we could do with some sort of tutorial for those, what details to leave in, how to keep the characters looking dynamic, so I'm on the lookout on that count. And you didn't sound too negative, thanks a lot for the detailed crit.
That's really a very nice image.
It's been a while since I've been in a creative writing class, so my critiquing skills are a bit rusty, but here goes:
I don't mind slow pacing when it appears to have purpose. See one of my favorite films, "Stalker" (Tarkovsky is a master of incredibly slow pacing... He's like Kubrick x10).
What slows your story down is the text. There's too much of it, and it gets ponderous and tiresome. You do a lot of good stuff with your imagery, which is highly atmospheric. You often don't need the redundancy of the text. Try to have confidence enough in your imagery to convey the story on it's own... This is a comic after all.
So my advice to you is to go back and edit. Chop out all that ponderous internal monologue going on. I think the story about the boy with the abusive father would do a lot better if it were introduced to us in images. Imagine how much more effective those first few pages of his story could be, where he walks through the woods to home and into his room, without any text at all.
Same goes for that prologue. The pictures are nice, but what are you telling the reader there that they really need to know? It all seems vague and mildly foreboding... but it nearly kept me from clicking onward because it was so much work to try to digest.
Sometimes it's good as a writer to get this stuff out initially, during the writing process. But it's also good to go back to it and ask yourself it's really necessary for the reader, or if it will just get in the way.
As for the verbosity...I'm really hitting my head against a brick wall with this one...a short while back, before I dared post anywhere like here or EatPoo, I ran what we had then through the forum over at TWCL...to a resounding chorus deploring how much text there was...so I edited it...I took out quite a bit of it and rewrote several other parts, (yah, it was even worse to start, fancy that, heh?
And that seemed to quell the critique there and even collect a few fans who found it engaging...enough to get us a WCCA nom at least (*thrilled*) so it was on to harsher forums for more ruthless criticism...and it turns out there's still too much writing. I do see what's being said on many points...I WILL make myself part with most/all the writing in the wood scenes and the first couple of pages in the house...as in part I think I put them there when they were all there was - to give description of what there simply was not yet enough images to describe...to go back and successfully edit though I think I still need a bit more practice with the new pages and learning to be as concise as possible when scripting them. In turn, do you think removing the words from those pages would quicken the pace, (as I imagine it would...) of the story overall?
Hmmm, yah I guess I could try having more faith in the imagery... *tries to overcome inherent novel-writing induced tendencies*.
The thing is, everything that has happened so far IS relevant or important, which will hopefully be borne out as the story progresses: for instance, I wouldn't want to lose any pages and their artwork altogether, even when cutting down on the narrative/dialogue. The biggest problem in this respect is the introduction: quite a few things need to be said here and I don’t know how images alone could be specific enough to serve the required purpose. (Suggestions welcome. ^___^)
And the final issue is characterisation…quite a few people have felt that nothing has really happened yet – and in terms of the overall plot, indeed it hasn’t; because it’s integral to this story that people care about the characters and know something of their history – as besides being (hopefully, eventually) entertaining it’s aiming to make a point. Perhaps it would have been better broken into flashback sequences? Or would that get too confusing?
Oh well, I’m killing off a character in the next chapter so maybe that will liven things up a bit.
Thanks again for the feedback.