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One of Many. NOW WORKING! - thanks for the help
matsutake
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Here is comic that was meant for the thread. Comments welcome.
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edit: just noticed you made another thread in H/A matsutake.
-Dude, get your shit together, mkay.
EXTREMELY simple stuff, like actually connecting the branches in the tree graphic, from there, to the escence of the "joke" itself, it just doesnt feel like a comic, and... you have something else to post ?
Second, people tend to read top down in every language, and left to right in English. With that in mind, the first thing we see is the punchline in this comic (presumably the taxonomic locations of religious types). I would then have to look down further to see the rest of the tree and context, which is awkward for parsing.
Third, the punchline is really overstated and hateful. Regardless of content, you would probably get the point across better by just listing their locations and the genus you are associating them with, rather than openly stating they live in shit. This is not to pull punches, clearly the audience you are aiming for would be aligned with you on this opinion, but in order for something to be funny in this way you have to have the context explain the situation, rather than detailing it out. A better option to do the same thing might be to break down the slimes and molds into sub-fields to show context. Or to make the implication a visual gag and show images of each genus with a comedic depiction of a sunday school teacher associating with slimes. Show, don't tell. This applies to both writing and drawing. The way you have it here, you could just have saved time and made a blog post that "Sunday School Teachers are shitty" to convey you opinion. And even if you agree, that's really not funny unless you make some visual gag or amusing way to convey that.
Fourth, this is designed more similarly to an info-graphic than a comic, which is great. But if you look at XKCD, which does a lot of "comics" in the form of infographics, you might notice that they tend to include many many more jokes than the main one. In the context of your piece, you might include other biblical beasts and legends that are a bit wonky on the chart in probably locations. An example is this comic: [ http://www.xkcd.com/1040/ ]. There are lots of gags going on here, but also lots of interesting information. Infographics need to do both in order to be worth reading and appreciated.
Fifth, and final from me, is it is way to big to take seriously as a comic, especially with the amount of unused space in the gradient. You should design for the medium, and online you are looking to fit your entire image in one screen at your weakest viewer's screen. This si why most people these days design their comics to be seen on smaller resolutions (typically about 800 wide and 800 tall will fit on a computer, but that is still the high end for comic size and depends on context). If you have to scroll, you want to make sure that the scrolling helps convey the message in some way. For a multi-panel comic, this can be a pacing medium to hide the gag or make a scene more intense. For a one panel thing like this, you want to make sure the entire thing can be immediately seen and understood.
There isn't really enough art to go about reviewing yet, maybe post some more so the folks here can help you out there. This should be enough to chew on for actual content, for now.
religion is bad?
Also, in this case, the explanation comes off as very hostile to the reader and even if they agree with you, it feels like you're calling them too stupid to get the joke. Tell your joke (ENC explained a lot of ways to improve conveying it) and the audience you are trying to hit will understand it.