I've been trying to get into cartooning so I've been screwing around with styles and just trying to be funny. Not sticking to anything yet and just trying to get better. Still very much a beginner so critique is always great. This is order from most current to oldest. First one is kinda just a fan art but it helped me out with a writers block.
Simple, to the point, succeeded at amusing me multiple times... I like lactose intolerance a "whole" lot, if you drew a campaign for 'Lactose intolerance awareness' id say the idea would be 2% more effective.
Thanks for the response. As much as i want to improve my art I know it will just improve slowly. But for now just knowing I can actually make a joke work and not just make myself laugh is a huge accomplishment.
Here are some more older attempts. The ocarina of time fan art is still my most current and i think that shows my progress in illustration. These were mostly done late 2012 when I started to get into cartooning.
As a new webcomic artist myself, I find it very helpful to see similar humor/jokes done by people who are years ahead of me. This helps show me, quite literally, exactly how much further I can take my art and/or delivery. This comic of yours that I quoted above, was already done by Penny Arcade's own Ronnie, almost exactly.
But I feel like his is a bit better for several reasons. For one, he's able to get a bigger punch and bigger laugh from half as many panels. He's also able to deliver the joke in the last panel without spelling-it-out-for-you and thus rewarding the reader by letting them connect the dots on their own. I'm not trying to say "He's awesome, you suck." I'm just trying to give actual examples of how the delivery could be tightened up.
Another quick note, as a fulltime Graphic Designer, I find it helpful to have constraints. In fact, it's hard for me to start working without constraints (one color brochure, banner ad less than 8kb, logo that reads well very tiny, etc..) and looking at your current stuff it's all over the place. Some are wide, some are tall, some are huge, some aren't, some are 1 panel, some are 7... What's your goal here? A webcomic? Just to get better at drawing? Maybe shooting for a set amount of panels at a set size, across multiple comics, will help you hone your humor. A joke delivered in 3 panels could be made into 9 panels depending on the joke. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
I think they're great. I especially love the Ocarina one. You could probably add Link throwing all the chickens back out of the pen after the woman in Kakariko villiage gives him the bottle. I always did that just to be a jerk.
Pifman- All criticism is good criticism and I really appreciate you taking the time to respond. As much as I love Whomp that totally blew my mind. I feel like somehow that could have been in the back of my mind even though I originally based it off of Notch's comment from his twitter. "Sometimes I see myself in my computer screen, and I think: What have I been doing with my life? .....Then the next level starts!". Still the similarity is uncanny and now I feel like a hack.
As for consistency I do realize I'm all over the place. I'd been working on a really simple web comic for a while and for the most part my friend and I stuck to the right dimensions. The art was crazy simplified so we could just move around the characters like puppets in Illustrator and the content was a very edgy humor which aimed at being offensive for the sake of being offensive.
What I'm doing right now is simply trying to improve my delivery, see if I can actually make things that make others laugh, and drastically improve art work until I feel like I've improved enough to start my new project. Layouts and dimensions I'm really just playing around with.
So far the responses here have been very helpful. Hopefully I can get some great feedback on my new work but recently I've only been doing gesture exercises and getting stuck with real world work.
If anyone is interested, my older work is like this (potentially offensive).
And here is one of my first side comics to make up for lack of new work. (I realize I could have executed that joke better).
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Here are some more older attempts. The ocarina of time fan art is still my most current and i think that shows my progress in illustration. These were mostly done late 2012 when I started to get into cartooning.
As a new webcomic artist myself, I find it very helpful to see similar humor/jokes done by people who are years ahead of me. This helps show me, quite literally, exactly how much further I can take my art and/or delivery. This comic of yours that I quoted above, was already done by Penny Arcade's own Ronnie, almost exactly.
But I feel like his is a bit better for several reasons. For one, he's able to get a bigger punch and bigger laugh from half as many panels. He's also able to deliver the joke in the last panel without spelling-it-out-for-you and thus rewarding the reader by letting them connect the dots on their own. I'm not trying to say "He's awesome, you suck." I'm just trying to give actual examples of how the delivery could be tightened up.
Another quick note, as a fulltime Graphic Designer, I find it helpful to have constraints. In fact, it's hard for me to start working without constraints (one color brochure, banner ad less than 8kb, logo that reads well very tiny, etc..) and looking at your current stuff it's all over the place. Some are wide, some are tall, some are huge, some aren't, some are 1 panel, some are 7... What's your goal here? A webcomic? Just to get better at drawing? Maybe shooting for a set amount of panels at a set size, across multiple comics, will help you hone your humor. A joke delivered in 3 panels could be made into 9 panels depending on the joke. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
As for consistency I do realize I'm all over the place. I'd been working on a really simple web comic for a while and for the most part my friend and I stuck to the right dimensions. The art was crazy simplified so we could just move around the characters like puppets in Illustrator and the content was a very edgy humor which aimed at being offensive for the sake of being offensive.
What I'm doing right now is simply trying to improve my delivery, see if I can actually make things that make others laugh, and drastically improve art work until I feel like I've improved enough to start my new project. Layouts and dimensions I'm really just playing around with.
So far the responses here have been very helpful. Hopefully I can get some great feedback on my new work but recently I've only been doing gesture exercises and getting stuck with real world work.
If anyone is interested, my older work is like this (potentially offensive).
And here is one of my first side comics to make up for lack of new work. (I realize I could have executed that joke better).