Red Raevynbecause I only take Bubble BathsRegistered Userregular
Damn, I love your comics m3nace. Those two funny pages made me laugh out loud, too. I'm offering you some editing again, some of it is just my taste so it's okay to spit in my face if you don't like it. Just digitally though, no real spitting.
Page 1/5
Added a beat here before the “and for what” “Many a time you have stolen from me, mocked me in the eyes of humans and gods – and for what?”
I’d make the second paragraph use “so that” in both sentences for the rhythm/symmetry of it, instead of so that in one and only so in the other.
I think the below needs at least the single comma. It reads like a runon sentence without it. Further punctuation may not be a bad idea: Sooner or later progress shall claim its victim and that is why you resist, is it not?
Sooner or later progress shall claim its victim, and that is why you resist, is it not?
Sooner or later progress shall claim its victim, and that is why you resist – is it not?
I think this could use a comma too Sooner or later… sooner or later you shall become your own doom, Prometheus.
I like this as separate sentences but that’s just preference: Your time is over Zeus. Admit it.
Page 2 “… tries thinking of the imminent change which his divine loot shall bring about,”
Loot has a very casual feel to it, it doesn’t fit with the otherwise formal and somewhat historical writing style. It has a connotation of something stolen and I think you’re doing that on purpose, but “divine loot” just sounds weird. I don't have a replacement to offer right now, though.
“It does not help. Zeus’ words still…”
I think this would be better with a period instead of a comma.
“A big guy, he can’t possibly overpower him,”
This confused me because of the art. This panel feels like I am in his head, but the words are coming from an external narrator. I like the panel, so I think I would shift the writing to his perspective, especially because it will help transition between the voice from nowhere to him speaking on page 3. Maybe something like “He’s big, too big to overpower…” and then the bottom left panel’s text changed to “… without fire from the gods.”
Page 4
Typo – married should have two r’s
“All those times” sounds funny to me. I would replace it with either “every time” or maybe “each time”. I think every does a better job of implying it happening many times, the way “all those” does, without sounding strange. (I think it’s the plurality of time that sounds odd).
I did another small funnypage:
here's the previous one (unrelated) for anyone wondering
edit: it's meant for print, not as a webcomic. It can sometimes be hard to look at crosshatching on a monitor...
and if anyone is better at latin than google translate go ahead, the title is supposed to read "death eternal"
That turned out fantastic! Is the eagles' eye the time of his death? Because that is awesome. You should post this in the Graphic Violence comic creator thread, dude.
Did the Strip Search elimination challenge (words being 'mystery' and 'naughty'). I spent an extra half an hour for final inks and details.
Let's just say I took it up a notch... WARNING [SUPER NSFW]
Red Raevynbecause I only take Bubble BathsRegistered Userregular
Haha, pipe coming out of the gas mask. Even though it's in one bubble I keep reading "Freeze motherfucker!" and "Stick police, bitch!" as if each cop had said one of them.
I also think it should be two word bubbles! I think because he referred to the main character as two different expletives.
You could keep it going by having one cop say "put your arms down!" And the other one echo him "yeah! Put your arms down!"
Really great page, those facial expressions in particular are excellent! The only thing that sticks out to me is the straightness of the girl's arm and that last panel; the guy's elbow seems to be sticking out at an odd angle and he doesn't seem to be quite gripping the bow. I'm not sure about the way the character breaks the border and overlaps the previous panel, but that's just me. It looks cool in that it gives it some depth, but I feel like it's a bit distracting in terms of the storytelling.
Thanks. And yeah I was really on the fence on whether or not to break the borders but eventually I think I'll just keep it.
Anyways. Once in a while I feel like disconnecting my brain and doing a dumb comic amidst all the thinking and writing of all the other comics (sheesh, natcowrimo script is driving me insane with how dark it is). This is one of those times:
So, I think Natcowrimo will be off because of all the work I do at school now, but I'll probably end up producing more than 30 pages of comix that month anyway. Now, the past two weeks I've been working on an autobiographical comic, and it has been a great learning experience. Here it is, front to back cover and all:
I have a few things I want to touch up on sometime, such as the awful handlettering some of the places.
Dude, I LOVE your storytelling skills as a sequential artist. You have that rare ability to author the language of comics that is very difficult to control and not unique to artistic ability (not that you are lacking there either, but your scripting is off the charts.)
I had a sequential art class where we had a lot of students with some serious artistic talent, but they couldn't tell a story with the images to save their soul. What they ended up with was a series of beautiful but disconnected panels that left the story illegible. It makes me incredibly happy that you are pursuing this. I just wanted you to know...
I can see the chris ware in it, which is not a bad thing, but I hope as you go along you get more elastic with your influences. The comics are awesome, and I'm sure you still plan to do a lot of exploring with style.
I also think you are a little inconsistent with the bold use of black, If you are going to take a lesson from ware, it may as well be that sometimes the design of the page is more important than the scene being detailed, or being in perspective. Like on this page:
You could probably get away with something like this:
That maybe a little too heavy, but its taking a bit more of the whole page into consideration. Now your eye follows the action to the more detailed panel in the middle, and the border less last panel gives the timing of the realization of awkwardness more breathing room. Up to you, in the end, how you want to solve that problem.
Thanks Iruka, those are some great crits. Paul Karasik said the same thing about style and I wholeheartedly agree, this was a massive learning experience for me but it's time to move on as well. The style I'm developing for my next comic is a lot more my own.
So here's the new comic, it's... kind of a mess. We basically scripted, pencilled and inked the whole thing in a week plus some, and I had to sit up till 6 in the morning with all this fucking cross hatching. We also had to write it in thumbnails only, so I feel like I neglected the text part a bit. I'm sorry about the font, we can't install fonts on our computers at school because we don't have admin rights which is retarded...
Very nice. Even if you were rushing, I think you handled the panels a lot better this time. The story is simple but good, I get a little confused around the little girl/the other lady as the father is saying goodbye. Maybe one too many angle shifts.
So right now in class we're doing these exercises in style with an American cartoonist, Matt Madden, which is just really focused on trying to give us constraints in order to free us. Sounds weird but it does make a lot of sense in that by imposing your own set of rules the more you're in charge of your creative process really.
So anyways, today we gave each other constraints as to how we should make this simple template comic (guy is drawing comic, another guy walks in and sits down, guy1 passes his comic to guy2 and says "she's all yours" and leaves.) It's a really simple story to tell and obviously none of us did particularly interesting versions of it when we did the first draft without any constraints but it's funny to see how creative people get once they get certain obstructions.
A classmate challenged me to draw this story in 6 panels, only using widescreen panels, only using close ups of the characters' eyes and only in blue. The blue part was easy enough and was just a matter of a simple gradient map, however the closeups on the eyes was really tough, I mean, how much can you fit into a panel with only close ups of eyes?
So I decided to make the actions appear as reflections in the characters' eyes, yet I needed something to visually differentiate the two. In the beginning I thought of different shades of blue, but eventually landed on giving one character glasses, which would provide me with a wider meta-panel, if you could call it that.
To me it sort of works aesthetically but not as a comic. I'm initially not a fan of elaborately painted comics because they don't really animate that well to me, because of all the detail that sort of detours your reading experience. Secondly the widescreen format ended up being just an obstruction and not much of an element that benefited the storytelling in any interesting way, to me at least. Really it's almost too subtle to understand what's going on, like sometimes I depend on changes in light to show that a character is changing the angle of his head and so on. On the plus side I really see potential in working with a combination of close ups and reflections and hopefully I'll encounter a situation in which it'll be meaningful to use those elements to tell a story.
Yesterday we did Art Forgery101, we essentially just had to copy someone else's style, visual and storytelling wise. I chose Jim Flora who hasn't done any comic work but mainly did children's literature and jazz record covers and so I had to translate his whole shtick into a comics format as well which was the initial lure of choosing him, because I generally don't see that many comics that have this very playful energy to it.
that jazz comic is kicking so much ass. in my head it feels like the reverse of a ghost story or something, like handing down something across an unspecified period of time... very very cool.
Just wanna show this real quick, mainly because this shit was extremely laborious, but I don't wanna clutter the doodle thread with art forgeries. This week we did stuff in different artists styles (Hugo Pratt, Chris Ware and Shigeru Mizuki) with inspiration from different pictures from Life magazine. The Mizuki one has my hand aching after all those damn dots, dots, dots, dots oh the humanity!
For once I'm glad it's weekend so I can do something in an original style again. Gonna do some more acrylics yay!
Oh my god these things are old.
Welp, dusting off this thread so I don't clutter the doodle thread too much.
Here's what I've been doing in my spare time recently. Trying to go for a less polished look, all these drawings are first take, no sketches or thumbnails.
Thanks bro. I'd been thinking a lot about what Frank Santoro taught us half a year ago about how the first gestural drawing is usually the best as well. So anyways when I posted this to tumblr yesterday I immediately got a mail from Frank that simply read "yes." Haha. He then reblogged it to comicsworkbook and now it's got like 150 notes on tumblr. I think I'll be doing more of these and put a zine together or something. Next up is either art deco robots, or 1950s space adventure tackled through this weird mix of humor and tragedy. I think with this comic I've finally found a voice that is distinctly mine and so I'm kind of pumped about that.
Just realized I haven't posted this.
My friend and I are working on an animated short. Here's the animatic we made in, like, two days or something. Don't watch it if you don't want the final product to be spoiled. The story was written with the same type of prompts I'm looking for in the chat thread right now, in this case the character prompt was a robot ballerina, the environment a hairdresser, and the object a diamond.
*redacted link - working on this thing now!*
Hah, Nice. Its well set up, I don't really have any crits. The real cat face made me chuckle because it surprised me, maybe something to actually consider as an effect later.
Posts
Page 1/5
Added a beat here before the “and for what”
“Many a time you have stolen from me, mocked me in the eyes of humans and gods – and for what?”
I’d make the second paragraph use “so that” in both sentences for the rhythm/symmetry of it, instead of so that in one and only so in the other.
I think the below needs at least the single comma. It reads like a runon sentence without it. Further punctuation may not be a bad idea:
Sooner or later progress shall claim its victim and that is why you resist, is it not?
Sooner or later progress shall claim its victim, and that is why you resist, is it not?
Sooner or later progress shall claim its victim, and that is why you resist – is it not?
I think this could use a comma too
Sooner or later… sooner or later you shall become your own doom, Prometheus.
I like this as separate sentences but that’s just preference:
Your time is over Zeus. Admit it.
Page 2
“… tries thinking of the imminent change which his divine loot shall bring about,”
Loot has a very casual feel to it, it doesn’t fit with the otherwise formal and somewhat historical writing style. It has a connotation of something stolen and I think you’re doing that on purpose, but “divine loot” just sounds weird. I don't have a replacement to offer right now, though.
“It does not help. Zeus’ words still…”
I think this would be better with a period instead of a comma.
“A big guy, he can’t possibly overpower him,”
This confused me because of the art. This panel feels like I am in his head, but the words are coming from an external narrator. I like the panel, so I think I would shift the writing to his perspective, especially because it will help transition between the voice from nowhere to him speaking on page 3. Maybe something like “He’s big, too big to overpower…” and then the bottom left panel’s text changed to “… without fire from the gods.”
Page 4
Typo – married should have two r’s
“All those times” sounds funny to me. I would replace it with either “every time” or maybe “each time”. I think every does a better job of implying it happening many times, the way “all those” does, without sounding strange. (I think it’s the plurality of time that sounds odd).
Shoot, going to miss my bus!
Seriously though, thanks for the crits.
totp:
...can I have that?
tumblrrr
deviantart
Let's just say I took it up a notch... WARNING [SUPER NSFW]
Great stuff m3nace.
You could keep it going by having one cop say "put your arms down!" And the other one echo him "yeah! Put your arms down!"
Love it! Keep creating!
Comics
Anyways. Once in a while I feel like disconnecting my brain and doing a dumb comic amidst all the thinking and writing of all the other comics (sheesh, natcowrimo script is driving me insane with how dark it is). This is one of those times:
I have a few things I want to touch up on sometime, such as the awful handlettering some of the places.
I had a sequential art class where we had a lot of students with some serious artistic talent, but they couldn't tell a story with the images to save their soul. What they ended up with was a series of beautiful but disconnected panels that left the story illegible. It makes me incredibly happy that you are pursuing this. I just wanted you to know...
I also think you are a little inconsistent with the bold use of black, If you are going to take a lesson from ware, it may as well be that sometimes the design of the page is more important than the scene being detailed, or being in perspective. Like on this page:
You could probably get away with something like this:
That maybe a little too heavy, but its taking a bit more of the whole page into consideration. Now your eye follows the action to the more detailed panel in the middle, and the border less last panel gives the timing of the realization of awkwardness more breathing room. Up to you, in the end, how you want to solve that problem.
Its good though, mad good.
So anyways, today we gave each other constraints as to how we should make this simple template comic (guy is drawing comic, another guy walks in and sits down, guy1 passes his comic to guy2 and says "she's all yours" and leaves.) It's a really simple story to tell and obviously none of us did particularly interesting versions of it when we did the first draft without any constraints but it's funny to see how creative people get once they get certain obstructions.
A classmate challenged me to draw this story in 6 panels, only using widescreen panels, only using close ups of the characters' eyes and only in blue. The blue part was easy enough and was just a matter of a simple gradient map, however the closeups on the eyes was really tough, I mean, how much can you fit into a panel with only close ups of eyes?
So I decided to make the actions appear as reflections in the characters' eyes, yet I needed something to visually differentiate the two. In the beginning I thought of different shades of blue, but eventually landed on giving one character glasses, which would provide me with a wider meta-panel, if you could call it that.
To me it sort of works aesthetically but not as a comic. I'm initially not a fan of elaborately painted comics because they don't really animate that well to me, because of all the detail that sort of detours your reading experience. Secondly the widescreen format ended up being just an obstruction and not much of an element that benefited the storytelling in any interesting way, to me at least. Really it's almost too subtle to understand what's going on, like sometimes I depend on changes in light to show that a character is changing the angle of his head and so on. On the plus side I really see potential in working with a combination of close ups and reflections and hopefully I'll encounter a situation in which it'll be meaningful to use those elements to tell a story.
Yesterday we did Art Forgery101, we essentially just had to copy someone else's style, visual and storytelling wise. I chose Jim Flora who hasn't done any comic work but mainly did children's literature and jazz record covers and so I had to translate his whole shtick into a comics format as well which was the initial lure of choosing him, because I generally don't see that many comics that have this very playful energy to it.
What I mean to say is these are all blowing my mind and excellent.
Uncanny Magazine!
The Mad Writers Union
For once I'm glad it's weekend so I can do something in an original style again. Gonna do some more acrylics yay!
Welp, dusting off this thread so I don't clutter the doodle thread too much.
Here's what I've been doing in my spare time recently. Trying to go for a less polished look, all these drawings are first take, no sketches or thumbnails.
My Portfolio Site
My friend and I are working on an animated short. Here's the animatic we made in, like, two days or something. Don't watch it if you don't want the final product to be spoiled. The story was written with the same type of prompts I'm looking for in the chat thread right now, in this case the character prompt was a robot ballerina, the environment a hairdresser, and the object a diamond.
*redacted link - working on this thing now!*