Comic Fury Webcomic Hosting - Comic Comparison

As anyone paying attention to my thread for my comic would know, I've been working on trying to get it good enough for a relaunch. A bit scatterbrained, I'm doing something like ten different tasks on the webcomic at any given time. :P But it's always something comic-related, and today's no different.

But this time, it's something which I could actually use real feedback on, and it could actually help with the future of the comic. Basically, when I finish all the setting details that I've been working on, I'll actually need to start drawing the comic. And that's where this thread comes in.

The comic's already gone through multiple versions, and I have a prototype for my planned relaunch version as well. Here they are.

JPEG.
Original.
Current.
And the planned relaunch.

What I'm basically looking for is feedback on each of them: what you like, and what you dislike. I'm not just talking about the looks and the art, either. I'm talking about the script, the execution, the details present, everything.

For instance, obviously, the JPEG version is a piece of junk, highly pixelated and extremely messy, but it has one thing the others don't: it's desaturated. Since the comics are made in MSPaint, the color palette used is extremely bright and vibrant colors, saturated as much as possible, the purest, cleanest colors available. The JPEG version tones it down. Does the desaturation make some things look better, and if so, which things are they? Or is the whole look just not worth it?

The difference between the original and current for this comic isn't that large (so it's probably not the best example), but in some comics, I added a lot and cut out some other stuff, giving it a minor rewrite. Even so, you can still see a difference in the speech bubbles, their shape and location having morphed between the current and the original.

And the difference between the current and the planned relaunch is also pretty large. For starters, there are backgrounds, but do they help or harm the comic? Do they make things pop out (and if so, what things stand out more than they did when there wasn't a background?), or do they make things blend in (and if so, which things have faded away)? Is it a good or bad change? (For instance, Aria kinda blends into the background, but Argus's wings look a lot, well, brighter than they were.)

Beyond the art, do you like the new dialog, or was it better before? What is better, and what is worse about it?

(Speaking of dialog, I edited some of it from my original relaunch script. Some changes were made because I didn't like what I had written compared to the original which I did. Others were changed because I simply didn't have the space to write it all out. Here's what the script originally was:


Was there anything in the original script which you think I should have kept? If so, what, and how do you think I could incorporate it back in?)


Basically, I'm not so much asking for a critique on things which are consistent through all the versions. (Though that's not to say that kind of advice wouldn't be helpful; I'd love it. :P It's just not what I need.) I'm asking for what's good in each of the five versions, and what is bad in each of the versions, how each could be made better.

I'm basically hoping that with the feedback I receive, I can combine the best of all worlds for the final product when I do relaunch the comic, and use that advice to better the comic as a whole, continuing it with all the comics I make in the future.

:O You're back!! Welcome back Ranger!

When writing comics, the phrase "Less is more" is extremely important. You want to get your point across to the reader without overwhelming them with walls of text.
An episode of Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe interviewed some of the most prominent UK TV writers, and I recall that one of them said that if there's a way to condense dialogue down, then you should do it.
Basically you want to say things with as few words as possible.
(If you're interested, the episode in question can be watched here)

As for the art, you haven't really done much to improve it at all. You've added backgrounds and shifted a few things around, but I would say that looks worse.
You want your characters to stand out against the background, but as it is, they just get lost.
What you want is some contrast; that's one of the most important things about art. Play around with colours and try to draw the viewers eye to the characters. Ditch the bright colours, because it looks extremely tacky and unappealing.

I'd advise against using copy and paste characters, because you're crippling the visual side of your comic by removing any real possibility of body language, facial expressions or pretty much ANY benefit to doing a comic rather than writing a novel.
Drawing things consistently is a very hard thing to learn, I know, but if you're not using the visual side of your comic effectively, there is literally no point.

As for the speech bubbles, they get steadily worse, I have to say. Speech bubbles should be proper shapes, like ovals or rectangles. I don't really know how to explain it but I've got a good tutorial about speech bubble theory in my bookmarks, so I'll link it here.

I'm not trying to dissuade you from making your comic, or push you away from CF again, because it's great that you're back, but you've obviously got a great imagination that's been working very hard on creating your story, so you should have the best shot at making it that you can :P

Actually, MSPaint has a broader palette than just what shows under your drawing area. Double-click on a colour and you'll open a box where you can replace that colour by one from an extended palette, or even a custom one.
Colours aren't really the problem with MSPaint, but the toolkit is poor. You may want to consider downloading Paint.net or another free program that will give you access to more advanced tools.
Just be careful not to get carried away with them. Are you old enough to remember when Wordart objects were new? Terrible years, I tell you.

LET'S DO THIS

I shall be saying things as I notice them

Thank goodness you aren't using JPEGs. They just look awful with the art you've got. And the compression from MSPaint is not nice. If you're going to desaturate your stuff, desaturate it. In Paint.NET. I know you have it. It's not terribly hard to use: Adjustments > Hue/Saturation. Better yet, don't use the default colour palette and tweak the colours yourself.
Speech bubbles, next, because that's something that you've changed fairly significantly. Generally, comics read left to right, top to bottom, and that's the way they should sit. It's kind of hard to follow the conversation in panel 2 because it goes (as far as I can tell) top middle, bottom left, bottom right. The original layout was even worse. It read middle-left-right. The shaky-line speech bubbles really don't fit in with anything else, because everything else is so PRECISE. Spread out the text some more if you can, because speech bubble on top of speech bubble doesn't look good. You could also minimise the dialogue a bit, you could use character actions and expression to replace some words... lots of things you can do. Or another thing, you could do floating, outlined text (like I do in F&G). But you'd have to lower the amount of text.
You know my stance on copying and pasting ;p Avoid it with this medium. You'll be less inclined to move the camera around, to make your characters move, to make them alive. It's a lot harder to empathise with characters that never change. Of course, there's no point redrawing the exact same thing over and over again, and with a webcomic you shouldn't have to. Visually, things constantly change.
With your current art the backgrounds kind of clutter it. You might want to stick with white for now. But I do encourage backgrounds eventually because if you do them well they look better than white.
In the current one your characters are moving slightly between panels. GOOD :D

...that's all for now

Oh, boy. I've got a lot to respond to.


The below is to Frosty, who I spent all this time responding to, only to see two additional comments after I hit "Post!". :P I'll get to you, Matt and Dodum later. Have to leave for a while.

Copy-Pasting/Consistency, and Characters' Expressions:

Hmm, Another detail I probably shoulda mentioned was how the comic has an art upgrade. I can improve some of the things in the original four comics, but when I have a comic devoted to the art upgrade, I either have to scrap the comic (which I'd rather not do), or work around that the art has to still evolve. From that comic onward, I make better use of hand and facial expressions, moving them around in pretty much every panel to be more appropriate, but I would prefer not to use too much of that until after the art upgrade comic.

Granted, I don't think I have as much as I could after that, something which I'll probably be working on when I get to that point in the relaunch comics. (In hindsight, it mighta been a good idea to start from that comic and show upgrades, but the thought didn't occur to me at the time, and my thought is more or less, I'd rather waste time on the prototype for one comic and end up changing it than waste time on the prototype for SIX [actually, seven, since one of the comics is going to be split in half] comics and end up changing it.) Still, though, I was quite aware that I didn't have enough emotion, so I added it in.

Basically, when the comic's gotten into full-swing, I'll probably still be using copy-paste...but not exact. As in, I have a base model of the characters, copy that, and modify it into what it needs to be. (That made more sense in my head. :P)

Simply put (rambling spoilered)


Boiled down,
I'm going to try and make the characters more expressive with their emotions, and make it look as if they're not just copy-pasted panel-to-panel, while still maintaining the simplicity and consistency which copy-pasting offers. Which as I said before, is pretty much the best of both worlds. :P

Speech Bubbles: The idea behind shrinking them (I believe; I can't remember my original thought process, as it was some time ago) was to make them more compact, since with large speech bubbles, a perfect circle looks somewhat...bloated, wasteful, and not very space efficient. When it comes to small amounts of text, I'd say you're right, in that shrinking them down probably wasn't a good idea, but when it comes to a giant piece of text, I'm not so convinced. (Granted, you're pretty much saying that the large amount of text should be dropped in the first place. :P)

That said, I'll check out the tutorial and see if I can get anything useful out of it, since I am in agreement that my ability to create speech bubbles has actually gotten worse over the years. (I kinda sorta still feel my best were the ones I made in one of the Comic Battle series. Probably R, given Q's inconsistencies.)


Conciseness: This itself needs to be broken down.

-First and foremost, only certain characters are wordy. Argus is a rambling champion and it's a part of his character; his wordiness is something which actually becomes a plot point, so there's only so much I can do to tone it down while still delivering the character I want. (Though if you have any tips on how to make him seem to be more wordy than he actually is, those'd be nice tips to have; the best I've got is in the linked comic 5 above.)
All party leaders (Sanik, Kinas, and Argus) are more verbose than most of their subordinates, with possible exceptions in the form of M (who is intentionally wordy), Nathan (who just talks a lot), and Aria (who snarks a lot at Argus).

-But beyond that, if you never noticed in Werewolf Games?

(VERY long ramble spoilered)


-There's one more thing which makes wordiness a slight part of the comic, though: it's part of my charm, so to speak. As pointed out above, it's in my fundamental nature. People know me by it. People recognize that I'm wordy, and they mostly have grown accustomed to it. To the point where people who I linked to the comic said (paraphrased), "Yup. That's you, alright." :P They actually *liked* that it was wordy, recognizing it as part of my signature style.

Granted, it's still something you're completely right about:
Despite being part of the characters,
Despite being a huge part of who *I* am,
Despite being one of the things which actually attracts potential readers...

...It's still something which I'd love to cut back on if I could. Believe me, more than anyone else ever could, I value concision above all else. (It's like my personal holy grail. :P) I KNOW the KISS rule like the back of my hand; people have been saying it to me for over ten years by know. I KNOW that I should say things with fewer words. But knowing something and being able to do it are two different things. Obviously, right now in this reply, I'm not really trying to be concise (so please don't use it as an example by critiquing this post and pointing out what could be done better in it :P), but when I do try, I like to have people helping me get it better--it works, and it works WELL. (With a couple helpers, I've cut something down to a third of its original length--but that was with a couple of helpers.)

(Again, one of the main problems I have for the comic is that I'm doing it all alone--and it's simultaneously one of the most simple and complex tasks I've ever tackled. Better than anyone else, I know my strengths and weaknesses, but just because I know what I do well and what I can use work on doesn't mean I actually know HOW to get better. Note in the opening post for the thread, for instance, I was able to list key points which I could use opinions on: I had already made the observations, but clearly not being able to make any conclusion based off of what I had already found, since I simply didn't know.)

Techniques for cutting down words and implying stuff are things which I know I need, but don't exactly know what to do.

Miscellaneous Art Critique Comments: Was it all characters who looked like the got lost in the background, or only a couple specific ones? If so, which ones? (I noted that Aria blended in a lot, but was okay with it, seeing as how she's a ghost and all. I noted Sanik was pretty much invisible with the original color of the pathway, so had to modify it to make him more visible, so obviously he's probably not standing out as much as he should.)

And of course I know I need contrast, but telling me I need something doesn't actually do me any good if I don't know how the characters aren't getting the contrast. As I mentioned in the post, I thought that the characters had a lot of features which the backgrounds helped make pop out, and if you're seeing differently, I don't exactly have the ability to understand why without you explaining, since this is one thing I DON'T see (except in the case of Aria and Sanik, as mentioned above). From my eyes, I see the characters with more clarity with the background than without, with my eyes drawn to features such as their weapons, their pale skin, and Argus's wings which I had otherwise not paid much attention to.

As for bright colors: again, that's saturation. Something I also pointed out in the post; my characters are extremely saturated in all versions...except the JPEG version, which is desaturized by quite some bit. Yet while I can take guesses at what is better bright and what is better desaturated, it is just a guess and another opinion (like yours) would be helpful. What should be toned down, and what should remain bright? (For instance, one of the things I made sure to fix when I saw the desaturization of the characters was to resaturize their eyes, since bright eyes are part of their characters and should remain, but that's just my take on it.)

And then there's also the matter that the backgrounds I've made are quite dull--they're meant to be toned down, and if I desaturized my characters, wouldn't that only serve to make them blend in more, rather than less? How do I counter that? These are things I'm perfectly willing to do, and in fact have been TRYING to do, but quite simply put, I don't know HOW to.







Again, I'm quite thankful for everything you've said, and I'll do what I can with what you've said so far, but as it is, I kinda sorta need a little more advice than what you've given me. :P Telling me what to do (especially when nearly all of it is stuff I already know to do) doesn't do me nearly as much good as telling me HOW to do it. :P

Okay well I think you've misinterpreted me in some places.
Sequential art is very versatile and there's a LOT that stylization can do. If you take a look at Matt's art for Fun and Games for example, the characters all have very simple designs that are easy and fast to draw. If you struggle to draw characters consistently, you could try something like that.
It doesn't really matter if the finest details don't match up EXACTLY as the pages go by; so long as they're there, people should get the idea.
You've talked a lot about facial expressions and how you're doing body language, but your art style does NOT lend itself to that at all. Your characters are tiny and the difference is in the finest pixels, which requires people to look very closely to realize what they're feeling, and makes subtle expressions absolutely impossible.
And body language is also impossible. You can't show somebody acting sassy with a hand on their hip, you can't show them leaning away and you can't really show them fighting, which seems like it'd be very important for your story.

When I say to cut down on dialogue, I don't just mean on individual words. With each sentence each character says, consider how important it is to the story. If it isn't, then chop it out.
For example, in the final two panels, the comments from the other characters are completely unnecessary. You're trying to put across that both the characters are saying the exact same thing (which is weird and unbelievable since it's a huge paragraph and even brothers wouldn't be able to do that, but I'll get back to that), but the order in which the reader would read the dialogue skewers that, primarily those on the left.
What would be good would be for the leader of each group to be center frame in each of their respective panels, with a worms eye view to show their importance. The dialogue should be condensed to something like;
"Okay, we agreed to attack this dungeon with our rivals, but knowing them, we can’t wait until tomorrow! So we’ve come a day early through a secret entrance in order to get there first! Adventure Away!"
This is much easier to read and essentially gets the same message across. It might be missing some details from what you wrote, but any information lost could be resupplemented later in the story.
The second panel, with Kinas, could also have room a single comment from one of the other characters, because due to being on the right side of the page, the reader will read it after the speech.
So you could have "We need a better catchphrase" in a smaller speech bubble in the corner of the page. After that long speech, it might get a chuckle out of someone :P

You listed wordiness as something that would attract readers, but I can tell you right now, that that's completely untrue.
In the world of webcomics, very little will turn people off more than excessive wordiness, when there are literally thousands of other webcomics to choose from, readers have very little reason to stay around.
Obviously, art isn't your strong point, so what you really need to do is at least make the writing worth reading. If you can't do that, then you don't have anything to stand on, and there will no reason for anybody to read your comic

When making speech bubbles, you should start with the dialogue and draw the speech bubble afterwards. That way, you can maximize the efficiency of the space.
Not to mention that it's good to have a dead zone in speech bubbles between the border and the text. Makes it easier to read.

Anyway, I quickly sketched this out in about half an hour as an example of what you could do;


Of course I'm not saying this is the way you SHOULD do it, but it's an example of how your page could be turned into something that someone might want to read (although I didn't have time to do the whole thing).
It's harsh to say, but as it is now, you will get very few readers :P

Now, here's one problem. You shouldn't have to explain everything in this much text. Of course when someone didn't get everything as you meant, it's only natural to tell them what the idea was, and to a point it shows that you gave their opinion some thinking, which is good, but this amount of explanation is a bit much. Your readers won't be reading this thread. I don't say that your readers won't get you as it is, but that when you feel like they won't get it (feeling compelled to fill three screen's worth of explanations) then as much of it as possible should be made clear in the story itself. That's what the readers come to read.


And the art upgrade comic idea, please reconsider it. You have a fantasy stickman comic, and want to use the same device that OOTS used too. When you're sharing both genre and style, better not share details as well. You'll e sharing audiences as well; they'll know.

Thanks. My mind's a liiiiittle bit shot right now, due to a day which is a bit long, but I'll get back to you on that.



I think I have an idea, which is kinda related to how some things which I want to draw near the ending (and for The Descended's eventual sequels) wouldn't work with my current style, anyway. (Be back after I get coffee, refresh my mind, and get my head back here with an update.)

I will read your rendition of Brian's comic Mita XD

So I'm thinking I might have gotten a direction which is larger, but captures the feel of the sprite art while incorporating more detail and yet not losing my style.

This may not be finished, but imagine it as being the first panel of the comic, similar to the one Frosty posted, but with my own modifications. (Namely, Davos is there and Aria's in the air.) That is of course NOT the final picture for Argus. The lines are jagged, their connections are horrible, it lacks refinement, it's not blended at all, it has the wrong colors, etc. But it DOES show you the geography OF my plan, giving you an idea of how things will look.

And it's about the same size as the panels I had before, actually a bit smaller. (Which means I might expand it out back to 400, as three characters seems a little clustered and I'll still need shots of four.) Yet the characters are larger--yet still fairly simple. As I said, it's not the final version, but as it is, it only took me at most an hour to get this far--and it'd only require a little bit more to finish it up. So--at most--working from scratch would take two hours per character, with no guidelines.

Recording the guidelines (like, say, taking measurements of the character as he is right now) would reduce that time, probably cutting it to at MOST half an hour per character, per panel. I'm guessing significantly less, once I get practicing, but again, I'd rather not waste hours of my time if I'm barking up the wrong tree and this is not the direction I should be going in. :P So I was hoping for some feedback.

Well it sure looks better, but it's really not simple to give useful feedback when it always turns out what you're asking feedback on doesn't even look like the final version you have in mind.

Which is why I took it a couple steps further. After the above, I expanded it. Then I expanded it again. Then, I reduced it, making as much as I could thinner (might upload all three to show the process involved), and am taking measurements on things from that model--but as an experiment, I drew over the thinned version with a brush in paint, and this was what I came up with. Drawing something like that is probably what I'll be aiming to do each time.

Edit: The full progression was from this, which I started with (well, technically, before that, there was a third figure like the other two you see there which I overrode), to what I showed you last night and asked for an opinion on, to this, and then what I'm taking measurements from, and finally the image shown above.

So I decided to expand the above. This was how I started Aria. This is the same image I originally showed you, now with Aria in there as well. This was adding in the details, this thinned things out, and this is (for now) the final look.

(Why'd I give her the stereotypical ghost bottom? Well, first off, it immediately establishes that she's a ghost, as a show-don't-tell kind of thing.
Second off, she's hovering in the air--if her legs were drawn in proportion to the rest of her body, they'd go below the panel, and that'd leave no way to tell she's hovering in the air, as opposed to, say, just being really tall. And when I tried various shrinkings of her limbs, they all looked absolutely HORRIBLE, so I had to scrap that angle. I tried a split-ghost-look, where it started as the standard ghost look and branched out into two feet, but that looked just as bad. I suppose I coulda tried the inverse, starting normal and going to ghost, but after wasting nearly half an hour on the feet, I decided to go "Screw it, just get it over with and do something simple." Pragmatism at its finest. :P)


As the title says, if I'm not moving in the right direction with the art, it's best to tell me now, rather than a day or two later. Obviously, you don't have to go mega-harsh on my style (I cooked it up less than 24 hours ago; this is brand-new from me, never-before done), but if you've got a criticism, suggestion, whatever, I do kinda need to hear it as soon as possible. :P

Since people don't seem to be commenting on my new direction artwise, how about giving comments on the new direction script-wise? Currently, my plan for Comic1 is this:

ONE--
Aria: So...
Davos: Argus...

Argus: Hmm?

(NOTE: Aria and Davos can be done vice-versa; it doesn't really matter, but I think that positioning-wise, Aria should speak first.
As for why I'm having both speak, rather than just Aria, it's quite simple: to help show that they're collaborating, that they're building off of each other, that they've thought things through and actually talked to each other, coordinating their efforts to best call Argus out, best showing that it's not just spontaneous.)

TWO--
Aria: You formed this group promising adventure.
Davos: Leveling up and learning techniques!

Argus: I know my words. What's your issue?

(NOTE: Leveling up is Aria's goal, learning techniques is Davos's. Spoils of war was unnecessary, but the goals of Aria and Davos definitely are worth mentioning.
As for not doing the "Yeah, so?" comment? It'd fit for any other character, but it simply didn't seem like something Argus as I know him now would say.)

THREE--
Davos (annoyed): We haven't DONE any!
Aria (angry): That is our issue!

(NOTE: Aria and Davos can be swapped here, but considering the panel after this, I think they're best as they are here.)

FOUR--
Davos: Two weeks since you recruited me.
Aria: Months since I joined. Not. A. Single. Quest.

FIVE--
Argus (smiling): You doubt we're on one now?

SIX--
Davos (back to normal): You don't start many adventures heading towards a village, Argus.
Aria (still annoyed): It's normally the other way around.

SEVEN--
Argus (shrugging it off): We could always be going there to pillage it.

EIGHT--
(Argus is simply smirking, Davos is chuckling)
Aria (rolling her eyes): Riiiiiiiight. 'Cause that'd go over so well with your Lawful Good and Neutral Good subordinates...

(With the rest of current comic1 bumped to comic2, finishing it up, but I haven't *quite* worked that out, yet.)


What do you think? Better? Still needs work?

That script is MUCH better. It's easy to read and it gets the same point across with a fraction of the words. Well done :)

As for the art; huge improvement there. Your characters actually look like characters now and you have room to make them all distinguishable.
I'd recommend using anti-aliased lines, because your lines are really jagged. I assume that's for ease of colouring, but you should learn to take advantage of layers, especially since you're using a program with them now. I would think Paint.Net would have a merge layer tool somewhere so you'll still be able to do your think with them.
Also, use the thick lines for lines on the outside, and thin lines for those inside, like on faces.

A basic rule of cinematics in comics is that all you really need is an establishing shot, after which you don't really need to show all the characters in one panel, just those that are relevant for that panel.

At this time, I've been using brushes in Paint 7 (since they always use antialiasing, in contrast with original Paint which never had antialiasing), simply 'cause it's quicker without me having learned how to do it in Paint.NET, to achieve the antialiasing. (After all, why bother if I'm going to scrap the art style and need to take another direction?) Butyeah, it was basically for ease of coloring. Now that I know I'm going in the right direction, I can afford to play around with the basics I've set out. (It'll require a few tutorials on Paint.NET, and a little playing around, but I think I can get the hang of it in a few days or so.)

Thanks for the tip on outside/inside lines as well; I never could get the hang of that. And, yeah. For the characters, I'm planning on just having the speakers in the panel. (Which means the first two have all three, and the last panel has all three, but 3, 4, and 6 are going to just be Davos and Aria, while 5 and 7 are just Argus.)

I'll see if I can put together a comic; I've shown the basic art, I've shown the planned script, but I'll be needing to put them together, and see if they work the way I'm hoping they will.

layers
use layers for colouring

Top layer, anti-aliased lineart
Bottom layer, colours


also the new art style = good

e: If you have any specific questions about PDN just ask, I use it for many things

Thanks, Matt. That advice is already being put to good use. For the first panel of the first comic, I'm half-way through drawing Aria (having already drawn Argus) using the technique you described. (Ironically enough, I remember having actually used this before, when I had access to a tablet and photoshop, but wouldn't have thought to do it that way without you essentially re-teaching me that method.)

Considering it's taking me a little more time than I was hoping it'd take, though, for future panels, I'm probably going to take a *slight* shortcut: I'll use the same "color" images which are in the first panel, drawing over them in the "brush" later.

Less work for me, and will add consistency, without giving you a noticeable copy-and-paste (since the color layer will eventually end up being completely invisible). Feels kinda cheap, but I don't have the time to re-do it every single time, especially when it's just being used for the colors and basic shape.

well actually, you could use the bucket tool to colour:
duplicate your lineart layer and fill the bottom one with colours - use a high tolerance on the bucket tool (it's the slider up the top)
if that doesn't work, disable anti-aliasing (it's the little zig-zag button when you have paint brush selected), draw the thing normally, duplicate it, fill the bottom, and feather it.