You're too kind! I appreciate you checking out my work, and I'm happy to hear that certain aspects of the story resonate with you on a personal level.

Just to be clear, I didn't expect a review for both Here I Lie Awake AND Princess Chroma. You're welcome to read Princess Chroma at your leisure if you really, really want to, but it's over 500 pages and you already have your hands full with review requests, so please feel free to skip to the next person waiting.

I got two longform comics, a magical girl fantasy and a psychological horror, if you're into either of those genres. I know they're a bit long, so feel free to skip over 'em if they don't interest you.

The two things that pop into mind for me with your art is Crayon Shin Chan and just, like, MS Paint in general.

I made some lemon meringue pie to have for Pi Day tomorrow. No idea how it'll taste yet, but it looks pretty good for a first attempt.

I try to stick with just one suggestion in this thread, and with particularly long comics, it can be a challenge deciding on what feedback would be most useful. But, after mulling it over, I think what you could stand to work on is your exposition delivery. Specifically, you do tend to repeat known information a lot. The biggest example is the main character angsting over being mistreated for being a "monster." Now, the angst is understandable, but when the characters keep saying the same things over and over, it starts to get stale. That particular plot element is just one example. There are a few things that you tend to repeat maybe a bit more often than you need to. The story, despite how long it is, is actually a quick read and fairly straightforward. You can probably hold some confidence that readers remember the important bits, so don't spend as much time rehashing it unless you have something new to build on.

Sorry for the wait. Busy workweek.

For long comics like this, I like using the infinite scroll feature to cut back on loading times and one thing that stood out to me while scrolling through was your chapter covers. It's kind of cool seeing all these different weird and spooky demons, and even cooler when we unexpectedly get to see some of them in action. It's cool to see what each of them is capable of, as well as what they bring to the party once they've been captured. Actually kind of makes me wonder if the demon king himself could be captured, but I'm guessing it wouldn't be that easy. Either way, every time a new arc opens, there is a fun little feeling of "ooh, what we gonna get this time?" It's also interesting seeing the dynamic change between the demons and the main characters once they've been captured, going from "I am here to specifically kill you and also generally screw you in particular" to "welp, guess I gotta heal/protect your sorry butt now, let's do this." It's certainly much more engaging than it would have been if the demons were merely killed or sent back to Hell after the fight instead.

Leaving Facebook about five years back was one of the best choices I ever made for myself. I had exactly two people on my friends list I didn't see regularly IRL that I actually talked to, so I made a Discord server for us to chat in and said adios to everything else. I'm in a few webcomic-centric Discord servers now, but that's it. I still view social media sites, but strictly as a lurker. If it weren't for webcomics, I'd have practically no online presence at all.

But, y'see, I actually *enjoy* the webcomic thing. Which is more than I could ever say about FB.

I find the characters to be very compelling in how they make mistakes and then work as a group to fix them. The main four are all well-developed and have a lot of likeablity, but they're also, to varying degrees, flawed people, and their vices and screwups, which come from an understandable place due to some of their personal past and/or issues, are not glossed over, but they are handled in a surprisingly gentle way. For example, I kind of expected Daniel's rather poor reaction to would lead to one of my least-favorite writing tropes, the Miscommunication Snarl, where nobody listens and everybody jumps to the wrong conclusion. The way you did handle it makes much for sense for the characters and served to actually build their friendships by overcoming the problem together. The same is true earlier when . Even though he's in the wrong, his friends are reasonably understanding, if justifiably stern about him knocking it off, and everyone comes out a better person for it in the end. I like that you have such a solid grasp on who these characters are and how they realistically deal with problems, even if the realistic answer sometimes is "really poorly, if I'm being honest."

Oof. This comic is a brass-knuckle noogie straight to my soul. Which, I think, is actually kind of the point. Some people just get kicked around north to south by life and this comic isn't going to sugarcoat that. Our main character is simultaneously deeply disillusioned and worryingly manic and it can be funny, ironic, and quirky, but mostly it's just relentlessly raw. The tongue-in-cheek nature of the writing and few heartfelt moments do little to cover that up and the amount of escapism is exactly zero. Maybe less than zero. Despite the exaggeration, the feelings and problems conveyed come from a real place and portray some ugly things that a lot of people can relate to--and probably wish they didn't.

I can basically sum up my experience reading this as "Thanks, I hate it." For the readers out there craving that kind of satire, your comic delivers the goods for sure.

I gotta hand it to you, the dialog really does an excellent job of selling what the players and DM are feeling (most of which is a frankly concerning amount of exasperation). If I'm being honest, I didn't really pay much attention to the visuals, though I do really appreciate that everyone has a signature color for their dialog so that it's very easy to see who's talking. So far, I'd say I enjoy the DM the most because they're just so sarcastic and yet surprisingly chill, complaining about Tony's character being way too OP while having loads of fun yanking his chain and more than willing to roll with the insanity even when the other players have just about had it. The players all have their moments of snark and brilliance too, but no matter who's rolling, the DM always interacts with them in fun ways (particularly all the backtalk regarding Stane's death).

"Where do you usually brainstorm?"

Yes.

Indeed, it is still developing, but I do quite like the world concept being centered around music. The vaporwave desert got a bit of a chuckle out of me. It's also a surprisingly clever idea for a desert name, since it calls to mind the visible heatwaves you see in deserts, but I'm getting off-track at this point. At any rate, it seems the setting is meant to be more bizarre and spoofy, rather than being something particularly serious, so the mix of more fundamental/classic music terminology with modern musical styles and trends fits the tone pretty well, and there's a lot of potential theming I can see this comic building on in the future while still maintaining a deeply irreverent skew.

See, the thing about fanworks is that you start out already having something original fiction has to work hard to garner--the audience's emotional investment. They already love the setting/characters and they're eager for more because they have made some kind of emotional connection with it, so you can pull people in faster with fanworks (it is not a guarantee, however). Original fiction doesn't have that advantage. It's your job to get the audience's attention and care about what you're writing. But how to do it?

That's the good part, actually--you have a lot of options. You're in total creative control. Fanworks, for all their advantage of recognizability, can be limited in scope unless you want to risk straying too far from the source material (imagine an Avatar-centric comic with only OCs set in space or a PMD comic with only fakemon--a lot of fans would turn their noses up at that). I've come up against that myself in a fancomic I did. I got readers who disagreed with how I reinterpreted a minor character who basically existed as just a one-note joke in the source material. Needless to say, I don't get people making comments like that about my original fiction characters even if they have an out-of-character moment.

There is also the fact that nonfans might avoid giving fanworks a chance in the first place no matter how original and accessible the work is, because they expect it to only make sense to fans ("Ech...this is a Pikmin comic? Pass. I've never played it so it's not for me"...but little did the reader know this adaptation is actually written as a hard sci-fi survival log and the reader is a hard sci-fi junkie who missed out!).

There are advantages and disadvantages to both, is what I'm saying. Don't be envious if a fanwork is more popular than your original fiction. Just focus on what you're doing. Or make fanworks yourself, if you so desire.

I tried cooking with saffron for the first time yesterday. Turns out everyone in the house likes saffron...except me.

Tasted and smelled like iron filings. Just...what the heck.

Most comics in this thread have been reviwed by me before, so no, you're not disqualified but it's suprising how many people come back for my pleb opinions, haha.

Your comic already has beautiful artwork with a creative, intellectual framing device, but I really prefer the writing direction the last two chapters have taken over the previous ones. The latter half of chapter one in particular was way too reliant on text to tell the story and had too much text overall, at least in my opinion. The Sky and Sea chapter was much more succint and poetic, and it integrated visuals and lettering smoothly, but the visuals felt like more of a backdrop, something pretty to look at while the words did all the work telling the actual story. I feel the storytelling approach of the last couple chapters feels the most natural and immersive, integrating the lush scenery with the events in real time with some sense of urgency, rather than serving as merely (admittedly lovely) imagery. I realize this sort of "criticism" isn't so much telling you what I think you need to improve on so much as me saying what I think you're currently doing right. But even so, I think it can sometimes be helpful to have someone say something like, "Hey, I like that you're doing it this way now instead of how you used to do it."

Buuut I guess I should give you some kind of token suggestion. Maybe consider changing the color of the red text on your site? The green reads fine against the black background, especially the lighter green, but not so much the red. Maybe use a lighter tone of the same hue to raise the contrast a bit.

You didn't specify which comic you wanted me to look at, so I went with the G-rated option. The art style is, well, lacking polish. Looks like you use things like the elliptical tool and such to make the shapes and then hand-draw things like limbs and faces, so the quality of the linework tends to be inconsistent. I feel like the characters might have a softer, more cohesive look if you just drew it all yourself and avoided using so many shape tools. The shapes might not be as perfect, but the overall style will gel together a bit more. You also might want to avoid putting too many details behind where the faces will be. For characters like, say, the cereal box, the face gets a bit lost because there's all this other stuff going on in the same spot.

You're really good at illustrating machines and scenery. The machines have a real sense of heft and are constructed well, and the backgrounds have some very solid perspective and a wonderful sense of scale. The especially massive structures are quite striking. You frame them in the panels in such a way that the audience can really appreciate the way they loom over everything else, giving whatever the giant thing is a sort of vaguely powerful, threatening aura. Even though the comic is primarily in black and white, those environmental shots have a sense of atmosphere to them. It's hard for me to describe exactly how, but something you're doing is clearly working.

Humor is subjective, I'm going to acknowledge that right off the bat. And I know daily webcomics are an incredibly demanding workload, so you have to keep things simple to keep that schedule consistent and feasible. That's perfectly fine, but you should really consider taking it easy on the fourth wall jokes, especially the ones that pretty much just serve as "the writer/artist is lazy" punchlines. Once in a while, it can be funny, but pointing out that something is lazily done or having the characters complain about how random the writing is doesn't actually make those things better by simply having pointed them out. At some point, self-deprecation starts to ring hollow if you just keep doing the same thing. Again, I know daily comics are hard. Maybe it would be a good idea for you to slow down the updates a little bit so you can take your time coming up with some truly creative gags. You have a fairly weird and quirky "world" where your characters seem to be able to do and encounter almost anything, so lean into that creativity more instead of poking fun at yourself so much.

It seems like you have a bit of trouble with perspective sometimes with your backgrounds. I can tell you're trying, but something still looks a bit off, especially in some of your indoor/architecture-heavy pages. The characters aren't quite positioned naturally with their environment sometimes, or something about the way it's drawn looks a bit skewed, like it's being filmed in a wide-angle lens. The outdoor scenes tend to look more proportional, so it's probably a matter of manmade objects being kinda hard to draw (something I also struggle with). All I can really suggest is to keep practicing, maybe use more references to help you along. You have a starting grasp of the whole thing and you do put effort into giving those backgrounds interesting details. They are still pleasing enough to look at, they're just a wee bit off. It just needs a little more polish and then you'll be able to create backgrounds with a very convincing sense of depth and scale.

I have a few standout moments.

Writing-wise:

A friend suggested I apply for Spiderforest. I applied. I got rejected. I don't know what exactly the reason was, but my understanding is it was because of the writing, not the art. I took a step back to reconsider my entire process and decided it was time to start actually writing scripts instead of making it up as I go, as well as simply cutting out elements that just weren't working out and focusing on what *did* work more.

I still have some improvement to do, but scripting has definitely resulted in much cleaner writing overall, even if I don't always strictly adhere to the script. Just having that direction/leash has made a big difference. I probably won't re-apply to Spiderforest mainly because it seems like that community is more geared toward people who want to work in art professionally, while I'm strictly a hobby artist, but that rejection did force me to look at my work in a way I hadn't been able to before.

Art-wise:

Taking figure drawing. I learned a lot in that class. Again, I could always improve, but I learned so much from drawing live models and I am convinced my art would be much worse today if I hadn't taken that class. Additionally, there was an expressions tutorial I saw from the creator of Lackadaisy Cats that made me completely rethink how I approached drawing faces. I still keep a lot of that advice in mind when I'm drawing expressions.