A bit of post-mortem feedback, please?

Hello!

I began making a webcomic, Kara the Assassin (mirror) in the summer 2009, and now I've almost finished the first "volume" of 50 comics. Just one more comic to go! (Yes, I know, weekly update plan sort of failed. Meh.) It's a fantasy/dark humour comic, and due to graphic content (consisting of badly drawn blood textures and some not particularly interesting naughty bits), might not be suitable for people under ~15-16 years.

I posted about this comic back when I started and had a couple of comics done, just to see if I was on the right track. Now, I'd like to know if I actually got on the right track.

Since then, I haven't received that much good feedback aside "OK, that was funny" or "these fonts suck" (fix'd) or "I can't really read this" (I never received any details, so this was harder to fix.)

My own opinion? I think I improved a lot since the very first comics. I developed some of my drawing techniques. The latter comics look a lot better than the first ones. However, some of the writing doesn't really seem to get my point across. I'm not sure if I managed to make the characters interesting enough, which is probably pretty hard anyway in a comic that's mostly confined to one-page gags.

I'll do the last comic of this volume sometime around this weekend. But before I continue the comic properly some time next spring, I'd like to revise some of the old comics. Some have pretty obvious artistic gaffes, and many panels probably need to be redrawn.

So, this would be a perfect time for all awesome helpful people to give some additional guidance on what needs to be fixed in the previous comics, and what I'd probably need to keep in mind in the future.

I think the biggest questions in my mind are about the writing. Am I getting my ideas through? Are the characters interesting and do they behave in an interesting manner? Would this comic make people curious about the world and the people in it, and, well, would it keep them reading the comic? And, um, the big problem - I'm a guy, writing a comic with a female protagonist - I think I've made her somewhat believable, but did I succeed?

Any feedback is appreciated!

Thank you for comments! Exactly the kind of feedback I was looking for!

abrenner said:

As for being a guy and writing a gal, don't worry. Just write her as you would write a male lead: Relatable (or at least amusing,) with an interesting backstory, and masculine/feminine behavior in proportion to what you would expect from someone pursuing an assassin lifestyle. ;]

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Yeah, I was asking about this, because last week, I had a discussion about this on another site. I said my usual approach to this is that the broad patterns of behaviour are probably the same and the little differing details aren't that hard to imagine. I knew this was a sensible approach, I just wasn't sure if it was working in practice. I hope it is!

abrenner said:

but they're obscured the whole way through by blotchy toning. I suppose you're going for that newspaper halftone look - or, heck, maybe you're doing the artwork traditionally and using actual screentone! - but it makes for a very busy-looking page. Sometimes the background texture blends in with the foreground texture, making it hard to tell if we should be looking at a wall, or what's happening in front of it.

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The toning definitely needs some work. Some of the obvious gaffes were in this comic (Afterwards I just told myself "dammit, if the backdrop 3D rendering sucks, adding a ton of shading isn't going to save it") and the first panel here (and I told myself "ummmm... a bit of increased density wouldn't hurt").

So I guess I need to work a little bit on the consistency of how the rasters are used in the foreground and background (my current method is something like "just keep adding them until they look cool", which sometimes produces things that don't look too cool ), make sure the raster density is high enough and doesn't obscure the details too much.

I'm definitely going consciously for the newspaper halftone look. I don't want the comic to look too crisp and clean-drawn, but I don't want it to be entirely unreadable either.

And for the record, the screentones are applied digitally (basically, rasters are plopped on one layer in Multiply mode and added through a layer mask). I guess the ones that have failed worst are the ones where I tried to use the digital techniques "wrong"; screentoned images should be reproducible in black and white and grey shades are wrong. In the most recent two comics, I've also used Halftone Laboratory, but my experiments with this thing are still underway.

abrenner said:

That busy effect is especially noticeable in this strip, which also showcases the other element making some pages look too busy: Word balloons. Lots and lots and lots of word balloons.

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I guess one of the problems in writing is that sometimes I've come up with the script and later thought "dang, this really should have been split to two pages after all." I guess the big flaw is that I've usually only kept the eye on the number of panels when writing the script, and not really considered the number of bubbles at all. Good point, there!

I've usually tried to avoid blatant textwalling, but even that has sometimes failed. I guess I need to be wary of assault by zillion little bubbles, too.

abrenner said:

I think your panel layouts could use a little work.

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Duly noted! The layout is a bit painful issue because I've just used GIMP for laying out the pages, and GIMP is just a graphics app and isn't really meant for doing DTP and page layouts in any shape or form. If the layout ends up being horrible, I'd usually need to just sigh and start over, and I've not had the time and energy to do that all the time. I know, I know, blaming my tools is not a good excuse and I could do it right...

But then again, I'm not sure if other apps I have at my disposal are much better either, so I guess I just need to work harder, dammit. I have sort of a principle that all tools I use are open source and readily available in all platforms I have at hand. I've seen people evaluate some commercial comic layout tools, sigh, and go back to Photoshop, so I don't hold my hopes too high for open source either. I'll definitely experiment with other applications in the following volumes and try replicating the style with other tools (I really need to see how far Scribus has gone since I last used it, for example).

Once again, thanks for feedback

elae said:

Definitely don't blame GIMP! Artists do good things with it. You just need to take a step back and evaluate the pages. Compare them to finished pages by other artists that you want to be as good as. See what they do differently. Do some tutorials.

I strongly recommend doing a basic layout of your pages with stick figures before you start working on the art. This will let you know if the layout is confusing, and if it's going to be overly wordy.

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Ah, maybe I was unclear. I love GIMP for actually drawing the images; I currently sketch and ink in MyPaint and add the rasters and other stuff in GIMP.

What I usually do is that I draw the panels separately. I end up with a bunch of 2000x2000 bitmaps. When I lay them out, I basically drop these panels in GIMP as layers, then resize and crop them, add bubbles and the borders as separate layers. The final layout takes form when I put those pics on the page. The advantage of having the panels separate is that I can change the layout easier. (For example, the very first comic used to have a slightly broken layout, but I fixed it later.) The disadvantage is that if I need to rescale some panel, I need to basically rescale and crop the image again, and in worst case every other panel around it.

It basically gets my job done, and fairly conveniently too, but if I decide that I'm not happy with the end results, I need to take more steps to correct the mistake.

I should publish the video I made of this process some day...

If I remember right, Scribus lets me basically draw a vector rectangle/polygon box for the panel, and make that a "viewport" that shows a part of the image. If so, that might be a bit more sensible solution: I could just modify the box and not touch the image data.

And yes, I think a part of the problem in these comics is that I leave the actual layout work at the last minute. I should do some more preliminary work with the sketches.

Bicyclefish said:

Though you don't want it "too crisp and clean", on some pages it looks as though there's a snowstorm. In my opinion, you've gone too far in the other direction, and it's messy.

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Yup, this is definitely going to be something I'll focus on improving in the future. Part of it is that the grit will hide the flaws and look cooler, but I guess sometimes it just exposes the flaws.