Looking For Feedback...

[AMPM]

So, I showed a couple of clocks my new comic, and I got a lot of feed back on it, and as I'm going to be doing a total re-draw of the full 22 page long beast, I really want to get as much feedback as possible, and because one of the clocks I spoke to encouraged me to post it online, I thought I would, and hope that some of you take the time to give it a look and then let me know what you think of it: Good, hopefully, or Bad, preferably, because I really do want to hammer out as many kinks or have options illuminated to me before I go onto another draft.

http://inthenoweventually.thecomicseries.com/comics/1/

[CandleJack]

So, I showed a couple of clocks my new comic, and I got a lot of feed back on it, and as I'm going to be doing a total re-draw of the full 22 page long beast, I really want to get as much feedback as possible, and because one of the clocks I spoke to encouraged me to post it online, I thought I would, and hope that some of you take the time to give it a look and then let me know what you think of it: Good, hopefully, or Bad, preferably, because I really do want to hammer out as many kinks or have options illuminated to me before I go onto another draft.

http://inthenoweventually.thecomicseries.com/comics/1/

It is difficult to read the flat black and white make it hard. it has a style about it. only time will tell. i tried running a webcomic for the CC years and years back Called Clock Comix it was a fairly well built website and i was doing it with another clock. it was gonna be mainly updated 2 days a week. and 2 days at random by anyone who wanted to submit a comic. It didn't take off sadly. Understand that a web comic is a lot of hard work with very little initial pay off. Rarely does a web comic get popular all at once and start generating revenue.

a few tips.
- it needs to be smooth and easy to read
- a clear direction and relatable humor  
- artwork isn't always terribly important but contrast in the artwork (shades of black white grey) don't be lazy!
- listen to your readers. don't let them hold you hostage but take what they have to say and take it into consideration.

-

[AMPM]

Well what do you mean by "flat black and white"? besides that I understand and agree with everything you said

[CandleJack]

Well what do you mean by "flat black and white"? besides that I understand and agree with everything you said

the fact that it looks like it was ink screened black on white makes it very difficult to read and see whats doing on. consider using shading and going gray scale. it almost looks like a mess of scribbles and blobs, unless you look at it really close.

[VCRClock]

Cool. I like the style, the rough edges, and your interesting, lively choice of perspective on a lot of the panels. There's probably some other good stuff I'm not even thinking about right now.

If I were to choose one suggestion to make, without really being able to demonstrate how to implement it in your work, it would be this: in panels where there's a lot going on, consider using value to separate the background from the figures in the foreground. I think of this because I've been reading a lot of black and white Krazy Kat strips lately, and noticing that George Herriman is really good at doing that (among other things). Here's one example, though by no means is that the only or best example of what I'm talking about. I'm tired ok

[CandleJack]

Cool. I like the style, the rough edges, and your interesting, lively choice of perspective on a lot of the panels. There's probably some other good stuff I'm not even thinking about right now.

If I were to choose one suggestion to make, without really being able to demonstrate how to implement it in your work, it would be this: in panels where there's a lot going on, consider using value to separate the background from the figures in the foreground. I think of this because I've been reading a lot of black and white Krazy Kat strips lately, and noticing that George Herriman is really good at doing that (among other things). Here's one example, though by no means is that the only or best example of what I'm talking about. I'm tired ok

see his example actually gives you another option if you open up the size of your cells and make it less cluttered would help a lot too.

[AMPM]

Yeah, I've actually been told it looks like my characters aren't in the environments but floating in front of them, but they didn't have anyway of solving that either, necessarily. And yeah I'm not quite sure, looking at this krazy kat comic, which I always forget exists but then I see it and I'm like, wow this is amazing, but yeah, I don't really see what he's doing there to make his backgrounds backgroundy besides be a better artist than me, I got no specifics.

[AMPM]

see his example actually gives you another option if you open up the size of your cells and make it less cluttered would help a lot too.

Yeah in the redraw I hope to really make good use of my panels and use of word balloons, i'm gonna be drawing on larger paper so that should help.

[CandleJack]

Yeah in the redraw I hope to really make good use of my panels and use of word balloons, i'm gonna be drawing on larger paper so that should help.

open less cluttered frame will do a world of difference your style on the eyes is good i see them looking where they should.

[VCRClock]

I don't even mean to draw attention to his draftsmanship. He's got a totally different style going on there.

I guess the simplest example of using value to separate figure and ground is in panels 5, 6 and 7. It's pitch dark and stuff so he can get away with using solid black for the house. Key objects like the barrel, the window and the characters are mostly white. They stand out, so they're easy to focus on. But even if you look at the left side of the panel where Offisa Pupp is peeking around the corner... it's night, so there's gotta be a dark sky, and it can't be black, or it'd blend in with the house. The lines are kind of busy, though, and Pupp stands out better on that field of pure white surrounding him than he would if that darkness were surrounding or bisecting him.
In panels 8-9, I think the dark wainscoting between the wall in the floor is a big deal. In 8, it's a point of contrast for the white jacket and white wall. If it were white, too, it might just look like skinny black pen lines extending from the jacket. The skinny lines on the floor also help us to feel like the floor is "there", but really any texture would have worked. Note that he avoids distraction by not extending the wainscoting across the panel (because we're not really supposed to be looking at it) or causing visual confusion by connecting the dark wainscoting to the dark mousetrap. When Krazy takes off his jacket in panel 9, you can actually see that the wainscoting is shaded lighter as it gets closer to Krazy's body, for the same reason.
In the lower left of panel 10, he shades in the sides of the path just enough to provide some contrast and show you what kind of terrain it is, but not so much that it looks busy. The shading and even the line marking the left side of the path don't touch the outline of Pupp; they're not connected to each other, after all. And then there are the lines in the sky near the trees to provide just enough contrast to show that there is a sky and that the trees are not part of it.

TL;DR if you took all the shading lines out of Krazy Kat, or shaded it exactly as it might appear to a camera, it'd be flatter and less readable.

It's a technique thang, of course, and there are probably different ways of applying the same ideas. Just something to think about. I'm not telling you to be Herriman, and neither do I mean to suggest that I have any mastery of this skill.

[AMPM]

Yeah, that was most certainly not tldr, those are really interesting points, and something I should remember when doing my panels, like you, I doubt I could reach that level of page design and panel layout but your points are really something good to think about.

I'm kind of taking my cues from Hate magazine's buddy bradley stores in a lot of ways, i think particularly in the backgrounds. And a lot of other things, but let's not point out how I'm a rip off artist.

[Slurpee]

to be brutally honest, and I'm not trying to be a dick, here, but I almost stopped around the third panel of the first page, and probably would have if this was just something I stumbled across. your first major roadblock is going to be the lack of a hook.

don't get me wrong, once I read through it, I was a invested in ryland, and I like what you did, altogether, but I only read that far because you're a fellow clock and you're looking for feedback.

your first impression is critical. make an effort to get the reader curious about ryland; who he is and his situation. the alarm going off at 2 PM and still surprising and infuriating him is a great detail, but it's also something I didn't even notice in my first read. playing with your layouts and having some fun drawing attention to subtleties like that could go a long way.

the first page in particular also suffers from tell-not-show. it's not too terrible that he talks out loud to himself, but he does it extensively and in a way that feels rushed and at the expense of naturalistic timing. be aware of your medium- comics can use the spacing of illustrations to express the passage of time, amongst other things.

alan bursting in to find ryland pretending to practice should be funny and surprising but instead it was more confusing, and the punchline didn't hit as hard as it could have.
for one, so much happens in the first page so quickly that it's not immediately clear what the passage of time is like from one panel to the next, so alan's bursting in, and the speed at which ryland presumably fixed himself up, lose a lot of potential impact.
for another, the geography of what you're depicting is not immediately clear- in panel 2 on page 2, we're suddenly looking at a door, but it's not immediately clear where this door is in relation to anything we've seen before.

the left side of the door also forms a tangent line with the left side of the panel- it's actually not even immediately clear that panel 2 is a separate panel, making alan's sudden entry through the door in panel 3 feel a little bizarre and unclear.

much of the detail work is also changed between panel 2 and 3 on page 2. if you're illustrating an action taking place at a single location, consistency in depicting that location drives the impact the action- the third panel is wider, shifted slightly to the left, and the poster, floor molding, and mouse hole have all disappeared. it's commendable that you dynamically reposition the camera and redraw the backgrounds, but letting it be at the expense of visual continuity is to the comic's detriment-the reader is going to need some visual landmarks to properly follow the action.


the style is OK. the pages are a little large, but the stark hand-drawn style has its merits. there's something of the underground comix spirit in there, a fledgling of rebellion and flippancy toward traditional storytelling mores.

edit: apparently I took more than an hour to write this post for some reason and consequently I didn't read the rest of the thread before posting it.

[AMPM]

Honestly Slurpee, you were the guy who I was hoping would respond to this, and you didn't disappoint, thank you so much for taking the time to look through it.

You telling me that I lack a hook is something I really needed to hear because I do think that is really goddamn important and it's something I'll give a lot of thought to. If you have any ideas as to make what Ryland is to you on page 22 readily available to the readers on page 1, let me hear it as soon as you do, because at this moment I'm drawing a blank, and I wanted to start redrawing this in a few days, and now that is going to be a nagging problem I'll want to fix, ha ha.



the geometry of the room, I suppose, is a problem of not watching the details enough. But maybe in mspaint you could demonstrate how I could really make the Alan bursting in bit work, because as I doodle, I'm also just not feeling it, though that again, thank you so much, these are really fucking good critiques, anything else like this, and I do mean anything, is greatly appreciated.

I really wanted you to tell me what you thought because I remember back in the day you had said that reading some stuff from Lamezone made you feel like how you felt being a fourteen year old going on walks and trying to figure stuff out, and I could really relate to that, I felt like I knew what you meant, and that always stuck with me, and yeah.

[miracle fruit]

hey ampm

[AMPM]

just read the comic

[miracle fruit]

i did i liked it!!!

i agree it needs a lil more contrast maybe even some colour??? idunno fuck all about comics dont ask me

[BilliardBall10]

So, I showed a couple of clocks my new comic, and I got a lot of feed back on it, and as I'm going to be doing a total re-draw of the full 22 page long beast, I really want to get as much feedback as possible, and because one of the clocks I spoke to encouraged me to post it online, I thought I would, and hope that some of you take the time to give it a look and then let me know what you think of it: Good, hopefully, or Bad, preferably, because I really do want to hammer out as many kinks or have options illuminated to me before I go onto another draft.

http://inthenoweventually.thecomicseries.com/comics/1/

it is...surprisingly good.

i like the idea, the premise of a young kid who dreams to be a rock star, or a guitar expert, at the very least,
and he chills by smoking weed,a nd playing videogames.

the design is good, despite the black and white, and i must say, the art style reminds me off, a young calvin and hobbes.
with weed and nudity in it.

also, no offence but why do you show him with his dick all the time?
tho, the last panel, where you draw him with his backbones being visible, and his angry look while alan calls him.
nice anatomy for a cartoony character, and nice and clean expressions.

i like this comic. do more, and try to add more to the storyline.
your drawings are GOOD, but the story needs more.

It is difficult to read the flat black and white make it hard. it has a style about it. only time will tell. i tried running a webcomic for the CC years and years back Called Clock Comix it was a fairly well built website and i was doing it with another clock. it was gonna be mainly updated 2 days a week. and 2 days at random by anyone who wanted to submit a comic. It didn't take off sadly. Understand that a web comic is a lot of hard work with very little initial pay off. Rarely does a web comic get popular all at once and start generating revenue.

good tips/advice, man!

also: could you show me THE CC WEBCOMIC that you did?
link me to this clock comix, dude!

ALSO: i recall action clock doing the ''lunch box'' a great comic about life, agents, and talking fruits.
-it also had indiana jones vs nazies-
i miss action-clock.

[AMPM]

Thanks Billiard, that really means a lot that you'd say that!

[Slurpee]

Honestly Slurpee, you were the guy who I was hoping would respond to this, and you didn't disappoint, thank you so much for taking the time to look through it.

you flatter me.

I'm probably not the best person to be doing this, honestly, because I'm really not very good at it, myself

but, since you asked, a mock-up of how I might rework a portion of it:


-the wider panel at the top establishes where the door is in relationship to our protagonist
-making the hinges on the door visible is a visual clue that the door swings inward. readers can pick up on this without consciously realizing it.
-consistent placement of nearby objects serve as visual reminders of what we're looking at
-similar panels where nothing is happening establish the passing of time- the more there are, the more pregnant the pause. (you can express a better feeling of the length of time with other cues, such as changing the hands on a clock, or inconsequential actions)
-motion lines give the impression of movement in static images, and the placement of the onomatopoeia indicates where the sound is emanating from
-keeping Alan's reaction and the reveal to what he's reacting to on separate pages creates a visual buffer, guarding the surprise from wandering eyes

my instinct would be expanding the first couple pages by maybe even 3 to 5 pages a piece. take some time to give readers a sense of the listless, sedimentary lifestyle Ryland lives in. Alan is an instigator that upsets Ryland's illusion of comfortable squalor, so I'd stretch to give readers a sense of just how go-nowhere Ryland's behavior is.

but, again, I'm not especially talented, so take this all with a grain of salt and do things the way you feel is best.

as for a hook... iunno.
the alarm clock thing actually works really well as an introduction to the character. the idea of Ryland setting an alarm, because he planned ahead to start practicing, then backing out of the plan and distracting himself with bullshit is great character study. very human.
my instinct, again, would be to expand. take a bit to establish that it's afternoon, take a bit to establish that somebody is sleeping at 2PM (which already tells us a lot about the character), then let him get woken up by the alarm. then he can get all petulant over his own self-imposed plans for self-improvement. (you might also want to experiment with ways to show his situation in the details- maybe a note on the calendar that says "practice today", or a lingering glance at the guitar, or an unopened training manual, or a regretful look before lighting up.)

[CandleJack]

it is...surprisingly good.

i like the idea, the premise of a young kid who dreams to be a rock star, or a guitar expert, at the very least,
and he chills by smoking weed,a nd playing videogames.

the design is good, despite the black and white, and i must say, the art style reminds me off, a young calvin and hobbes.
with weed and nudity in it.

also, no offence but why do you show him with his dick all the time?
tho, the last panel, where you draw him with his backbones being visible, and his angry look while alan calls him.
nice anatomy for a cartoony character, and nice and clean expressions.

i like this comic. do more, and try to add more to the storyline.
your drawings are GOOD, but the story needs more.

good tips/advice, man!

also: could you show me THE CC WEBCOMIC that you did?
link me to this clock comix, dude!

ALSO: i recall action clock doing the ''lunch box'' a great comic about life, agents, and talking fruits.
-it also had indiana jones vs nazies-
i miss action-clock.

the site is long long gone. its sad.