thanks again everyone

and thank you squid for the battle
 i will treasure it in that hollow space under my ribs :3

oh hay, thanks for the nice comments :3

Kuro, yes, I totally stole it from you hahaha I am merciless!

This was a hard choice, both were well done and were short and sweet.

D6- The contrast in your pages was amazing! I loved it! The only thing you lacked was creativity in your story. It felt like an episode of Family Guy almost. Just random little sayings. Which is funny on it\'s own, but it did not stand up to Squids unique twist on both the characters.

Squid- Well, gee golly gosh, I aint gots nothing to say- you steal my heart away every time I read your battles.

good work.

d6, black out your blacks when your done. it\'s so easy & makes it look a lot neater. and i think dawg brings up a good point. we don\'t need a set up or an in depth story, but this felt like a generally quiet action scene that takes place in a bigger story rather than something standalone. wasn\'t a lot to latch onto. it probably would have worked better for me if at the end they were safe from the santa robot & in the safety of the ship & that last page happened.

squid, GODDAMMIT thanks for stealing my landscape/widescreen format (that\'s what i\'ve been doing for my battle right now)(and i think rabbitrabbit did it first but still).... DAMMIT haha regardless of all that, i got a creepy beatrix potter meets grimm bros thing going on from the story, which was a neat diversion from the void city status quo. and subtle things like your shading on samuel\'s suit really kind of drove that old illustrated story feel home. stop being so good so other people can catch up.

-J

I really enjoyed both stories...immensely

D6016 you had me at DEATH METAL SANTA...I was so seriously cracking up. and the exectution of his design was great.  It\'s hard to provide any new tidbits of criticism that hasnt already been covered by everyone else.  Although I\'m actually going to tell you not cut back on the crazyness and sometimes incomprehensibility of your panels I found them fun and kind of inviting. Shit it worked for Chris Bachalo and he\'s mildly famous....I say get crazier.

Squidman:  your illustrations are good on so many levels. I heart your control of ink and your ability to create texture. you have such a beautiful stroke...of the brush...hehe...that I hope your work continues on this path for forever!!!

great comics guys! :3

@D6016: your inks are really nice man, but as it has been mentioned before your character art did blend in with your backgrounds so I\'d suggest working on that. I really like how you designed the death metal santa, it looked pretty sweet :0 and that last page was kind of cute XD

@SQUID: The story was quit a surprise indeed I\'m loving the backgrounds you had going on, very clean yet full of texture. I do feel that the first two pages needed a bit more to have made the characters \"pop out\" a bit more, maybe some shading of colors even. very nice comic though quite fun to read!

Both of you: top form!!
High creativity marks for making Ben spacey and Sam not spacey at all.

its a shame we both cut short :c
in the future we should rematch to remedy this! >:3

umm, i don\'t feel like addressing all the crits individually, but i felt most(if not all) where spot on, and i will try to work on these before i do anymore battles.

well. This time I did purposely hold back on expressions a little. But in some panels I wasn\'t quite sure how to approach certain emotions.
It was hard to keep Ben cute and still give her a semi-realistic cat-like face XD

Hahah not really, it\'s just that a persons facial feature\'s gets more extreme when they age, and I\'ve never seen you fail with Ben\'s, so I\'d guess it\'s not a flaw, but intended in some way

wait granny Ben what?

do you mean she looks old? ...that bad huh? XD

I think that kind of face is to mean shed be a \"granny ben\" or something

Dee - Your art is really cool, but your comics are lacking substance.  I don\'t think you need character development through stories, as it\'s possible to do random stories that aren\'t connected and have it work.  Just add some personality.  Despite that, the art still made this a fun read.

Squid - What I wanted to say has already been pointed out.  Ben\'s face looking weird and the first two pages being perfect for colors.  And I don\'t know what others are talking about, the ending was the funniest part.  Only thing that would have made it better was if you added visible tears.

D6- I agree with Ang.- My biggest problem aside from the abrupt ending, is that the foreground and background got lost in places.  I always try and squint when I am inking. When the details blur out, you can spot your blacks alot easyer. I thought the story was good, Im a sucker for anything science fiction.

Squid- One of my favs of yours. I liked the storybook feel to the comic. I felt like I just opened one of my kids fairy tale books with the gold leaf binding.  I would have enjoyed a little more \'fight\' between the principal charcters though. Nice inking and pleasent layouts. I have to give you this one in overall quality and entertainment-Good Work!

D6106, I like the short and sweet story, I agree with angie, that the characters get lost a little in the backgrounds, I had some trouble reading the facial expressions, but other than that it was highly enjoyably

Squidman, delightful! I think you should use some varying line weights to help characters \"pop\" and the paneling on page 5 was a little confusing...

Dee-art wise you\'re very solid, I would however like to see you do some things to make the characters stand out from the backgrounds some more like varying your linewidths or adding tones to the characters. Just a little something to make the characters pop since they tend to get lost in the backgrounds. Now story wise, I really want to see you work on your stories. I feel like you\'ve never really done much with your stories since coming to Void. That doesn\'t mean you have to have an epic super serious story arc or anything, but perhaps giving your characters a goal for the next few battles would help you give your battles more focus so they seem less random. I understand Samuel isn\'t a super serious character or anything but I feel as though I still know very little about him as a character.

Ben-I really enjoyed the style you went with here, adding some washes or toning or doing a little more with the blacks in there may have made the lineart a little easier on the eyes, but other than that the art was great. I thought the approach you took story wise was interesting and was a joy to read.  I really didn\'t expect this at all and I was pleasantly surprised.

Thanks for all the comments so far.

Helf: This style of Ben was really different and sometimes I wasn\'t sure how to draw a particular expression. I probably could\'ve done some more practice drawings beforehand. I think I can see which panels you probably meant. yeah. Thanks.

Cypher: If I did all the pages I meant to, the fat mouse would have inadverdently saved Sam while looking for food and then Sam would\'ve killed Ben. Still not a clever ending, but I do reget losing the part with the mouse. Just saying I know what you mean.

AVT: I don\'t think killing the other character is nessessarily a cop-out, but if you meant that it is cop-out-ish the way I did it in this comic, then I would agree with you.
Also since this comic is like alt-universe, it\'s not like Ben\'s life in Void is affected at all.

Z: The second page did need more darks. Is that the one you meant? Originally I wanted to color this comic, so page one and two have all this really nice, sexy linework and stuff. Then when I had determined that there was no way it was getting colored, I started to work in more darks to all the pages.. but when I went into page 2, I felt like I was covering up all those sexy lines that I was so proud of :C So, I posted this bare, no-darks version out of pride I guess.

Phil: yeah, more darks in that panel would have helped clarity a lot.

I couldn\'t think of a more appropriate sound for a giant space santa beam.

Space Rat.  Some of the drawinger where really impressive but it was way to unclear
it took me three reads before i was sure what was going on.On first read i barely noticed
the rat.some of your pictures blend way to much together putting a color on your characters
would have helped that in a easy way.and i am still unsure what the rats does in the last pic
does he fly into the metal santas mouth does he shoot it or?
your story kinda plays on ben being overly annoying without really showing it


Ben
everything looked really amazing here exept bens face at times looked a bit rushed or not thinked
out i really enjoyed this one nice setting and good idea,loved the backgrounds

Man... I was so much into both comics that I that I didn\'t really pay much attention on my first read...

My vote goes to Dee because of the following:

-Made me laugh pretty hard. I think in almost every panel there was a little something that would make me crack a smile and that\'s the reason I prefered Dee\'s.
-I liked the art on both sides, so you were equal on this point (Squid I love how you did your paneling)
-As for the creativity, that\'s where Squid lost a bit of points to me. Although I did enjoy it, I find the story was a bit like \"déja-vu\" like some tale that you played with, but didn\'t finish right. I liked the idea at first because I was expecting that you would come up with something unexpected....so ya lost points basically cause ya left me WANTING FOR MORE!

I think Phil basically covered all aspects of this one, story length and art wise.  They both amused the hell out of me--Death Metal Santa and Little Miss Fattie McRattie alike (okay so perhaps she was a mouse, but still).

And I hate to be the ass that does it, but unfortunately I\'mna put Squidman on the spot (just this once, I promise):
What throws me a bit--and it is, definitely, personal preference--is the FINALITY of some of these normal fights that seem, more or less, fitting for a DEATH MATCH (undoubtedly this has been a topic of debate before and I missed it).  I know that artists/writers may not have a particular agenda on VOID, with a continuous story line from battle to battle, and that\'s fine.  Basically, that any one can carry on, or leave behind, whatever they choose to.  But I think what I fear is individuals not able to find a way to defeat their opponent without resorting to what seems like the End All Beat All.  I\'m putting this out there because that is actually a factor that determines my creativity vote.  It is personal preference vs. the nature of the thing.

But really, I mean it. You guys did great, otherwise, both of you.

Giant Death Metal Santa

Quite nice in both entries!

Dee: As always, your inks never cease to amaze me, and I enjoyed every bit of it! As for the pages layout and panelling though, that\'s something with lots of room to improve! Firstly, each page seems to have their own size and it doesnt look like there are stacked pages, so I take it as miscalculation maybe? Secondly, the panel sizes could be better used, and their composition as well, having two exaamples from the top of my mind:
-When Ben is first shown falling above a spike, it\'s panel had the same size as any other in the page, while it could have used a bigger space to add dramaticism to it, and even a better attention given to the spike (I didn\'t get if the spike was a menace at first until the following page)
-The same happens in the folowing page when Metal Santa shows up again and you have a lot of unused space (and whites) in a dramatic filled with hatches panel. The panel size here is ok though.
Sorry for the nitpicking, it\'s just where I think you can improve as far as I see, art-wise.
As for the story, it was a bit too simple, but it was pure fun, I liked it!

Ben: Tha was some grim fairy tale! Really impressive!
That said, Maybe you\'d take advantage of some nasty blacks, but I guess you ran out of time (sinceyou were still finishing stuff as of today)
While I don\'t think lineweights were neeeded, Maybe you\'d take advantge of some! I do understand that this is an entirely different style you were aiming for, though.
I love seeing every facets of Ben, please keep bringin\'em on!

Good luck! This thing is HOT

I really liked both comics, but I really think you guys should of given us more.


Dee: Awesome art as always, all though some parts kinda got confusing and it took me a while to figure out where characters were amongst the line work. You gotta be careful about that in the future man. The story was pretty creative, but you kinda cut it short for my tastes. It would of been awesome to just have an extra page or two.


SQUIDMAN: The art here was great, and the more feline version of Ben was pretty scary in a way. But like Dee\'s side, some things just got lost with the linewidths here like the scene where Samuel was sitting with the feline trophy\'s surrounding him, it really took a while to take it all in honestly. Story here was great, reminds me of the Grimm storytales of old and not the ones that end with happy endings.


Really great stuff here, but I\'m siding with Squidman on this one.

Hey I did all I could.................... now it\'s up to the fans. :I


Dee, that\'s totally amazing; I don\'t want to bore you with a list of everything I like about it, but at the top is your inks. They win. :3

SQUID IF YOU LOSE I WONT BE YOUR FRIEND ANYMORE >: U

:huff:

Sorry about the abrupt ending. I had planned more pages and blah blah blah.

* o*
Does that mean Dee\'s already uploaded? Oooh.

Cleaning up pages.

Good thing I don\'t have class early tomorrow so I can put it up right when Squid uploads

Just six more hours.  I\'ll get to read it first thing in the morning.

Go sqweedo!

You\'re gonna have to cause I\'m not done yet :I

20 hours?? I can\'t wait that long! D:

SWEET

Go guys GOOOO!!!! X333

I cannot wait for this.    

kick his ass, SQUID!

i have no donkies to add ._.

MAN! This is up there with MIMI VS. BEN as one of my all time most wished for battles! I love both you guys!

Kick her ass, DEE!!

Ben Fan

Oh this shall be interestin!!!

There shall not be popcorn enough for this

What the hell??
This can only end in bitter salt tears. XD

nice to see you back in action Dee!
and good to see MORE action from you, Squidy!

=D

awesome~

Good luck guys! Can\'t wait to see you guys kick some ass

oh snap
-J