" Most of your expressions are kinda stilted. Your characters never get that far away from their neutral expressions. Have them emote more, push it farther. If you don't, you're wasting an opportunity for storytelling. "

oof i gotta push this more.

Monday        -

               Your text totally needs more room to breathe dude. There are spot where there's barely a pixel of space between the letter's and the bubbl'se outline. Also, be more careful about centering your text. It's pretty consistently out of place. Nothing so small and simply to fix should be drawing attention away from your amazing art.

              Most of your expressions are kinda stilted. Your characters never get that far away from their neutral expressions. Have them emote more, push it farther. If you don't, you're wasting an opportunity for storytelling.

             Page 12 is extremely hard to parse, especially the action the near the top. This was a page that would've really benefited from some careful articulation and rendering.

             Your line quality on strait, geometric lines is confident and strong, but becomes much less so on organic forms. And it doesn't help that you sometimes chew those lines up with your rendering.

             As always, amazingly lovely stuff Monday. I love how you work with mass and light . And those explosions, fire , and smoke, oh my god so pretty. Even if I'm not super into the story, your amazing art always draws me in and holds me.


Nachte               -

                    Ahhh, man I really miss all your pretty greys. It totally would've done wonders for this comic too, because often your scenes are visually cluttered and kinda busy. Scenes with characters in full backgrounds are especially bad. Often these scenes contain very small figures, and the smaller your figures get the more messy and indistinct they become.
                   
                    Your lineart is pretty rough in general, but I know from your art that that you're a wonderful draftsman, so it's prolly just a one off thing. Even if I hadn't spent oodles of time checking that thread out, all I'd have to do is look at your characters faces and expressions. You do such a lovely job with emotion, I can't help but be furiously jealous. Also, It was awesome seeing Paper again, and those soldiers totally reminded me and Clash and Pistol!


Great work bro-dudes!

Don't get me wrong I found it interesting that we faced such limitations and I think myself and                                                                                                                                                      nachte pulled out like champs. I think we both foresaw the problems and went through with it regardless and the results are quite interesting.

I have no clue if I'll learn from it, but it will determine how I do things in a future work. Thanks to nachte for giving me an even fight ! Your story about fighter insurance actually allowed for Mars to be as smart and gutsy as I imagined him to be. And - Is that Paper ? 8O





                                                                                         

@jong oh yeah I totally get ya! In honest  what you suggested on the pages is great and really useful haha. I think we all know that feeling of like 'coulda done more' it follows artists everywhere.

But yeah I totally understand what you meant, I wasn't like grasping for an excuse or anything! (I was just lamenting that I would love a scenario to butt heads with pio where we could both commit 24 hours a day to drawing, oh my god what a fun fucking battle that would be. )

Interesting perspective on the viewing your stuff as completed too, I like that and yeah I can see where that would help you benefit from crit.

usually my approach to critique is to critique -as if- what the artist upload is exactly what the artist wants the reader to see.
Of course i don't completely pretend that there aren't real-life discrepancies in the creation of these comics, of course there's a time limit and of course you're not going to be able to devote 24 out of 24 hours to creating comics. Excuses are valid in these instances, but the assumption of the excuse in the critique gets in the way of what could potentially be said by the critic. Because such limitations exist it actually makes the critic's job easier, because then the artist can see aspects of the comics that can go awry from a third-party perspective.
In this sense it benefits the artist if they too perceives their own work as though whatever they upload is exactly what they wanted the reader to see sans obstacles and limitations in the process of getting to the completed product. I say more pages are choice, even though what i suggest is a logistical impossibility i say that because its simply see that its something in my opinion that ought to be.

I agree , it feels like gris was a lot easier to handle if I considered the fact that nothing about her was established outside of what was actually written in canonical comics. Which is distressing since a lot of background canon does exist that the reader won't benefit from unless whole chapters were written about it.

Every technical thing is noted and thanks for leading me the right path, Jong. Even though we only used a little more than a week isn't an excuse to say that there wasn't enough "time" as plans should be able to compromise to the most bare minimum of the situation.

@jong thanks for the wickedass crit man. I agree pretty much 100% with what you're saying. It seems like I never can battle Monday at a time where I have the actual free time to tackle it 100%! hahaha, yeah this could have definitely benefited from more time/ less consolidation and cuts. (the original script was about 5-7 pages longer) Also I'm glad I escaped some of the talking heads syndrome. And I tried this time to be more aware of cowboy shots but I'm not sure how well I pulled that off.

damn. the type of narrative and the heaviness of topic-matter makes both of you guys difficult to categorize let alone attempt a novice critique. Comics that approach this kind of seriousness and complexity are on an entirely different playing field than most other comics on this site.  Seriously, why the fuck are you guys remaining on void? Haha jk butnoreallyanswerthisquestionanswermewtfbbq.

@Monday- Well, you already know how much i love your style, so we can just skip the foreplay and go straight to the hard stuff, eh? Your tank battles still suffer from jarring camera angles and violations of the 180-degree rule (page , though at least you're able to establish the model of the good guys' tank and differentiate it from the bad guys (though this could only apply to the readers that pay attention to details).  It also seems as though you're beginning to suffer from a case of one-face-itis, i had no idea that Radio Rikkan was an entirely different character from Mars until I saw them together in the same panel. Theres also the issue of confusing action within a lot of the panels.
Unecessary details that break the silhouettes of main objects (page 7 panel 6- overturned car next to tank), which makes the main objects harder to make out. Instances of inappropriate uses of details include darkening background objects (page 8 panel which breaks consistencies of spatial relationships (things in the back are lighter-less detailed, things up in the front are more defined-detailed). The story is great, but your art seems to be more focused on bouts of passion and obsessive attention to certain details rather than an efficiency towards the big picture and economic usage of illustration, which may be counter-productive to a shonen vision of Void. In short, your art isn't hurting in lack, but rather because of excesses.
Things I praise are Mars's brief segue to explain his battle plans with tactical illustrations- which kept the battle sequence from becoming random, and gave it a sense of purpose. Despite its excellent shonen sensibilities, comics such as these always demand more pages in order to space out action sequences and elaboration thereof. I await to see what a full-length, fully fleshed out Mars battle would bring *u*

@Nachte: What I love about your comic is that its easy on the eyes and doesn't demand the reader in an exercise in visual recognition. In certain cases, further elaboration of scenes would have kept your details from being overly obscure (background scenes of page 4), and would have given the reader a greater impression of Sangre's shocked expression. Your use of montages to describe a situation keeps the flow of sequences interesting and avoids the redundancy of talking heads.
The most interesting development of the Void continuum is the concept of 'fighter insurance' and how it plays into the decisions of Mars & gang and the consequences involved afterwards, however i would have liked to see development of Sangre's past relationship with Rainbow Bread school even more, which would have carried deeper narrative significance (though i defaulted on that battle like an asshole :'c. and i regret it to this day). This could have been done with a brief 1-2 page dialogue between the characters Mars and Sangre Gris, thus enriching the perspective of Sangre's cold attitude to the student body. This is where the comic fell short, because it started off strong being about Sangre, but ended off being about insurance.

#Conclusion: Both excellent comics, but both suffering from similar problems, that is of course, a shortage of not being more of it. I'm not saying this as a glutton, but really, i believe both of your narratives and sequences needed more breathing room and greater elaboration for the type of comic you're both trying to make. The attempt in itself is a ballsy undertaking which garners nothing but my admiration. I look forwards to more of both Monday and Nachte!

FFFFMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

yes.

Oh
my
god

yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesssssssssssssssssssssssssss

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMYESSSS

IT BEGINS