Memoria Mortis / Jonos Valorous

Memoria Mortis — Jonos Valorous

by Orion

This comic has not been rated; viewer discretion advised.

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Critiques & Comments
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petarvee
Artist
83 comments
# 7   Posted: Jan 15 2018, 09:01 AM
Overall, not bad! It doesn't quite push the envelope enough to be called Great, but it's a serviceable comic that you're obviously having fun making. And that count for something.

But lemme hitcha with the specifics.

Color choice: I can appreciate the colors you chose, but not really the way they were balanced out. Like I liked your purples and yellows and greens, but I don't like them next to each other. They all hover in about the same Saturation/Value level, so if you made your pages greyscale, they'd look like a homogenous mass of sorta-differing greys, rather than a full value scale.

The hand lettering: I always give points for handlettering. It's a dying art that needs a big light on it. So kudos for that. But, that sorta stuff does need to be on straight horizontal lines, not just freeformly written like every word balloon is a sound effect. The closest thing to a standard I've heard is a 1/8" line to write on, with a 1/16" between. And just scale that up if you prefer larger text. So keep the handlettered look, just make sure everything's set neatly.

The Style: It's cartoony, it's all-ages, and it works. The only issue I've got is that it could work better. It seems like your tables, chairs, backgrounds, and even hands are all un-referenced. I'm not sure if that's because Its A Scifi Ship, Anything Can Happen, but without reference, things just sorta lose the feelings they're real. You can still use reference of like, the inside of a submarine, and throw some window sills on the window, some features on the desk consoles, some design to the shoes, etc. Something to breathe a bit of life into the scenes so they're just a hair more believable would really pay dividends.

Staging/Draftsmanship: Overall, probably the stronger qualities. You zoom in and out and take interesting camera angles, and that should be applauded. My only note here is that some closeups of things like hands get really hard to read because theyre just Too Close. For situations like that, make sure everything's got a clearly defined silhouette. If it doesn't, the zoom out til it does.

Writing: Serviceable. The writing's pretty par for a void comic. Two characters meet, they fight for one reason or another, and somebody loses. I liked the altercation itself, but the balloons just sorta felt like they got in the way of the fight, rather than underlined how cool things were. And the ending sorta threw me for a loop. Or at least felt a bit unwarranted. Having Jonos cry seemingly out of nowhere doesn't really fit with the tone of the rest of the comic. It's a bit like a punchline to a long joke, but we never got to hear the long joke, only see the "-That's no toaster, thats my wife" sort of ending. If you're gonna end on a big emotion, we gotta get some setup for it, so we as the readers feel along with the character.

Wolfbaloo
Artist
33 comments
# 6   Posted: Jan 14 2018, 07:23 PM
Wasn't too sure if I even remembered this but I personally didn't like it. It's just a bit messy on how the action was going, as well as the body language just being a bit weird and doesn't even look like the guy is fighting them, rather just tugging their arms and shoving them around. What would be a good improvement to this is to practice more on action poses. While I do like the colors, the inside of the ship inside doesn't really translate a "space pirate", more like a colorful condo.

I still think there was potential here, but I just felt that it fell very short.

zee
Artist
132 comments
# 5   Posted: Jan 14 2018, 04:47 PM
Like others have said, this is very easy to follow this time around and quite enjoyable!
Your handwritten text definitely suits the style, and I think it gives the pages more motion which is fun, but you may try keeping the text a little bit more uniform in the future for easier readability. For example, sometimes it's a little too tightly packed (page 3, middle panel), and it just varies a lot overall.
I like the color changes between being ~out in spaaace~ and inside the ship, it really helps with the tone/ mood- especially with the ending. Though, I would also suggest more contrast/ shading (inside the ship in this case) between the backgrounds and characters in the future to really make them POP. I think Pomo's commentary is great for this!
I quite like the general direction of your color choices and hope you continue to do more colored work in the future!

Radji
Artist
623 comments
# 4   Posted: Jan 13 2018, 08:34 AM
when i read that comic back then, i thought it was fluif enough to understand. With colors now no effort to understand what's going on that's good! Maybe the speech bubbles are a bit wancky

PyrasTerran
Artist
1512 comments
# 3   Posted: Jan 12 2018, 06:11 PM
this is  a good way to start the year, finishing an old piece like this~

what stands out most for me is that this comic is easy to understand; i get what's going on in each panel pretty well and that's commendable. I think it's a wasted opportunity to not use shading inside the ship like you do outside, it makes your colors more effective. there's some fundamentals you need to keep practicing too about body anatomy/proportions and proper perspective. Try to add more variety to your keyboards so they're not just tile buttons (i understand this approach with a time crunch but here you had the time to enhance things) hope to see more comics of this quality moving forward!

Pocketmouse
Artist
101 comments
# 2   Posted: Jan 11 2018, 10:29 PM
Heeeeey well done for taking the time to finish this!!!!! That's a great way to kick off the new year!

I'll keep my comment focused to the colour/shading aspects for now because I left you some notes on the first one already :)

Colour is a great way to focus your audiences eye using contrast. Your contrast can come from hue (eg purple and yellow), shade (dark Vs light) and saturation (greyish and dull or vibrant and intense) making use of all three I'll give you control over where your audience looks. Most of the time this would be your character in the panel but sometimes there's other important stuff in your backgrounds you'd want to call out. It also creates a mood that subliminally tells them how to feel, so with that in mind, here's some analysis of what your colours are doing, and how they could work differently next time.

Your opening page is pretty desaturated, save for the third panel. In the first panel, my eyes are drawn more to the shape Jonos is sat on rather than him which is largely due to the high contrast light/shade you've used here. I really like the contrast here but because everything else is so much lower contrast, this becomes the focus of the panel. Next time, you could try keep the light/shade ratio similar across the whole foreground, but strongest on Jonos and let the background elements stay lost in the desats. This theory would apply to your final page too. The mood feels right here, but the tears could have had a bit more glittery wateryness attention pulled to them too for extra emotional points!

The pages inside the ship are strong and you picked good hues for your background and foreground elements, but your contrast gets muddied in that there's no saturation or dark/light contrast, which can make a drawing look flat and like a background has no depth. This means that while what you've done with the hues brings our your characters and feels exciting in contrast to the first page, it gets overwhelming in places. Next time, if you try desaturating the background hues and giving yourself starker, bolder light and shade contrast you'll be on fire!

When it comes to learning shading it takes time and practice of consistent light sources to make them into attractive shapes. Your shading sometimes doesn't extend across whole panels, which maybe just a time willing thing, but a good solid light map of a scene is worth taking time over. It can help to muck about with some simple objects too, how would your pencil travel over its surface? What flat line would that make on a piece of paper? That's the key to getting good shapes down in your shading.

It's great to see you submit a full colour comic and I'm so excited to see you do more of this! Well done for preserving and I hope this helps for next time! :)

Orion
Artist
224 comments
# 1   Posted: Jan 1 2018, 09:22 PM
In an attempt to start the year off right I am going to be polishing up and submitting my unfinished Jonos comic from back in October and give it the proper send off it deserves. I have had far too many unfinished work and half finished failures and I hope with this to put at least one of those to bed.

And since I have been jumping back and forth far too much about finishing this, in anticipation of starting bootcamp and hopefully SDT, I am going to settle this the Entervoid way: with a HARD DEADLINE!

It will be more or less the same comic as Jonos vs Huey and Hara with most of the same dialogue and composition but the pages have been tightened up, lettering fixed, it will be inked and colored, and the whole thing will be resubmitted as a complete work 1 week from Monday (if not sooner.)

So! Off to Bed and onto finishing!

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Beyond Battle
Drawing Time: 1 week
Ended: Jan 15th, 2018
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