Last moment comment:

Monday: I've already gone over most of my comments with you privately. I wasn't bothered by jumping into the story. My brain clicked over to 'oh, like Record of the Lodoss Wars OVA, cool' and went from there. You do tend to crowd your panels and pages, but you've already told me you are aware of it and want to loosen it up. You HAVE to give yourself more time to do post-production work, such as cleaning up lines. And your word bubbles have GOT to be fixed so that the words fit into them properly. Seriously. Clean up, give yourself time, and slow down. It's all in your time management. Your quality was lower, but you had higher marks for entertainment and creativity from me.

Corny: This was cute, and your consistency and clean pages were nice to see. But it felt  rather dull to me, maybe because I went 'Oh, it's Kiki's Delivery Service, except she's got a dog...' It was cute, but I didn't feel it was very original or as entertaining. I'll agree that you need to watch your hatching, but you're learning to use it better each time you work, so that's great to see. Your cleanliness and easy of reading got you a slightly higher quality, but your entertainment and creativity took a hit to me because it just was not original or engaging to me. (I didn't care for Kiki's Delivery Service, either. :\ So that didn't help, I guess.)

Good job, both of you.

yeah I guess I found it relate able because of how much time I play WoW so it read a little deeper for me

Thanks Angie ! I don't know if I was aiming for his being neglectful of his family as much as it is just being a kid (though I guess you can argue that they have a level of responsibility as well)- but since that's the only scenes I've shown it's understandable, and really I dont have a problem with it being interpreted that way.  I'm definitely considering colors and various other suggestions everyone's presented up till now since that would have been my next step after had I more time (colors that is). So again,  thanks guys.

Okay as promised, here's my critique. Not as thorough as I'd like as I just woke up and my brain is dead but it's here nonetheless.

Monday-Someday I would like to see you try to do a whole comic in color like you have on that first page. I remember seeing your sketchbooks at WW and being really impressed with your coloring. I think that using color could help quite a lot with your clarity as it would help prevent things from blending into one another. And I'm not just saying this because I'm a color whore, I'm saying this because anything that could help your work become easier to follow would help. It took a few reads for me to totally absorb the comic and figure out what was going on. When I finally got it, I appreciated that you were showing that this kid pretty much wasted his life playing a videogame and didn't really notice his parents.

I think playing this up a little could have helped, like maybe devoting a few more panels in the scenes featuring the boy could have made the scene transitions feel less awkward. Like you show the kid I'm assuming at his birthday in like 1 panel then cut right back to the action. I think you could have really given the story a lot more impact by showing the extent of how he was pretty much neglecting his life and parents, like making those scenes with just the boy a little longer would have made it clear that time was passing and this guy was wasting a ton of time on this game. Because on the first read through I just didn't catch those little things because they happened so quickly so when I found out the kid's parents were dead I really didn't care. I feel like that scene should have really made me tear up or go like whoa shit or something but it didn't because I didn't really care about this boy or understand the whole story on the first read through and obviously on the second read through I already know what happened. So yeah, you kind of missed a huge opportunity to do a very powerful scene right there.

Corny-I think your work looks very nice in black and white and you have some good hatching. But sometimes you need to just let things be black. Like you have the road and it looks really weird with all that hatching on it. It would have been better to just make it a solid black. There were also some times where the lineart became very faint like second page third panel all of a sudden she's all gray but everything around her is dark black. While I understand that you're trying to show action and that's a good way to do it, having the last figure darker than the previous ones would have helped. While story wise I don't think this was the pinnacle of originality, I think you did very well in making an entertaining story. I was wanting to know what would happen next on each page and would like to see you do another part to this somewhere down the line.

Yes, Corny's was far more accessible.  It's cute so far, but feels less like a "pilot" and more like a "part one."  I definitely want to see the rest!  You've got a good thing going on here.  

Monday, I enjoyed the action and the artwork (and the shout-outs!), but there wasn't really enough story or enough "why" to really sink my teeth into.  And sorry, but I saw that ending coming from a mile away.  It could have worked if it tied into the rest of the comic better - I guess it gave him a reason to want to escape reality, but I didn't really get that from the context.  

Hey guys, please actually critique the comics if you're gonna complain. I'll be deleting any further comments asking that without backing it up with a nice thorough critique.

i was thinking the same thing.

Ultimately the true winner is the reader...  pfft.

I'll give a full crit later, but Corny's is far more accessible to more audiences and is easier to read which is probably why. In the future I think it's much better to explain why you think the other person should be winning by actually critiquing both artists instead of questioning the voters. People will vote how they'll vote, there's always differences in opinions on this site.

OK, if you really think he should be winning, then explain why he should win and Corny should lose since you make it sound as if there's some foul play afoot.

Good question. Maybe the majority of people who voted preferred Corny's story?

Great job peeps, Monday i love where you went with your story at the end.
i like the ceativity of corny's story also.

MEEEE TOOOOO

It *was* very Ghibli--my first thought was 'Kiki's Delivery Service'.

Holy fuck these were good

Monday: I really enjoyed this story. I would say for all the reasons Michael and Jack dont like it.  Aside from the obvious rushed looking quality to most of the panels I felt drawn into the story and wanted to know more about the characters.  The focus felt extremely japanese. not only in the panelling and word design, but often in Japanese story telling (well Asian..Korean manga and chinese) you don't get an explanation of anything...they throw you in a world or a battle or whatever and they give you characters..and shit happens...and then it ends...but I think that's besides the point. Why I was drawn to this story was a few reasons it kind of reminded me of Never Ending Story meets final fantasy tactics. which are two things I love. (Although reading this made me hunger for some good ol Advance Wars!!) so reading this I didnt really care about their pasts...or their personal catharsis I wanted to just see where the story went. I would say you have a strong sense of story telling through imagery but you need to spend more time on the drawings...some of the panels were Fanfucking tastic like the...well..all of the panels where things get killed and go all splodey...your talking heads need work...hmmm...not much more to say...I love this...My vote went to you although I docked you for quality

Corny- Wow this was impressive too (monday only edged you out by a point on my side...nostalgia yo) you line quality is excellent.and Unlike mike I have seen a lot of illsutrators do cartoony + hatching...I think in most places it was used quite well and knowledgeably where it needed work was the street on page..like 1 or 2 or something... with the frog guy....that looked a bit out of place...the story was quaint and it felt very Studio Ghibliesque...maybe it was the witch on a broom thing...meh I dont know...it was cute...

good job you two!!! Kudos

Michael hit the nail on the head. I don't know if you're problem now is a lack of planning or an excess, but you need to fix something somewhere. If you think this was a pitch you're miles off. You did too much too quickly, and missed the point. A "stick you in the middle of the chaos to get a hook" story is useless if there's no hook. And there's no hook. It's just too much. You blew through too fast and had some extremely sloppy, cluttered and boring composition, and traded in technical skill for speed, and foolishly at that. You're a good enough artist to know that you can't draw a circle, and how an object looks when it's drawn right. What were you thinking when you made the focal point of that one panel a poorly drawn moon? That panel basically summarizes how this comic turned out. Your work is either too dense or not dense enough, you're not using enough black, there's a lack of strong composition and absolutely no sense of lighting at all, which is everything in black and white comics as dense as you're intending to work.

However, the part with the trolls was a great comic. The trolls were the best drawn in the comic and the action in which the trolls were killed was great. There were still sloppy senseless mistakes made, but if you're going to pitch this, that's what you pitch.  I'd suggest you remake the troll slaying sequence, introduce maybe one or two characters, and build from there. (Now that I think of it, that was how it started last time, but that was a really great start.) Nobody blows their load on the pitch.


Corny, I'm hooked. Michael was, again, right about the crosshatching. More complex and detailed backgrounds and perhaps greys or tones would have been a better route for this, maybe even colour. There were places where the hatching was spot on, like on the noses. That was my favourite drawn feature of this comic actually. The story is grabbing, albeit slow, but not every story needs to be Crank, and if you can do this kind of comic and keep it fun and entertaining then you're miles ahead of the game. I want desperately to see this continued, if that tells you anything.

Yeah; I cant seem to find good approach to the grey balance Im thinking of just sticking to pure blacks or go all the way with only greys.

As for the story; this is just one of those "stick you in the middle of the chaos to get a hook" where it gets followed up by a more coherent follow-up story.  Sorry to lay that out like an excuse but It's ok to turn your brain off on this one and just plow through the whole thing like it was a nonsensical dream.

Thanks

Just voted--and WOW that is a REALLY close margin!

Monday
I got 9 pages in and I couldn't read anymore. The sloppiness really annoyed me. In the drawings and in the text. When you need to add a dash to a word you are supposed to add them to the end of a syllable not like where you hypen-ed the word "fough-t" Are you American? You seem to write like a person who doesn't use English on a regular basis. If so, I apologize.

As for the story, you bring us to a world and a cast of characters we don't know, but you don't introduce or explain any of it. IF you want us to feel anything for the characters we need to know who they are and what they are fighting for, if you want to make a purely action comic there needs to be more action and less blabbing. I guess my problem was I get introduced to a story where I don't know anyone, I don't get enough info to care about any of them, and there isn't enough action to keep me reading. Then you randomly drop new characters(ie the witch sniper and the trolls) , so on top of me not knowing/caring about anyone random shit just happens with no explanation, it just frustrated and bored me to tears.

The art seemed kind of haphazard, I have seen people that can do that well, but there are a lot of problems with foreground/background separation, and the use of gray tones seems completely random, sometimes its cartoony with pure black and white line work, then randomly its gray tones.

Corny
I like the linework but the cross hatching really doesn't work. I have never seen anyone do a style as cartoony as yours and then add crosshatching to it. The story was a bit slow and a tad boring but easy to follow, and I enjoyed the drawings of the characters.

Monday, I'm seeing a lot little nods to things I like in your comic.  Berserk being the obvious one to me... and maybe BlazeBlue.  That ending is really depressing though.

Corny, looks like a great start to something!

Both are really good, I'm going to have to come back later read again and vote.

I think this is going to be a tough choice, both have their strengths, but I am seeing a few things that need a lot of work.


Monday: Still messy as always, but it's nice to see you step out of your normal work and try something different. Granted you're still putting guns into the mix. Anyway, your action is top notch, but most of the time the action is crammed up into teeny tiny panels and it becomes hard to understand what exactly is going on. If you need more room for an action shot, give yourself more room. Don't overlap panels if things are getting complicated in terms of detail, zoom out and avoid too many shots of characters from the waist up, and remember that clarity is a comic's best friend.

The story I thought was pretty good, but the pacing was way too fast to really enjoy. 21 pages is rather taxing for a short story like this, but you've crammed at least 50 pages worth of story and comic panels in here if you ask me. The reason I say this is because I do recognize how you're shifting between fantasy and reality throughout the story, but it happens so suddenly in the middle of a comic page and it confused me on my first read. You gotta find a way to separate the two different realities at work in this story. Again back onto the art for a second, I couldn't tell when you had switched from reality to fantasy, there was nothing to clue me in on this aside from the characters suddenly losing a lot of detail, but even when I noticed this you had the fantasy panels breaking into the real world story, page 7 top panel  where the cape is nearly covering half of the first panel is a perfect example of this.

Well, the story however was pretty fresh, I just couldn't fully get into this. Un-cram your pages, and try to lessen the panels you have in your pages and stretch out the length of your next comic.




Corny: Like Monday, I think your story is also very unique and fresh. Your entry however was the cleanest by far and easier to take in. However, I would of liked to seen more, maybe have more hints to the back story, I'm probably only saying this as Monday's entry is pretty much a self contained story while yours is technically a fantasy pilot. Anyway, the story was rather cute and it was easy to understand, but the art is a bit of a let down this time. I'm mainly referring to your cross hatching here. Now... I'm definitely no expert in cross-hatching, but the one thing everybody tells me is that it should define the form. Your cross hatching is a lot like mine, very flat.

Now, your shading is pretty well done mind you, but cross hatching is meant to define the form of what you're drawing. I'm not sure how to really help honestly aside from pointing you towards Squidman, she's great at cross hatching.




Both of you did wonderfully, but ultimately it came down to quality, and clarity. Vote went to Corny on this one.

Thaaaaank Yooooooouuuuuuuuu~~~~~~

I'll put this and anything else that was due/turned in last night up when I get home from work. I'd put it up now but I don't have time to thumbnail 928374926487258247932 pages in the time I have left before work.

HNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

WHY GOD WHHHHhhhhhyyyyyyyy..........<cough> <cough>

this will be something to fancy >:3

.  .  . . . .*shoots you twice.

GET HER MONDAY. YOUR A BUM!!!!! lol
Worked in Rock III ......

Now what's all this hubbub about some fantasy pilot? Make this quick, now, I'm a busy man. Busy man. *puffs cigar*

Monday she will beat you . . .

Oh, yeah!

perfec

iFantastique!

Note that this doesn't involve magic aircraft pilots in any way.

pretty amazing!

But her spirit lives on.

Wait, Corny is dead.

Wao, now that was unexpected

FANTASY PILOT CYCLE 1

:O

VERY GOOD

MISSION IS GO