Hey man, sorry I wasn't around all those times you tried to contact me, but thanks for taking me up on the battle and thanks for the comics.  I'm just sorry my side fared so poorly, aside from the lost pages, I'm just really sorry this didn't turn out like it did in my head haha.

Dalarminus - Good job, try to not let your pages get too cluttered... try thumb nailing each page two or three times.. just to get a sense of the whole aesthetic of it.

William_Duel - Also good job, my suggestion to you would be to use reference on your backgrounds... look up supermarkets on the web, look at things that can make your bg's pop out.. it'll help you once you start training your brain to look at every day  bg's around you.

Allow me to clarify. Look at all forms of storytelling, my examples were just examples and never meant to be the end all be all. And thanks, K, for repeating exactly what I said, in different words. It helps reiterate problems. Maybe in time, you can make your own observations.

Sorry, I can't offer a proper crit at the moment. And while it's never good to contradict what others say in their critiques, mikey rarely knows what he's talking about. If you followed his lead, you'd also be using video games to make your characters.
It's good to broaden your horizons, but pull your influences from where ever you can. Check out more than just "american comics & european movies." 75% of both suck any how. Check out movies & comics from every continent. Read actual books. Try to incorporate first hand accounts of actual events. Anything. At the very least it'll put you both way ahead of the curve mikey's on. But at the end of the day, do what you like to do.

I hope it's okay if I toss in my two cents...!

Dal: I feel like maybe you should work a little more in black and white before doing colors. You're obviously moving towards being a good line artist with some time, but the colors don't really do anything for the story. I would suggest learning about what draws the eye and helps with clarity in black and white, and then build up with color. You know, can't build a house without the foundation!

Also, the transparent sound effects seem like an afterthought - like you drew all this hot stuff and then were like "crap, I need to put a sound effect but don't want to block out all that stuff I drew..."

Will: Pretty good drawings and everything, I would just say to "spot your blacks" a little more carefully - as in, put the big spots of black where you want us to look. The many "stripey" areas (where you have a lot of blacks spots and white alternating) really confuse my eyes, and I don't know quite where to look. For example, on the first page of comic - theres all those ribbon things, then his hair, then his hair again, and the fireball... it makes my eyes go all over!  Also the transformation sequence needs more sparkles. (just kidding)

Since a lot of critiqueness has already been said, I will try to comment on a different front: WHAT I FELT READING THESE. LOL.

Mr Dalarminus: your Cavallero seemed like a complete twat or had a hint of Mr Awesome's lack of understanding of what's around him. I mean randomly attacking somebody WITHOUT having a conversation with them first? How rude! I would totally talk to someone first before I attacked them.

The colours were quite crazy, most of them fairly toned down with some splashes of bright almost-fluorescent colours. Like lollipops spilled in a muddy puddle...


Mr William D.: I felt like I was a kid again... reading Sailor Moon and Power Rangers. The whole exaggerated  internal dialogue thing I didn't actually get as exaggerated when reading it the first time, only after you pointed out. It could also be that I am a bit of an idiot and tend to take stuff too seriously. I think the Sailor Moonyness would come from the attention to detail in backgrounds (and the demon), as in them you often got background entirely made of lines or foam or dust or circles or letraset flowers etc.

I loved the present though, I think you kicked ass. Really, nothing like a seizure first thing in the morning ^o^

My overall advice: watch American movies and read European comics.

Shouldn't he read European comics, instead of watching European movies?

To add to michael's critique, American comics are a tricky medium, as well! There are some American comics(most notably Marvel/DC) that have their characters exchanging entire dialogues mid-combat, or having big internal monologues during intense action sequences. These are also too old-school, so avoid writers that do this alot.

Well I will speak up about the dialogue, it was an experiment.  I guess if you wanna put it in layman's terms, I wanted to see how dumb the audience is.  I don't mean that to be insulting but I was just thinking in a lot of action stuff how scenes and such and are suddenly explained for the benefit of the viewer, so I wanted to see how helpful that was.  I know it was shitty, so I'll try not to go to that level of dumb again.

Dalarminus,
Artwise I really appreciated the attention to backgrounds. I would encourage you to learn perspective drawing and the anatomy does need a lot of work, like Cavallero's head on page 3 panel on and Bartin's wonky shoulders in the same panel. I would have liked to see a full shot of Cavallero before the fight starts because we really don't see enough of hm to be sure who he is before he starts getting beat up.

Billy D,
Artwise, Watch your text on the first page, the "because" gets lost because the rest of the text follows a logical curved line downwards. You really need to start putting effort into your backgrounds, these were just kind of afterthoughts. Keep working on anatomy and perspective. It got confusing in places, on page four I couldn't really tell what the top two panels were and I had to think about it for a minute.

Both
Storywise, Please vary up your influences. Read American comics, watch European movies. If you want to write anime, ok then, write anime, but I believe its better to broaden your storytelling influences. It brings a credibility to your story and feels less like fanfiction.

Billy D  This really felt like a child's cartoon show, all the characters are blatantly announcing what they are doing. You should design your panels to show rather than having your characters explain. Show the monster running away, don't have him say, "Oh! it's time for me to run away now." we could get that information by seeing him run away, it also takes realism out of the story.

Over all I did enjoy these, they held my interest and I made it through them entirely. Good job.

Dalarmius: Invest in free fonts on Blambot.com ... you're using alotta standard and sub-standard fonts that cheapen the overall quality of your work :X

William: Thanks for the heads up on what the heck is going on, but you can easily have that in a lil page at the beginning dedicated to keeping the reader up to speed. I've found personally that having the "The Story So Far" prologue narration at the front of my comics here has helped readers stay on the same level and read without confusion. I would recommend trying to add the exposition somewhere in the comic in the future, rather than on the comment box

Great work from both of y'all!

Oh and there's a present at the end to make up for my bullshit.

Success.  Banished the virus and uploaded my pages.  I'm sorry about the missing pages, hell, I'm pissed about it but there's not much I can do.  But basically my comic starts off where Bartin's introduction left off, he's looking for info he walks into murphy's (which in this reality is a convenience store/minimart) only to find that everyone inside is dead and cut to pieces except for Cavallero and the beastie (Skin Rip).  Cavallero and Skin Rip notice Bartin's presence and Skin Rip zealously attacks Bartin.  Cue my comic.  Man this sucks.

Yay.  My computer is infected with a virus.  This hasn't happened in a long while so yay.  I'm typing this from my ipod, but basically me not defaulting is now equal to how quickly I can remove this bastard from my system.  Well and even if I do submit this, the first three pages of my battle have been lost.  So I'm having a wonderful time.  Fuck me.

Life is pesky and gets in the way at times.  My plans are always ambitious and often times I have to cut out a lot of stuff (it hurts it hurts).  But I'm working on fleshing out the backgrounds that I have and tightening up what's left in the days that are left.

I'm all done

Good luck both of you!

This should be a cool battle

hmm, neat match up~

good luck!