Congrats on finishing the comic! I think it was worth the wait. One thing I see in the comic is the positioning of the text seems a little too squished inside the bubbles (where some of the text barely touches the edges of the word bubbles).
Everything else I've wanted to say about the comic I've already told you in the google hangouts and stuff, so ya everything else looks very kickass.

Mamoru I love your version of Void city, loved the history in here!!!!
also wonderfully bridged to the present day, this was a really good read too,  you successfully manage the ridiculousness of void yet still keep the stakes high, can't wait to continue reading.  
also your art somehow looks even better than the last comic i read from you!!  

fucking great.

This comic was 2 and a half goddamn acts and I am excited to read more. The inclusion of other characters ties up disparate story elements that has taken nearly a year to develop on its own. The comic easily targets the new and old crowd and for the most part is an effort in centralizing a much needed setting. Void Comics can easily be tied up with simple plots if it made an effort to reach out to other stories more and gave other folks' events more context. This comic does that and it should show up more often.

While it is established that this piece is extremely competent and qualifies as a full episodical read through I hope you dont mind me jumping into some old school crits while the ideas are still fresh in my head.


"The linaeart is Too Big"
 I don't know if this is because your canvas is set to be extremely big or you are alloting more time to color your lines instead of carefully crafting each one but there is a strange feeling here that I get when I read through this comic style like you had to tackle a huge canvas, drew basic shapes and shrunk it down. But I dont think it has shrunk down enough.

 To illustrate I would have you look at your worst offender, page 15 and page 6. And your best incarnation of your own style on page 34 and page 23

I say its too big because my screen fills up with about 2 frames of your lovely painted style but those two frames would only have part of an eye or a face or an awkwardly drawn foot that seemed rushed.  On the other hand, the dynamic angles and the inclusion of background characters really fill the space on your best pages. Pages where there is a background is present seem to dodge this rule because your figures tend to read as more iconic poses than figures in a 3 dimensional plane.

-To fix this, you should look at more artists outside of just Endling and Oh Great.  Look at dynamic character to environment relationships in Ashley Wood paintings or the dynamic illustrative figures rendered by Laro Laro. Dresden Codak faced an opposite problem of filling up his pages TOO MUCH but eventually owned up to it with sharp coloring and painting that compressed within an inch big frame.

But if you want to stick to the guns of your style simply shrinking the frames down superficially gets rid of the eye flooding problem. Unfortunately despite how you paint these, your coloring is very limited to how well you render your lines and spaces which doesn't nail it as cleanly as how Endling does it with his free flowing pencils.

I would also suggest looking at environmental concept art to see if anything will blow your mind.

This is all very heavy stuff but your strong points and your weaknesses will be overcome in a near instant once you are aware of your own style.

Wow! Such comic! Totes love it, can't wait for issue 2

Omg this is so AWESOME!! I love Mize now!! So many cameos too. What a funny and alluring comic! I'll be watching Mize.

Carl, I already let you know some of my thoughts in the DeviantArt Chat.... but dang man.... excellent work. I agree with Bobo, it feels like you perfectly captured an anime in comic form. Your motion makes me feel like a little baby in comparison. So much motion was conveyed here, something I still have a very hard time with. It really looked great. The colors were also very good, I thought. I liked the painted backgrounds beneath the more sharply defined characters, really helps convey depth, at least to me.

Toast's "Did I stutter?" line..... perfection. :-) Can't wait for issue two!

Carl, I love how your comics really just feel like high-quality anime captured perfectly in comic form. I can definitely feel the influence, and I think it resonates with my past anime watching to help bring your comics to life. Action scenes are hard to get right, but I feel like you just totally NAILED it with this comic. I can follow the flow, I feel the kinetic energy, I can visualize the whole thing in my mind, and it doesn't feel rushed, forced, or resolved too quickly. And you accomplish so much action with each shot that you don't even need to spend tons of pages making the details of the battle clear. You just focus on the essential elements and let my mind fill in the rest, and it's perfect dude.

This comic has special appeal to me as someone who has also been on VOID in both the "Old Days" and more recently. I kinda wished that I had done a better job of reintroducing Ancelin to the city like you have hahah. It's fun to see some of those characters that have been lost to the winds of time, whom I miss very much (especially those characters whose stories were never resolved but their artists just moved on to other things).

And of course, you caught me in the heart with that second to last page and that kawaii-as-ohmygoodness-I-can't-believe-it cameo, teasing me for the next issue and leaving me begging for more hahah. Beyond my personal attachment to that particular page, it's also an excellent example of how effectively you tell stories visually. You provide this one-page sneak peek, and you do it using a scene where we're seeing the world come into view from Mize's perspective. It's like a sneak peek within a sneak peek hahah. It just works so well, and I think the entire comic is paced, laid out, and executed in such a way that I'm always kept interested and involved.

If you want me to really scrape your comic for tiny critiques, I would be happy to provide more, but I honestly would have to nitpick to come up with anything to improve upon (which sometimes is good, of course). Solid work, and I can't wait for the next installment!

Yooooooo, this be lookin awesome yooooooo!

Just gonna give a little tip regarding the fight sequence at the start, particularly the backgrounds. There are quite a few panels where I feel the characters are lost in the background. This is most likely because the background is just as crisp, detailed and most importantly coloured with the same tonal values as the characters.

Simplest fix is really just to blur up the backgrounds and/or make em lighter in value than the characters.

Anyway, good work dude. I'm so looking forward to the next one. :3

Great stuff man, though I would have liked to see more going on between pages 15-22 in the background. can't wait to see the next issue~

I think a lot of time Wolcik, that exposition comics on VOID tend to be very hard to do just because of the wealth of information that make up the DNA of a long running character. It's very spread out and convoluted when you think about it, no matter how much of an effort is made in keeping things coherent. Too many cooks in the kitchen. There is just too much to reasonably pack into a comic for a hobby site like VOID. I think the key is to try and keep it simple and to the bare essentials of what people need to know - present things that 'this is the way they are'. I guess keep things more standalone and not necessarily reliant on everyone else's interpretation, it allows the author more freedom to flesh things out without sticking to the ideas 5 or 6 other people have already made.

So yeah I do agree with you, the exposition comics on VOID can be quite muddled if you aren't already familiar with the characters or settings. I'd liken it to a long running comic like Spiderman or Batman or something where you already have 500+ issues and if you were to just jump in, things would be confusing. Or you can pull a Sheldon and have Charlie be aged up and still make a lot of sense to readers over what happened -  because the story is simple enough that people 'get it', which is something I wish I could do myself.

Anyway, Mamoru my bro:

That is one thing I do need to give props to this comic for - the time jump. The time jump to me felt like a rift between the old VOID and the new VOID in a way that I could almost relate to as a viewer. I haven't been around these parts in a while to really read anything aside from when people link me to what they have done - so the story itself makes no sense to me as much as it doesn't make sense to Mize. That said, I kind of liked your first timeline better and almost wished you had stuck with -that- and went in your own direction on how that would have played out.

Art is fantastic though all around dude.

Awesome stuff, I actually read it on first sitting which isn't standard for void comics these days. Backgrounds when present looks nice even if they don't match people in them. This story makes me wish I knew more backstory about the 3 cities - why nobody does exposition comics well?

this came out so well!! all the hard work you poured into it really paid off! the art is amazing, i love the colours and the action! And so many cameos, I cant believe how many you fit in there! ahh I can't think of anything bad to say except that I want more and there isn't any yet! (also I'm dyslexic and keep reading "Jong Dew" as "Dong Jew" but thats not your fault). Cant wait to see the next issue, Im super excited!

I love the time jump.

This was pretty rad dude.

Real enjoyable, man. Colors are vibrant and the visual fx are nicely done. The city feels alive with all the cameos and interaction going around which can be difficult to pull off so awesome work on that. Can't wait to see where this continues.

*SCREAMS* I love everything about thiissss

The text on page 32 was really really hard to read, but otherwise, that was totally awesome. It makes me want to comic. I love your Toast.

uploaded

For some reason, I think Issue 01.5 will be so much better than this one, but I'm excited for Issue 01 anyways.

In less than five days, I'll finally figure out who that other pyro is

OH MAN I CAN'T BELIE- waitaminute....

Oooooh snaaaap I did not see this coming.

Yeih, Mize my love

OOOOOOO

huuuuuuhh? MAMO IS BACK? WHUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU--?

yes lets ALL FEIGN SURPRISE

OH NO

whaaaaaaaaaaaa