Both of these comics were great!

Footini: I loved the imaginative setting of this comic! I liked the vibrant colors and your layouts were really fun! I'm really interested to see where you take Saal from here!

Flytee: First and foremost I'm impressed by just the amount of comic you were able to produce. Thinking back to my own output I'm just blown away. I liked how we learned more about the cult through Lucy's backstory and I actually really like how Rae and Saal don't actually interact. The sequence of Rae soul weaving Lucy's soul out was really well done and looked cool. Also I'm really jealous of how readable you handwritten text is.

Woo finally got around to this. What a frikkin fun ride from both of you!

Footini - Love your use of colors here so vibrant! And I really like  Saal's  explanation about how this new 'realm' came to be (Is it still what I think it is based from what we talked about? hehehe). It just makes sense in my head. And is that the purple drink Saal Rae? Hopefully we get to know more about Saal's backstory in your  next comics as opposed to Saal playing the role of a facilitator to other characters.

Flytee - I can't believe you're able to put this much story in your comic. This is like Heavyweight level right here! Your characterization of Saal is also well done and faithful to what I know  about the character. Rae is such a a lovable person no matter what and I am impressed that Lucy herself has such an interesting story. It doesn't look like we've seen the last of her though! Can't wait for the next adventure.

What a great battle indeed!  

Good job both of you with these comics.

Footini: I love your colors, you managed to find a good pallet that is psychedelic and with lots of bright colors but not too saturated. You should get a custom font on one of the comic sties because the one you're using is a disservice to your good dialogue.

Flytee: I only just now noticed the Catador cameo and I appreciate it, thank you. This is a fantastic comic all around. only a couple of minor crits i have, the first being that some places the color fills get a little sloppy and go a bit outside where they're supposed to. Also some of the borders have a weird square tangent thing that doesn't look intentional. I will say the layouts and experiments you do in this are really cool. also it's a bit of a shame we only got lucy's backstory right when you killed her off but that's just a minor thing that may just be me.

In both of these comics, the most powerful magic of all is CAT.

Footini: How/why did Rae wind up here? Who cares? Here's Saal with a drink relaxing under a parry-sol, in a setting that doesn't really makes sense, but suits them and their "vibe" very well. In a world without the other comics, this would have been a good way to introduce Saal, their personality, abilities, and familiars. Although, it's a little inconsistent how much Saal seems to know and don't know about Rae. This version of traditional comics with digital finishing is nice. It can be a bit rough, but it's visible and the texture gives it a kind of indie comic feel. I wonder if there are ways to further process it to work with it (like adding a texture to your colors, or making the text bubbles more analog-looking). The way the panels can be a little off kilter is a bit distracting though.

Flytee: Wow! This was a real multilayered episode. I really appreciate it when an artist gets very into their opponent character, and here we get to spend time with Saal, hear their inner monolog, how they talk with Egos, do business, spend their time, and so on, and it was all in the service of your greater narrative. I like the way you're able to do that without your characters taking over and making the opponent's involvement seem incidental. The shifting levels of rendering and coloring even coincide with story beats. I really enjoyed this comic.

@snager
Thanks for taking the time to leave a long crit & welcome to void!
I understand that you're new to the site, and this not an ideal first comic from the "Rae and Blue" achieve... This story is a lot better with context, but I still tried to make it entertaining as a one-off read. So I'm happy it kept your attention at least.

I just want to address some of your crits.

Re "Which character is the most important??"

Saal is technically the main character, they investigate and push the story along.
However, all of the characters important in their own way, they all play their part in the story. The second half has the focus shifts to Rae when events call for it.
Even though void is OCvsOC you can deviate from the classic 50% of the limelight approach. Side characters can pop up sometimes (in this case Lucy, who has featured in many of my past comics).

Re "your style of depicting text and dialogue is inconsistent"

Yeah I agree in hindsight there were too many types of text bubbles- Saal and Rae both had two types depending on their situation. I can actually see how that would get confusing, so noted. Thank you.

Re "Your panel layouts where all over the place etc etc"

eh, I made visual changes when I felt it was suitable in the story/ to add impact. Trust me some thought did go behind the layouts. I do agree with you about page 3- I wasn't happy with it when I submitted it.

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I have been having some issues with Rae and Blue, my original idea when I brought them into Void was to tell one linear narrative. With other characters weaved in- I have an ending planned, where I will retire the characters.
But the further along in the story I get the more I feel like it'll just be confusing for people who don't read all my battles, or people who are new like yourself. I'm seriously considering just moving this into a webcomic format.

Footini: I love your color design and the flow of your character's acting. I like rough looking comics, but your stuff has a few too many craftsmanship issues. for example, It looks like you're scanning traditional media but a few panels look like they didn't get pressed to the glass all the way. some of your lines, esp. panels, are looking  too often like an after-thought or like a single-pass line. While I do like loose art styles, I'd say work on a more confident and committed line work to build form/shapes/depth. You could do that with a looser pencil stage then a tighter inking stage or just sit and do quick studies in your sketchbook until you git gud at drawing straight to ink. however, your style is good at depicting depth already so don't forget to keep building that skill set evenly so your props, settings and characters maintain this same nice equality.
I like your story telling style, just that classic sort of comic book shop single.
 Also work on mechanical stuff, like tiding up your word balloons: I'd like to see you commit to either a loose balloon or a graphical one but consider more where your balloons / speech is going to go in conjunction with your art work.

Flytee: your comic was so long I was intimidated by it at first: but then it turned out to be a roller coaster of emotions that kept me hanging on the whole time. I was a little confused as to who the characters were / who was supposed to be most important. It seemed like the man who had his ex erased was supposed to be a big deal - we're helping him, right? but then no, its the Ex herself that is most important, actually. no, wait again, its the mysterious horror terror gods. jk, they're humans. then the focus shifts over back and forth between the points of view of Sall and Rae and even the Fleshweaver girl (only to have that character quickly killed off. is she someone's void character? I'm new here.) - its kind of a lot, even for the high number of pages you have already.
your style of depicting text and dialog is inconsistent - I get that this is supposed to show a shift between the spirit plane and real life, but I did get confused who was speaking. there were also times where the painting behind the text wasn't filled in enough and actually made the words optically hard to read for me.
also, your comicing style was all over the place. I guess you're using this big project to experiment with as many styles as possible or maybe you were working on the project so long, your brain was in a different place each session you sat down to work in. I can respect you trying to get creative with your panel layouts, but i did infact wind up reading them out of order on page three. soon after that, you start using more conservative comic styles. I take it you realized the crazier layouts are a lot of work to get right.
it's such a great story though, it would have helped the coherency of the plot to pick just one middle-road comicing style for the whole thing.

both: you're both going for really surreal and difficult subject matter with the memory of a memory and pocket dimension episodes. and i'm happy with how well you both manage it in your own ways! i also noticed both of you making little typos and usage errors. not a super big deal though, since i've picked up graphic novels off the shelf at stores and found the same in those pages. :/

I hope these critiques are fair and helpful! I'm still learning to comic, but I did take plenty of studio art classes, so it's nice to critique something that deserves it again! GOOD WORK YOU GUYS!

foot: this was cute! there's a lot of fun interactions here, plus you get a much better feel about what saal's deal and realm even is than ever before. i'm also a big fan of how this looks; i dunno why you experimented with traditional but it looks real dang solid! the comic makes sense  in the context of "this is happening while rae is shackled up in cultville" assuming saal can just roll up to people like this, but since you don't have that context definitively defined until the very end, the events seemed really arbitrary and conflictless to me until i could retroactively make sense of them. i think it's just really cute that saal can neatly fit into rae's story as a little pick-me-up! good comic!
 
flyt: man, i was gonna just be satisfied with the comic ending on page 8, despite the lack of rae or blue, but then there was THREE TIMES THAT MANY PAGES!! and i'm glad it did because the rest of the comic CONTINUED TO BE EXCELLENT. you art's super consistent and you're def showing a lot of confidence in doing more complex things in it, i love the fleshweaving, fleshweaving looks very nice, i gotta give props for all the lines you have to draw with soulweaving as well. the development going on here has got me very "OOOOOO," and the internal struggle rae's going through has got me EVEN MORE "OOOOOO". the way saal's integrated into it is also really fun and creative! i adored this, and am more hype than ever to see where rae's story is going, now that we know what the heck's going on with her.

You both did a great job with your comics!

I love the psychedelic world and trippy atmosphere of footini's comic, tho i think it's a bit out of character of Rae to instantly trust a stranger in a weird place like this.

And i loved the suspenseful build-up of flytee's story until it reached it's climax with rae facing lucy for the last time, and revealing she's an actual god! even tho Saal, Rae and Blue didn't directly interacted it worked perfectly well! (also thanks for the cameo!)

Wowzers the two of you pulled out all the stops. Cults, wizards and, ghosts oh my!

Footini - It was very neat of you to have Saal just hanging out on the cusp of spacetime relaxing in the primitive surroundings. I really enjoyed seeing this finished peice from you and look forward to your future work!

Flytee - Extraordinary management of time and story. This was a real treat, of which, I gorged myself heedlessly before going to bed. Would you believe that I had a dream with Rae, Blue and, Saal included? I am glad to see your pages keep a set format and you use the space accordingly. Fantastic work. Curious to know what kind of trouble Blue is getting into. '3'

I love both of these so freaking much!

Footini -  I really like this strange and vibrant world you’ve crafted. The colours were good, and there were a lot of nice details, like the hat umbrella and later the Parry umbrellas, the planet in the background, the strange arches. I like how the buildings of other universes looked almost like crystals at first! To me, anyway. Idk if it’s a different style you’re going for but the hair looked different to me here and I really dug it. Also liked panel 1 page 8, the big swoosh was pretty cool.

The slanted borders and sloppy speech bubbles were really distracting for me though. I understand you drew and inked the comic out traditionally and then coloured it digitally? The edges of the boxes appear straight, so I’m guessing you used a ruler, yet they’re all slanted and often run off the page. I’d suggest drawing margins on your pages next time so that you can align the boxes and make sure they’re not cut off when you scan them. You had a whole month, that wouldn’t have taken much time (same goes for the bubbles).

Rae’s behaviour also didn’t make sense to me here. She’s very nonchalant, despite being thrown into this weird mindscape and offered an unknown substance by a stranger. Meanwhile later, she has this giant freak out at the mere mention of Hendrix. The intensity of her emotions is inappropriate to the events. I actually didn’t get a sense of either Rae or Blue’s personality here, their reactions feel necessary for the plot to continue rather than IC.

Flytee - Ho. Ly. Crap. I fucking loved this. It was SO GOOD AHHH!! I feel like Saal gave you the opportunity to experiment with colours because those first few pages are absolutely mwah chef’s kiss, just beautiful. I adore this pale blue/fuchsia palette and the brush you used for the gradient effect. I loved the imagery on pages 20 and 21, the way you drew the soul spiralling up the sky. You draw swirly shapes really nicely so they’re always nice to see haha. Also Egos was adorable.

As for story... again, wow. You wove so much stuff together in a way that worked and felt natural. I honestly don’t even mind that Rae and Saal had little interaction because you just made it work somehow. They may not have physically interacted, but narratively their storylines were tightly woven together, so I’d say it counts! The flesh weaving reveal, and other hints of the cult, via the memory Saal had to erase was really clever, not to mention chilling. Lucy’s ex barely has any screentime and yet I feel really sorry for him. And the reveal that Rae is essentially a god, and her snapping? Holy shit. Just wow. I’m simultaneously more eager to see how her story goes AND fight you now.

PS I liked that little Easter egg with the dating app. Chadly McChad, omg. And is it weird I kinda wanna see how a date between Rae and Ghost?

I loved both of these, nice work to both of you!

Footini: I love the mix of humor and seriousness you put into your comics, it makes them so enjoyable to read! Your style lends very well to your narration, and I enjoyed the bright colors you used. I also like how you tied in this scene with Flytee's narrative with her characters and their timeline!

Flytee: Your style seems different in this comic, and I'm loving it! Your storytelling is wonderful, and I really want to see what Rae does with this development to her! I think the choice to tell the story in the way you did worked really well, even if the two (four) didn't really interact!

Sidenote: This battle really just makes me want to fight both of you, lol.

I don't have a clue how this comic will be recieved, I hope people enjoy it for what it is!

Saal felt like the perfect, competent protagonist to do damage control & explore some lore, so I wanted to focus on that as well as world-building.  

Thank you Footini for the battle, I dug your comic.