Footini you got me pretty good with that line "You think this is a heckin game Merry?" You also did such a fun range of expressions!

Damn your cute way of drawing Pita! That kitsune is so cute! I love her.

Real quick comments before I get back to Lovechild:

Pita: your comic was lovely and wholesome af. Very on-brand. I enjoy the lightheartedness and goofiness of the whole thing, too. Your expressions are wonderful. Also I have a total crush on Ms. Kitt 😔

Footini: Also a very cute comic! I love how snappy the banter is between Merry and Dan, and the little romantic subplot warmed my heart. I think I missed a reference or two, but I enjoyed all the little gags that I did get. And Dan's serious face is flawless. Wrapping the whole thing up with a meta joke about being a side comic was amazing. And ftr the new mayor would not find this show tacky 😘

I think this match up is a good example of the community's shift in interest in valuing story and character interaction. I think it's clear Dan uki was the comedic showrunner in Footini's side. It's comfort zone for the artist and their place of power. You don't get much more in the zone than a toon engaging in some antics. The gags were really funny, Merry being the straight man, but still be funny doing so was a great sharing of the narrative wealth. This comic made me smile and I think when it comes to toons AND comics, that's a win.

That's not to say this isn't without its places for work and polish. I defintiely agree your quality took a dip here. Even if they are toons, your anatomy definitely needs work. You tend to default in designing your characters like teddy bears where their limbs are just sort of sewn onto a jellybean torso and don't really interface . Despite their looser constraints, even toons need some sort of framework to flow and move. I'd give old Classics like Tex Avery, Chuck Jones or Bob Clampett. I think it'd really punch up your writing and humor if the art itself was pushed -even under tight deadlines like this battle.

I also think your framing and panel composition could do with some TLC. The 'this is a heckin game' gag would've really been brought home if the event playing out in those last two panels weren't so squished. All in all though, you've proved you're kind of the slapstick to beat!

As for Pita, I think technically your art is lovely. It flows, there's movement. I especially like the crossover panel action on page 3 where Dan Uki snatches up the bone. Honestly, the aspects where you made it your own interested me. The aspects where it fell eerily in line with a popular Marvel series currently on air stagnated it. I know you've made mention you haven't seen it yet, but this whole exchange, down to the choking is action for action exactly a WandaVision episode. Which is fine! I think it would've been stronger if you'd made it your own in some way, taken us off the tracks and offroaded it a bit with more of the tanuki magic in a simple way that would've made more sense. Boss is a cat and doesnt like dogs is clean cut and to the point. Tying it into void events I think was a spirited attempt ,but it definitely muddled things for me trying to make sense of it. Heck, when they sit down to dinner I was SO READY for the awkward hijinks of dinner conversation, but all we get was some silent panels of Merry sweating it. Sweating it over what? What's going on in his head or off camera  that would've tittilated us?

It's interesting that you both have opposite areas to work on, but I wish you luck in beefing up in future battles!

Pita - Arts went on too deep a dive for me and while I don’t agree with all of his points, I do agree with his points about the meta confusion and disguises. I was really confused as to why Dan was particularly at risk, especially because Merry didn’t phrase it as “Ms Kitt doesn’t know I’m married to a handsome magic raccoon dog”, just that he was a “handsome raccoon dog”. I didn’t know why being a dog was the issue. Is it because of the idea that cats hate dogs? In which case it probably shouldn’t have been mixed in with the Phoenix Coalition stuff, as it makes it seem like Dan’s “dogness” was the issue to the coalition, not him having magic or being a toon/furry. Also yeah, since your style is more simplified than most, some of the differences between the animals are lost? Arts said it all though so I won’t repeat things.

However, I did enjoy this comic, visually it was nice and perfectly polished. Your monotone is very good and your lines and style so pleasant that I don’t really feel it needs rendering or fancy backgrounds. The dynamics between the characters were enjoyable and the jokes cute. Honesty to me the only issue was mentioning the Phoenix Coalition, otherwise I’d call this a pretty tight story.

Footini - Since you’ve been improving a lot recently, the drop in quality here was jarring. I liked some of the jokes, mainly the “serious face” one (also bonus points from me for actually drawing a proper raccoon dog and not a raccoon), but a lot of the meta ones felt more like covering up the issues in the comic than being clever. Idk if I can really criticise you for taking a battle during another battle though, since Void really is just addictive like that haha.

I liked both of these quite a bit for being cute and well made short reads.
Pita, a little more explanation about what the Phoenix Coalition is for the uninitiated reader would have helped a little but there was a very good layer of polish on this comic and was still very enjoyable.

Footini, your characters were kind of all over the place, even for toons but even then I legit laughed out loud at Dan’s serious face and I do lov some good fourth wall breaking.

Pita: your art is great as always, I also really like all the expressions you did for this. The main problems come from the use of Phoenix coalition.  The Phoenix coalition I has been established as against all non-humans, not just metas. in the Sky falls comic Smile's big speech about against non-humans, that includes all furries, not just the magic ones. So using the phoenix coalition as just anti-meta but being okay with furries was a take I couldn't suspend my disbelief for.

The other thing is that while Dan's disguise is meant to be bad I do think there should have been more differences in Kitts two forms, since both of them read to me more as fox than cat. there are lots of types of cats and I think you should have used rounder features and a smaller tail to make the difference and change more obvious. it doesn't really read as a twist when she changes to have a bigger fox muzzle, so doing more would have helped make that twist with an impact, I honestly thing you should have gone the whole way of making her first form a human form.

As I'm writing this and going over it again the plot and theme of this comic are very confused. there are funny moments in this with the expressions but this feels like a light hearted drama more than a comedy. Page 2 is all about building up tension and drama and while Merry's expressions are great, it's not that humorous in the situation of worrying about Dan getting caught and murdered by the evil coalition. There is also the really obvious disguise of dan which is supposed to be humorous, but Kitt has just as bad a disguise that she uses in her every day life to avoid the same fate. So a lot of these jokes are undercut with the horrifying backdrop it's in.

A lot of humor comes from subverting expectations and this comic didn't subvert any of the big expectations set up in it. The main expectation in it is "This is in the anti-meta Phoenix Coalition is a big problem and they can't avoid getting found out."
There are lots of humorous ways to subvert this; have this be like a tv set, have the phoenix coalition be silly and irreverent, clarify it's non-human and not just non-meta and then they all get in trouble. Those are just some quick ideas but the point is you should find a way to subvert that major expectation that you find funny.

There is also expectations that comes from you as a writer and you need to be aware of those and finding ways to lampshade or subvert those can be good for humor as well. That's just all stuff to work on when you do future light hearted comics, this type of fluff stuff is good to see with Merry and this is still a really solid comic, just maybe not as committed to the genre you were going for.

Footini: you are a comic addict doing a battle in-between tourney rounds like a nut and I have so much respect for that. the comic obviously suffered from the lack of time but I like how you acknowledged that with your story and worked with it. Though even with the short time I do think you should try to come up with some more shortcut/cheat ways to do backgrounds to give them a little more life than flat colors, having a couple of those in their own files that you can just pull up and paste into comcis will help with comcis on short deadlines. I do also like the jabs at yourself more than in your previous comic, last time it just felt like you were being mean to yourself where as this it comes off more lighthearted and in an enjoyable way. Good quick comic overall.

'I'll just' *poof* 'take the dog out!' (9/10 on the laugh scale ) Pita, yours looks so polished and print ready. and the story is feeding my 'Wondavision should have been a 40 episode slow burn' rage.

I definitely didn't see the twist coming, pita. nor did I see footini's twist. that was some heavy duty 4th wall breakage. gonna need a contractor to put that wall back up.

Okay done.

For this comic I tried to implement more pringling into my style and pay more attention to high and low frequency fields among various right angles within the panels.  It's kind of tricky to get right so any advice on that would be appreciated.

And Thank you to Pita for taking me up on this battle, getting to fight one of my friends and one of the artists that got me onto void has been a pleasure.

This one goes out to you, Lucky

I never claimed to have impulse control.