Now this is a toon off!

MRPR-Yup, Mona Lisa is definitely drawn badly. So evil!
It's always so arresting to see a whimsical being partaking in the seedier aspects of humanity. Definitely a way to grip your reader from the get as it all fizzles down into the worst hangover ever.  I feel some of the language barrier kind of left me rattling down the track of narrative you were trying to portray here. Especially with the small gags you had in here.

You also has a really cool reveal with the true culprit of Hunters attacker, but I feel the dialogue and the route to get there felt a bit off. Still though, you've had such an upward sail when it comes to your comics with this tournament its clear you are really amped for this showdown.

PITA- This is a solid comic. The colors, the cool angles with Mona Lisa's inky reveal and artistic licensed look super appeal. The transition from Mona to Lisa behind the curtain was to be my favorite bit. You definitely took some inspiration from Who Framed roger Rabbit with that leg peek that I was DYING to see an equally impressive reaction panel from our talent judges and bummed we didnt get it. It just felt "meh' apart from Conway so as a reader I was like 'should I be meh too? I mean I was initially dazzled.."
I also am not sure if the arrest was played straight or as a gag because the elements outside of Mona herself seemed so chill about it. Mona's expression even looks genuinely concerned as opposed to a punchline.
I'm well into Round 2 and I'm still not in the loop over who this Hunter is, but we still got a finale to go!

Now lemme start first by saying these are both pretty good comics!!

MRPR: First of all, I do enjoy the ending you got here, you definitely had me worrying for Conway. But, I feel your comic could've benefited from having those textures you put in be a different color or atleast be a little less pronounced, maybe even something akin to mangatone would've worked better? To me, they muddle up a lot of the colors across the pages. Also a nitpick, in the first page the muscle guy could've had his back muscles toned down a lot, it took me a while to figure out what exactly was happening and what he was. Other than that though this is a pretty good read!

Pita: This honestly was a really fun, the amount of creativity you put into the different toons trying out and the cameos you had were really fun! I loved your characterization of Mona and Lisa and you have a knack for adapting characters into your style. I loved the amount of puns you put into this too. I do think this is a good set up for whatever your next comic featuring Hunter and Merry's relationship will be though. This was honestly really good!

monsieur pr: i thought this was pretty investing! merry and conway trying to cheer this girl up in a way that feels very like them. i think your panel compositions are pretty good, you had plenty of jokes i liked and the dialogue felt well-paced, and the way the ending hard-cuts into the monster stalking was super neat! all in all, this is perhaps the best comic i've seen from you, and i really liked it!

pita: the talent show plot is very clever and i love basically every shot of the judge's panel, seeing merry's disillusioned face alongside these two bozos is great. however, i don't feel like it really lets mona or lisa shine very well, since you kind of sacrifice the conflict between the characters for more talent show development in terms of page count. still, i loved what was here!

I enjoyed both comics and the massively different takes on the matchup! It was hard to pick.

MRPR - Great improvement from your last entry btw! I love the twist and the dark theme of your version. I saw a few typos here and there and really appreciate that you did backgrounds as well.One suggestion is to put something on the walls next time.  A picture , window or some posters so they don't look so bare.

Pita- Your art is just perfect for Toon town and the cameos are amazing! It's great to see some of the Toon characters in colors too I really enjoyed that. I just  wish you showed us MonaLisa ended up getting arrested though. It would've been great to see that fight!

MrPR: This is a great story and has so much more weight than your previous. I love the set up with Merry taking her in knowing that this will be a bad result and how they play it off as a joke but we know it's the real deal, the twist with Hunter getting stabbed but not dieing is really cool and you set up for it very well. I do like the texture you used but you should not have it cover the characters the same way it covers the background.

Pita: i Love your art, your inks are goals for how clean and expressive they are. also the colors all look nice. I like the story with the auditions and how you interpreted MonaLisa with the ink dress being really cool. also just calling the cops on her was a funny deescalation.
As for Hunter I think we need to see his true colors. so far you have only vaguely hinted at stuff but there has not been enough details for us to be scared or worried about anything yet. The closest was in Karma's comic where the constant obsessive texting was a good way to show how uncomfortable Hunter is. I know you have a script for a BB planned but I think you can't wait anymore for that BB and you need show us how horrible Hunter truly is in the next comic. The way you talk about Hunter, you want him to be hated and want Merry to get out of this relationship immediately, however right now there is lots of room for redemption and for a potential good side to him, which to my knowledge is not what you want. We need to see in uncomfortable detail why this relationship is toxic and why Merry is so scared of Hunter. You have been trying to make Hunter an imposing figure but without seeing what he's capable of some of that kind of falls flat.
That all being said I love Merry and relaly want to see more of your story.

@MrPr: I enjoyed seeing all these character interactions. The build-up of events was good and well planned. The way you illustrate expressions is very effective in clearly depicting emotion.

@Pita: This was a very creative set-up for a battle. I liked seeing all these unique characters go to the auditions. Page 2 had a nice variety of camera angles.

These were both fun reads!

Pita- I think art wise you're one of my favorites people on void. There's just something so pleasing and clean about your style and colouring. I really like it. Your interpretation of Lisa was great too! I love the inky black dress it was a really nice touch.
I'm relatively new here, so the impact of the Hunter x Merry stuff at the end fell a little flat for me.
I'm actually a huge fan of people having continuity in their comics on here, so I'm not mad that you have this interpersonal drama happening within the battle. I just think it might've been good to have it weaved into the narrative a bit more. Like maybe having a scene in the middle of the comic- showing Hunter getting closer to the theatre and angrier would've been effective. Having that part of the story building up alongside the stuff with Monalisa would've given the end panel of Hunter confronting Merry a lot more punch..
Because honestly by the time we got to the end of the comic I'd forgotten about Hunter. I hope this feedback makes a bit of sense, I kinda went a bit rambly there haha  

MrPr- This comic was a great step up, It was a fun read! I agree with a lot of the previous feedback so I wouldn't harp on too much. The textures were a good addition imo, but go easy on them a bit. I think they were overkill on some pages and gave everything a grimy feel, Which didn't feel suitable in certain scenes (the apartment for example) keep experimenting with them though!
Yeah just keep doing what your doing, you're clearly improving with each comic.

MrPr: hey narratively this is definitely a level up! This was an engaging story with some nice surprises that kept it fresh! Congrats! I'll give you one simple tip for future comics playing with this texture: don't add the characters to the same texture as the backgrounds. Either give them two different texture filters or don't add a texture overlay on the characters at all, either will look better than what you're doing right now.  

Pita: Was your unofficial editor for this battle I don't got much to say that you didn't already know/address, it's cool that you had time ultimately to color everything and it all looks mostly profesh, good job. It's clear that the cars are killing you though, even on the last page it looks like the police car shrank to toy size once it drove off. Trust me I know it's unappealing but even just a day of just practicing drawing different cars over and over would do wonders to help you out going forward

MrPr - I think this is the best comic I’ve seen from you so far. Your backgrounds are clearer and more developed, and I think the texture adds a lot, especially in Mona-Lisa’s case as she’s supposed to be kind of dark and gritty. I also like how you integrated other characters from Merry’s story, it gave the story more depth. I expected it to be another “Mona loses control and kills/tries to kill someone as Lisa” comic, and while it still kind of was, having Hunter be the victim and the attack being a twist that didn’t even happen in the present was something I didn’t expect.

The biggest thing I think you should work on now is your shading. In this comic at least, most of your shading appears to be just cut out circles regardless of the shape and texture of whatever’s being shaded, and the lighting is always shining directly forward onto the character. It’s particularly noticeable on page 1, Merry on page 4 (clearly visible that you cut out a circle around him and his phone in the last panel) and the room on page 5 (it appears to have a spotlight but Merry and Conway are still lit up when they should be in shadow). Some of your phrasing is also really weird, for example on page , “I might do something you’ll never apologise me” makes no sense, even though I know what you’re trying to say.

Pita - Really enjoyed this. Imo this flows super well from the last comic and continues Merry’s story while not sacrificing Mona-Lisa’s! The mood change from rather lighthearted and funny (I loved the skeleton joke and Riley just coming back as different styles) to serious was done pretty well too. I loved how you drew Lisa, especially making her dress out of ink and the ink transformation, I thought that was really clever. And was that a Jessica Rabbit reference? I like.

Crit-wise, I think you should have explained a little more why Hunter’s mad at Merry, and why Merry should be scared. I know why, because I’ve heard about him through Discord and read your Meet Merry script, but imo without the soft reset comic it may not be clear to some readers why this guy would be mad about Merry holding a fundraiser. We know he’s possessive from Merry vs Conway but there’s a big difference between wanting to know where your partner is all the time and getting mad enough to scare said partner over holding an event for a good cause.

PS I don’t wanna be dumb and assume every red and black cat is Gold but if that is Gold on the first page thank you?? He’s adorable ;w;

We still got a few days to get this done, so have a couple points of trivia--

- A thrust stage is a type of stage where a portion of it juts out into the audience space.  Think something similar to the runways of fashion shows.

- Typically musical theatre auditions will ask you to sing 16 bars of a song.  I did my best to pick a song that could be quick enough to use as an audition piece while still capturing the mood of the character.  The more memorable part of the song got cut to comply with that restriction, but if you wanna listen to the song in its entirety, here ya go--
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3MamvKeOvg