Thank you to everyone for the comments/crits! They're all a tremendous help for going forward! (Also sorry for the lateness of this reply, I've been without internet for a few days and I didn't want to do this from my phone, but now it's looking like I have no choice.)

@cy Thank you for such a great comic! I know you were worried about the amount of time you got to work on it but it came out great! I loved how you portrayed Jerin and I love Hathsha!
Edit: I almost forgot! I'm super jealous of how you draw Hathsha, she looks so organic and natural in your style.

@dechado thank you for the kind words. Also of course the mermen would be pantsless!

@Flutterbyes @artsandgoodies and @flytee your crits have given me a pretty good idea of pitfalls to watch out for in the future. I will say that I did have an additional 2-3 pages planned that would have helped the ending but I was getting pressed for time and had to cut the comic short. Hence the rather abrupt ending. @Arts in particular I agree that I needed to give my dialogue a few more passes, I probably had the time to do so, but convinced myself I didn't. I don't know what happened with the word balloons, but yeah, they were kinda sloppy.

Also @Flytee, my fiance listens to My Favorite Murder all the time and she was probably listening to it while I was writing the intro, lol.

Thank you all again to everyone who read and voted!

@Cy thanks for the explaination! Its helped me understand your choice a lot more- especially the bit about her not having an intro. With all that in mind, I think you showed her personality super well in those early pages! I love Hathsha. so. much. ;_;  

@Dechado @Flutterbyes @Flytee Thank you, and I’m really glad you all liked my portrayal of her body language!

@Flytee I do also wanna explain my pacing though. The baking wasn’t supposed to be the main point of the story. Since Hathsha doesn’t have an intro, I wanted to use this battle to semi-introduce her as well and show how she might operate. She needs to question this pretty uncooperative guy, and offers a deal in the form of something he won’t say no to - a duel. She doesn’t tell him what kind of duel it is until after he accepts, then picks a non-combative battle that he’s sure to lose. And ultimately, she gets what she wants. The baking was incidental and could have been anything Jerin wasn’t good at.

I included a lot of panels with no dialogue or like two words max, to draw it out and show Jerin’s stubbornness. If I had more time, I would have actually made the conversation longer, because Hathsha jumped pretty quickly to bargaining after just one refusal to answer. Maybe I would have had a page where she goes on about how people have been hurt by the anomalies, how he was their only lead, bla bla bla and had him repeatedly say no until she has to offer up the duel. That might have been more satisfying?

But yeah anyway. I wanted to show that Hathsha is indeed a cute, polite little alien who wants to solve crime, but she’s more wily than she seems. I’m guessing the problem here was that I wasn’t obvious enough, or that there were tonal issues. The ending might have been too over the top and comedic if I wanted people to pay closer attention to the prior situation. I did want that segment to be fun but maybe I made it too fun?

@ArtsandGoodies Thanks! I could imagine in the actual show Jozzik would be doing those little motions in person as they baked, haha.

Ober: Good job with this comic, my favorite part is page 9 as I feel the final pose is the strongest with some dynamic action going on. While a basic shonen type of story is fine, but your dialogue wasn't gripping enough for me to get invested. The prime example of this is on page 5 "The fishmen have taken us prisoner in here! I think they're going to eat us!" This line has no emotion to it and is just describing what's going on to move the plot going forward. If someone is a prisoner to fishmen and is thinking they are going to be eaten, they would be  feeling intense emotions of anger, fear and a sudden sense of hope. This effects how they would talk, currently the prisoner doesn't seem all that worried about the situation with your current dialogue.
It's important to go over your dialogue multiple times and around the point when you're putting it on the page well after the scripting phases and some of the sketching/inking is when you should more closely look at all of it and think of ways it could sound more like this exact person is saying it while feeling emotions they should during this circumstance. that being said Jerin's voice is really clear and you nailed most of his dialogue in this. Also your bubbles are sloppy at some points and a bit distracting.
Beyond that this was a solid comic and Jerin is a fun character to see.


Cy: I don't see what you mean about the lines, they are clean throughout your comic and good overall. My favorite thing that i absolute love is the little Jozzik drawings on page 7, sometimes the simpliest stuff can have the biggest impact and those cute little drawings i absolutely love. Also the idea of Hathsha challenging Jerin to a bakeoff is a cute idea as well. Even though this comic doesn't have all the fancy details of a comic with no time limit, but it has a strong core that is quite enjoyable.

Obergoat: I love how you introduced Hathsha: Listening to true crime, excited to do some investigating, but also visually introduced so that one might initially think the comic is introducing her as the being behind it. Not a bad way to introduce Jerrin and intertwine their interests at the start, but since it ends with Hathsha leaving while Jerrin fights offscreen, it feels like there isn't a payoff to this setup, especially for Hathsha. As striking as Jerrin's brutal introduction was, I would have been more satisfied it had been sacrificed in favor of more resolution to your setup.

 Cydork: There is just something so charming about the way you depict Hathsha's stance and body language. While her face is limited in expression, you're very good at nonhuman appeal in ways I can't quite put my finger on. Also, the duel's sudden change in visuals and tone just cracked me up. The setup and resolution don't feel balanced BUT that kind of silliness is aided by an off-kilter quality anyway.

OberGoat: I love Jerry. He's very angry, he's very powerful, and he has blue hair!
Your comic felt well balanced between being mysterious, funny, and badass. I really liked the way you interpreted Hathsha, she looks adorable in your style!
Also thank you for pantless mermen, know that I am very grateful.
Looking forward to see more of Jerin in the future, good job!

Cy: Despite you mentioned this is "incomplete", I quite enjoyed it. While I am aware the characters being highlighted was because of lack of time, I thought it made the comic look very clean.
Hathsha is a quirky one, and I really like her. I love, love how you drew her body language.

OBERGOAT- PURE shounen goodness- an edgy dude with impressive hair takes on the bad guys. This was just a lot of fun. The art was generally solid, there were some technical errors but it was never distracting for me.
Occasionally I questioned your choices with panel layout and size- using page 3 as an example - panel 7 and 8 (showing Jerin watching Hathsha being ambushed from afar.) Those were some cool visuals and it's the first appearance of the main character, It didn't make much sense to have it in a tiny panel on the bottom of the page- that took away some impact for me.

Writing wise- like I said Shounen goodness, its a straight forward "monster of the week" story and it works in that regard. However, it isn't particularly challenging and a lot of things feel just a bit too convenient and like set up. These types of stories are in danger of becoming old fast. It'll be nice to see more twists and turns in your next comic/ a bit more of a struggle.

Oh also have you even listened to the "my favourite murder" podcast because I mentally read all that opening dialogue in the host's voices xD

Cy- I find Hathsha's mannerisms really endearings, seeing her in action is great shes so loveable. The ending of this story was rather amusing and wholesome too. Yeah, it was cute comic!

crit: The pacing.
For me there was too much set up to get to the entertaining part of the story (The bake-off!) imo light-hearted comedic stories can get away with having a snappier setup- that could literally just be a narration. I would've liked to see more of these pages spent on the baking antics, as opposed to a rather basic conversation.  





 

PLEASE READ BEFORE COMMENTING!

Due to a bunch of irl stuff being thrown in my face, while I would say this is technically finished, there is a lot of stuff missing and cut corners here and It Shows. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do the backgrounds I had in mind, or even colour, so I just focussed on lining the main characters and getting all the speech bubbles in place so the story was clear and complete. As such there are some problems I’m aware of and are purely because of the lack of time:

> Missing characters/objects/backgrounds - I didn’t want to leave sketchy elements because my thumbs are extremely illegible (even to myself sometimes), so a lot of things were straight up nixed for clarity since I didn’t have time to line everything.

> Poor lines/form - had to go straight from thumbs to lines, and rushed said lines as well. I had so little time I think the only parts that had sketches were the more geometric objects like tables.

So I don’t need these pointing out ^^” Feel free to crit any other aspects. I’m particularly interested in thoughts on panelling and layout, because for once I actually did all the thumbs first instead of doing the main beats and muddling through the rest. I tried to vary my shots and add more fullbodies, and I want to know if I’m on the right track!

Thank you Ober for the extension again, and I hope you like my portrayal of Jerin! I’m sorry I couldn’t do a better comic for you and would definitely like to battle you again sometime in the future. Thank you to Bat too for letting me borrow Jozzik!

ANYWAY time to give my Thoughts:

Ober, I really enjoyed this! I liked how you set the scene on the first page, and you portrayed Hathsha in such a cute way, especially her body language. I also really appreciate you noticing her weird feet instead of giving her generic bird feet. I love how Jerin looks dramatic or is at a cool camera angle in almost every panel he’s in as well, it gives him this fun over the top vibe. Especially the panels where it was just his hand zooming out, those were really cool and I envy your foreshortening skills!

Ok I’m genuinely worried I won’t be able to finish this. I got over my flu, but then my aunt died so we had to go for the wake and prayers, and since then I’ve had a headache for three days straight. I’m doing my best but I’ve lost so many days and haven’t even completed the thumbs yet...

Thanks so much Ober! I swear, every single regular battle I have I get sick. I’m starting to think I’m cursed.

Deadline extended due to Holiday work hours wearing me out and sickness befalling Cy.