Hello there I write Straight Face Comics, My Partner Donald draws them. Before we went live today we did a lot of research on who was doing what and what it took to make it and the first couple of years grind that a lot of webcomics go through. Out of all the stuff out there Joel's was the most postive. I loved his pay it forward attitude on helping others realize their dreams. When I read his first penny-arcade forum thread, I knew if we decided to do a critique thread I'd want to do it here. So have at it you fancy bastards. My thanks in advance to anyone that takes the time to write something on this, I really appreciate it.
Looks great! I actually think you could do without the dead panels (2 and 4). I see what you were doing - and it would work well in video - but I think it slows down the pace too much here. Keep it up!
EDIT: OK, on second thought maybe 4 should stay. 2 can go though.
Nice! I love the art style, and the chibi-Matt in the last panel cracked me up. Don's character is somewhat inconsistent between panels, though I realize Don is still settling into the routine of drawing you guys. I agree with Mike that panel 2 should go, and I'm not sure how I feel about breaking the fourth wall, but it's great otherwise. I subscribed to your RSS feed and can't wait to see more.
The fourth wall breakage is intentional when in happens, it's not in every strip but I do have us break through every so often. It's something I had wanted to play with early on in the writing process...I'm wary that it could get a little bit campy, i'm trying to keep it fun without too much cheese sneaking in. Over these next 3-4 weeks a lot of the art is unfortunately going to bounce around a bit. We have about 35 scripts done and about 10-15 comics mostly drawn and then like the jerk I am (instead of being 3-4 weeks ahead he's now working on week 2) , I moved around the order to make the time link for a few multi-part strips make more sense. And thanks all for subscribing. :D
the art is pretty solid but I have a couple of crits on the first one. Like others have said, drop at least one of the pause panels. I think those pause silent panels can be a crutch that should be used sparingly.
In Panel 3 I want to read the "what first" The first character talking should have the left-most bubble. Even though it's higher up, we always read right to left.
The font is a little hard to read. Finding a great font is quite difficult. I switched 3 or 4 times at the beginning.
In panel 4 your characters get smaller as if they are further away but their couch stayed the same size, so it seems as if they shrank.
Cthulu looks great.
In the second comic you've got too much text crammed into bubbles that are too small. Keep your font size consistent. If they words you wrote dont fit, cut some of the text out or rework the panel so they can fit without dropping the font size. Your writing will usually get tighter if you force yourself to cut out 1/3 to 1/2 of the original dialog.
I would lose the drop shadow in the yellow box. Do go for "special" with text. Go for legible.
I know most of these crits are for your partner, so pass them on if you like. I think you're off to a good start.
Fonts are definitely something we've struggled with. That font that we have in these strips ended up being Don's handwriting ported to font just because we couldn't find anything we liked better. Definitely some things to think about, thanks for taking the time. I ramble a bit, may need to work a bit on line cuts. The scripts I've written lately have been getting shorter out of habit, I think I evolved to trying to write a bit shorter just so we'd have less line edits/cuts. There's some of the early scripts though that I'll probably go back and retool just to shorten them a bit. And I'll most definitely be passing on the art notes.
Looks awesome dude. I'm not an artist (more like a nega-artist really- a few artworks have actually burst into flame at my touch), but from what I can see it looks really cool. Have fun with it.
Posted By: Matt_SFCHrm the only thing we did different was use tags...wonder if that was enough to block you.There's no such thing as too far, just too sensitive.
Posted By: John DarcShe played Bea Arthur's mom and was actually like, much younger or only a few years older than Bea Arthur.Move over, bananas! I've got a new source of potassium!
Yeah it's younger we had a long conversation about that at work the other week. Why a bunch of 20-30 somethings are talking about golden girls while work--I'd like to say it was the comic, but it was well before that. I was about to use the word mediaphile here to talk about our levels of geekery, but I think that it would start to take on a whole new connotation.
Wait, he wanted to punish Bea Arthur by torturing her with the pain of killing her "family" but then he just kills her anyway? Wouldn't it make sense to kill off Betty White and Rue McClanahan before offing Bea Arthur? Unless you take it as her tv family, of which it was just her and Estelle Getty, seeing as she wasn't related to the other two.
edit: Nevermind. I guess I just took it completely wrong. For some reason, it didn't compute that he was punishing Betty White, even though he says her name.
I have a couple more up since I last posted. Here's today's...we've had a little time to take the critiques in at this point. Also we're most likely going to be ditching the title bar on the comics once we can do it uniformly on all of them. (basically once we have the time to do it to all of them.) We'll be replacing them with something simpler most likely just black text on the top stating the title of the strip.
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!