The Fancy Bastard Forum

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.

Thanks Mike! The original comic was actually drawn with only 3 panels and I decided I wanted the comedic pauses so we added two more, although I was shaky on whether or not to cut panel 2 after the fact.

Not bad man. I'll keep your rss link *yoink*.

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

I agree about the "panel 2" thing. My *ONLY* other criticism is that on your link, the word should be spelled "sensitive". RSS feed bookmarked.

Ah, crap.

Great work man, made me laugh pretty hard...

Thanks!

Here's today's comic:

"Potentially Damaging Content". Stupid web filter.

Hrm the only thing we did different was use tags...wonder if that was enough to block you.

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.

I managed to read it when I got home so...I got it. Good stuff man.
Our school filter is balls anyway. It blocked Live Mesh (file sync service) and a political blog (same reason as yours) that was independent and not crazy..

Thanks for the comments guys. Will have a new one up for you on Thursday.

New comic up today. Trying a new font.

Wow. Maybe to soon, but still good. So whats the reason for the other one?

I'm not sure what you meant by "other one". I'm going to make a stab guess that you meant the other golden girl Estelle Getty? She passed away in 2008.

She played Bea Arthur's mom and was actually like, much younger or only a few years older than Bea Arthur.

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!

Younger I believe.

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.

It is odd how much we all know about Golden Girls....I'm going to go watch Murder She Wrote. Peace!

Angela always looked breath taking biking before every episode...er..>>

But seriously murder she wrote was just scooby doo for the elderly.

By that analogy, Castle is just Murder She Wrote for the young?

Hey man, Scooby Doo is hard core. Murder She Wrote is fucking epic.

New comic up today, sorry guys no old ladies in this one.

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.

I haven't put up a comic in awhile thought you guys might like this one considering subject matter: