It’s brand new (only two updates in) and the artwork is done by a young friend of mine who does another comic for a different project of mine.
I’ve grown to love webcomics over the years and hope to make this one a success. I’ve been a writer for a long time but this is my first (published) attempt at the comic scene.
I’m a little nervous.
Heh
Good luck with the Web comic. I think that creating and sustaining a good series in this format is a lot harder than many people realize. Are you interested in feedback/critiques?
hiya, i quite like the visual style but nothing has happened yet to make me interested. is this a whole new creation or am i meant to know who the characters are? is it going to be funny? i know nothing about anything from those two strips. good luck with it though 
what’s the overall plan with it? how much have you already written?
sorry, that’s a lot of questions.
i can’t really read the writing outside of the cartoon - it’s all black writing on dark grey background, like it’s not loaded properly. anyone else have the same problem?
nothing’s happened yet but so far so good, subscribing to thread to see if anything interesting will develop. i got the illegible black font on grey striped background too.
OK, we’ll change the background on the comment section to lighten it up. That’s sent off to be done.
I’ve written about three months worth so far and Alia has completed about half that. There will be an overarching plotline that will emerge but I can’t sell that at this early stage.
To answer Biffer_Spice yes, this is wholly new. So we’re still in the ‘getting to know the characters’ phase. Actually, Alia critiqued me earlier with a whole series that I had to discard as taking focus away from the characters.
Always with the feedback, certainly. I want to build a community around this thing. I’ve got a story I want to tell but I’m not all that dogmatic about how I get that story told. It’s been a LONG time since I’ve written fiction seriously.
The cast of characters page is nearly unreadable, black text on a grey-lined background.
Also, it says:
Newton – A Brownie, male. Lives in the house. Can communicate with the house
Currie – A brownie, female.
What’s with the inconsistent capitalization of “brownie” and, for that matter, what the hell is a “brownie”? I gather it’s some kind of pixie.
OK, I’ve had the background color lightened.
And yes, a brownie is a form of pixie/fairy/what have you. Usually one tied with a location.
Good catch on the capitalization inconsistency. That’s why we edit!
I’ve bookmarked this with my other webcomics, so I’ll read it as often as I do those. Which some weeks means every day, and sometimes means semimonthly.
Will we get updates every day, just weekdays, or on no particular schedule?
Can’t say much so far, except that you seem to have created a setting that gives you plenty of hooks two write about. Looking forward to seeing how it evolves.
Thank you. I look forward to exploring the world.
Using Jeph Jacques rules for webcomic production I took a discussion about webcomics between Alia and myself (we can do one three times per week!) and subtracted one. So for the moment we’ll update Tuesday and Fridays. More often if things go well. But this’ll be a side project for us unless it starts producing.
Please keep in mind that I went to an art school that employed a pretty vicious approach to critiques, mostly designed to help the prospective artists to learn to take criticism of their work without taking it as a personal attack, so please don’t take any of this personally…
OK, here are my thoughts:
As a new comic, I think that it would really benefit the reader to have a few episodes simply to establish the relationships between the characters; maybe show the family in the car as they arrive at the house, and maybe the brownies are watching them arrive from inside the house and commenting on the new arrivals, referring to each other by their names so the reader can get a sense of who they are and why they’re even there to begin with.
There’s a lot that I found confusing without the additional explanations of the characters on the Web page. For example, it wasn’t at all clear to me in the second strip that the girl with the pet carrier was supposed to be the daughter of the couple in the first strip; I thought maybe the woman had gone outside the apartment/house and the boyfriend/husband was calling to her from inside, and I had to read the character descriptions on your page to get a bit more of what was going on. If I had just the first strip to go on, I would have thought that this was a young couple who had decided to move in together and that they were unmarried and had no children. The art style contributed to this confusion (more on this later) and I still didn’t get why the female was carrying a pet carrier with a human boy inside it, and why she would be surprised at him coming out of it. Did everyone in the family just not miss the kid during the trip to the house? They get out of the car at their destination and the boy is missing, but they just don’t notice or care? Combine this with the unnamed (in the comic thus far) brownies and I thought maybe the kid was actually some sort of leprechaun, which would explain the girl’s surprised reaction and his strange behavior somewhat.
I don’t quite get the brownies’ skeptical reaction to “peace?” either; are they skeptical that the new family will actually be peaceful, are they skeptical of the idea of “peace” (some Fae folk in myth and legend were notorious for creating havoc and mischief) or what? Are they going to be hostile toward the family for invading the space they are living in? Are they going to drag the kids down to the basement and steal their teeth to eat? It might be better to establish the family first, then introduce the brownies and explain some of their motivations and relationship to each other. Are the brownies siblings? Mates?
As others have said, there’s not a lot of story or characterization to go on yet, so it’s hard to say much more. From the character descriptions, I can imagine the potential relationships and stories that might come from it, but if you take the perspective of a new reader who just wants to enjoy a fun story and characters, there’s not much of a “hook” in these first two strips. I think establishing that “hook” is one of the hardest things for a new strip to achieve, so don’t be discouraged by that, just keep trying out different approaches and showing your “test audience” the strips until you get the reaction that you’re looking for.
Now, about the art:
The manga style employed here really isn’t working well for me, because there is a tendency to make the characters look very young and similar to each other. If it weren’t for the goatee on the guy, I would have thought that he was in his teens; same goes for the boobs on the mom being the only “adult” characteristic. Even with the goatee on the guy, they look like they might be a couple in their early college years, not parents of two kids, one of which presumably is a tween. You might be able to get away with that more if you have the aforementioned establishing shot of the entire family together and some dialogue that shows the family relationships. I’m not saying you need totally realistic artwork here, but it’s a bit confusing when everyone looks so close in age that they could all be siblings.
The artist could benefit from learning and employing some basic perspective drawing skills (here’s a good start) ; he/she will learn a lot that will translate into artwork that is easier to “get” and put the characters in a more believable environment. Some successful cartoon artists get away with little or no perspective drawing in their strips, but since a big part of your story has to do with the house (the house is actually a named character! I like that bit.) I think it would really behoove the artist to pay attention to those details to give the house more character and visual “solidity” as well.
Don’t be afraid to rework the intros and artwork and character designs for a while until you get the desired reaction when you show the strip to someone who isn’t familiar with the whole thing. Ideally, your readers should be able to pick up on who is who and the basic idea of what is going on without having to read character bios on a separate page. I think for a character-driven comic strip, that is very important (well-established characters and relationships are important in a comic like For Better or Worse but not so much for something like Frank and Ernest which is more of a joke-based comic.)
Good luck and please keep us updated!
As an art teacher, I have plenty of criticisms… but my biggest one is “I don’t know what’s going to happen next!”
In other words, I really like it, and I want to know if a kid travelled with the cat as a carry-on… and who all these people are, what the Brownies know that no one else does… and what happens to your characters.
Some things are best left mysteries…at least at the moment.
New one is up! Keep the critique coming, though the first 15 or so are all in the bag already the newer ones may take those critiques to heart.
what does that sun-sign mean? is he faint? btw the dark background thing is still there.
The relative sizes of the characters strike me as odd–specifically Jack. In the second strip, he’s pretty clearly much smaller than Elinor; she can carry him and the cat, and his head only comes up to about her chest when he emerges from the carrier, even though he’s jumping at the time. In the next strip, though, they both come up to about the same height on their mother. I’ve been told that it’s hard to draw little kids in panels with adults, but he just seems unreasonably big for the circumstances.
Those are brownies? I’ve never pictured brownies with wings, but eh, Your Fae Are Different, and that’s fine.
A sort of feedback I’ve found useful in the past is for someone to tell me what impressions they’ve gathered without explanation or reference to other sources. It provides a sort of spot-check on my assumptions. So, without reference to the cast page…
Kurt: Not much impression yet. He seems a bit dubious about leaving the city, but not much else. Absent-minded, maybe?
Minnie: Pollyanna-ish, easily distracted or sidetracked.
Elinor: The Only Sane One. Her life is turned upside down, chaos abounds, weird things happen, and she is a bit annoyed about it all.
Jack: Antics, possibly with Fae assistance in the future. Bet he likes high places and climbs like a lemur on crack.
Key: Cats Are Snarkers. As one would expect from a cat, he is put out by change and by affronts to his dignity.
The Brownies: Not much of an impression yet, really. I gather that they don’t think their home is necessarily the place for someone looking for peace and quiet, but that doesn’t tell me much about their characters.
It looks like an emote to me. I interpreted it as laughter/giggling.
So far, there’s nothing that indicates why this comic is interesting. It might be good, or it might not be, but why should I keep reading if I can’t tell? I’ve subscribed to the RSS feed and I’ll keep an eye on this one, but my overall impression is that you goofed by promoting this with no hook in place.
(I also agree that you need to do something to make the characters look more different. That might be less of an issue after their personalities are a little bit more established, but right now there’s really not a lot to distinguish them.)
Another Art degree critic here.
I"m interested enough in the characters, but nothing has happened to grab my attention. The art is not interesting enough to keep me coming back without the story, which so far has only had a bit of mild snark, and a sight gag, (somewhat badly conveyed by your artist). I’ll keep tuning in for a few more pages to see what happens though. Slow start but shows promise. I dislike the brownie design, it is far to tinkerbelly/ stock pixie out of a how to draw manga book.
I guess the problem for me now is I can’t place the genre of the comic, and so I don’t know if I’ll keep following it. I think the character page needs to be more enticing, and it would be good if characters start to shine in their own ways, soon!
Sorry to be a harsh critic, but the characters are still pretty bland to me.
Just touching base. Here’s the latest:
And here’s the beginning:
I’m still setting up the situation, here, obviously. And most of these scripts were completed several months ago. It’ll be a couple of weeks until stuff I’ve written lately will begin appearing. That’s when the mystery will start developing.
One of the comments, presumably from one of you fine folks, said that it read more like a novel. That’s fair enough. I definitely have a beginning, middle and end in mind here. It’s my hope that the wait will be worth the payoff.
It’s also frustrating to only do 2 per week. But I took advice from Jeph Jacques and asked myself how many I was comfortable to committing to per week and subtracted one. Once Alia and I get a feel for ourselves we might bump that up to three times per week. It would have to make a lot of money to go daily.
The most difficult thing I have to do on the process is learning the back end software. I have to remind myself to approve comments. The only one I’ve disapproved of at this point was a spammer.
I think this would read more smoothly as:
Newton - A male brownie. [Etc.]
Currie - A female brownie.
If they’re the only brownies, I’d consider:
Newton and Currie - Male and female brownies, respectively. They live in, and can communicate with, the house. [Or, they live in the house and can communicate with it.]
I’m going to give feedback without reading anyone else’s posts, so my apologies if any of this has been stated before:
Try reading the dialogue out loud before publishing it. Does it sound like something that a human would say? I think not in the case of “Got it! But why dad?”
Why are the pixies talking out of their crotches?
In the mouseover text, “You think they’d fly up” should say “You’d think they’d fly up” if you want it to be grammatically correct.
I don’t really understand why there’s explanatory text under each comic. Is this going to be a regular thing…?