Critique My Old Attempt!

[Funderbunk]

Okay, a bunch of years ago, when I had only JUST discovered webcomics through the miracle of the internets (I found Real Life Comics, through that was linked to Penny Arcade, and have been completely hooked on all things webcomic since), me and a good friend made a Penny Arcade ripoff. We did it 'together', which meant that I did the art and the writing, but I came up with most of it by bouncing ideas off him which I felt was enough for co-creator credit.

Anyway, the attempt was never put online until now, because I thought it would be fun to see what other webcomic fans have to say about it. It's old, and not very representative of work I do now, but I haven't made another attempt after this due to being busy at my animation school, and it's all I have. I put this in the art forum because I didn't know where else to put it (it's hardly a plug considering it never existed outside of this), but critique any aspect of it you like. Perhaps I can learn something from it which could be helpful for a next attempt. :)

Thanks, and enjoy my poopyness.



Link for if the picture won't show up: http://vehiko.homestead.com/files/14_Comic3.jpg

[GaborBoth]

I don't have my comic yet, but I study as much as I can about how to make a good one, so hopefully my opinion will be a valid one.
The art isn't bad, though I would suggest structuring your characters, with special attention on the chest, shoulders, and how the neck connects the head. And watch out for mistakes, such as the guy in the red shirt - one of his arms is missing, and his other hand does nothing in the whole strip. If you never show it typing, it looks like it is just floating above the keyboard. He doesn't hold the mouse as he uses the computer (an odd mouse, if I may add, as it is modern with being wireless meanwhile the monitor looks very old, especially because it looks yellowed from age)
Also, I really don't like the copypasted panels and the stiff expressions. But the most important thing would be not to copypaste, that's very boring and shows the reader you didn't spend much time on it. I'd also suggest moving around with the camera a little. I would zoom on the second panel a little to show the facial expressions better (which they should have changed at least a bit) . I'd make the speech bubbles bigger a bit so the text has some space from the borderline, making the bubbles look cleaner. I'd also give the bubbles a black outline, making them distinct from the light gray wall.
Another thing: The sound effect on the bottom of the last panel isn't noticable (I only found it after the third read as I was looking through carefully for mistakes) and does not fit in the timeline of the events. As you read the panel, it goes
1 speech -> 2 error message -> 3 fizzle, instead of
1 speech -> 2 the computer fizzling -> 3 then showing the error message, as in real life. I don't know if you meant it this way.

I hope I was helpful.

[Funderbunk]

Any opinion, by definition of being an opinion, is valid. :)

Like I said, it's old, and I had figured out some of those points myself (needing larger text bubbles, copy paste comics are boring, and OH GOD THE NECKS) but some of your points were quite interesting, especially the last one! I've always struggled with panel flow. Also, I still do the whole "floating arms above whatever the character is doing" thing a lot, though I never noticed it before you pointed it out. So thanks for that!

Fun fact; when I made this comic, I did it entirely in Flash with a mouse. It wasn't until after that that I started learning how to draw proper. :P

[Rob]

This is a fine place for what you want. I know that no forum is always going to have the exact category for what folks will always need (not without becoming huge and unwieldy). You chose well here.

The art is better than I have seen in a lot of webcomics. The perspectives look pretty good. The one thing that might be holding you back a bit is the coloration and shading make the art look simpler than it is. When you only use one light source, especially when a character is sitting in front of a light source like a computer,  things can look a little off. The simplicity of your background could be a place for improvement.

The speech bubble used for the computer is not what is generally used when machines speak. Most creators use a sort of lightning bolt or something to set the bubble itself apart. But then the blue screen of death color and type is a nice touch so that may just be an opinion.

Also you used the same three panels and only changed facial expressions and in panel 3 moved one arm. It gets the comic done faster but sooner or later your fans will call you on it. Which is why a lot of artist, even when they are reusing the art change the arm and shoulder positions to give the impression that each panel was individually crafted. Or they actually draw all their panels from scratch and avoid the matter altogether.

The writing could also be tightened up a bit. It's a little clunky. You sort of stumble towards the punch line rather than slide into it.

If I were scripting this I might (and please keep in mind that this is a really quick rewrite) go with something like this.


Panel 1

Blonde: Murphy's Law states that anything that can go wrong, will.
Brunette: I'm aware... but... what has that...?

Panel 2

Blonde: When's the last time you backed up your hard drive?
Brunette: I don't like where this is going.

Panel 3

Computer: Total Hard Drive Failure
Brunette: Son of a bitch! I hate that Murphy guy!
Blonde: Guy? Murphy's Law dot com is a sadists porn website I found last night while I was using your computer. By the way, you might have a virus.

Of course, this is a completely different joke and it still needs to be tightened up a bit as it would require you draw a different perspective in panel 3 or go to four panels because of the speech bubble laws. If I ruminated on it a bit I cold probably make it work in the existing format.

Anyway, that's all I got. Hope you find some of it useful. 

[Funderbunk]

I agree, the setup works but it only vaguely saunters into a joke. It's more of a 'gentle tape line' than it is a 'PUNCH line'. This is the major problem I encounter with my comics and is in fact the reason I have never been able to bring myself to throw myself into actually going for it when it comes to making a comic.

Also, I hadn't noticed that about the shading - in fact, it with the computer being where it is it looks like my light source is coming from the wrong direction! I better pay more attention to that.

Thanks for saying the art is not that bad, that gives me a bit of a confidence boost considering I made this six years back.

I like responses, so I decided to post the only other entries in this series (I gave up fairly quickly because I realized how much it was just Penny Arcade except worse). Feel free to rip me a new one over them! Also, bonus points to anyone who gets the last one.



Link: http://vehiko.homestead.com/files/201.jpg



Link: http://vehiko.homestead.com/files/202.jpg



Link: http://vehiko.homestead.com/files/204.jpg

[Rob]

Listen man I'm no comedic genius by any stretch of the imagination... that said your joke writing could use a lot of work. The first comic has that same bland background and the punchline is just... awful. The truth is I'm not a huge fan of the Beatles but they were genre defying and some of their songs did border on heavy. I don't think anyone would deny that "Revolution" absolutely fucking rocks. None if it may be the present definition of Heavy Metal but suggesting that they are what they weren't isn't necessarily funny and the Blonde guys reaction isn't over the top enough to be considered farcical, parody or slapstick. So it just sort of falls flat.

Now if he had whipped out a gun and murdered brunette guy in a fit of unbridled rage while castigating him that he was too stupid to be allowed to live that might be funny but even that would matter a lot on how you drew the Blonde character and conveyed his insanity.

Comic 2 would have been a lot funnier if in panel three brunette guy had simply broken blonde guy over his knee, creating a loud cracking sound. The empty threat and lame retort are an anti-climax. Also, bland background.

In panel one of the third comic I swear the masked dude had a heart floating over his head like he was in love with brunette guy. I also completely missed that the black line up the middle is supposed to be a road leading to a cityscape because the perspective is so off. At first I thought they were in an alley and the cityscape was appearing over a wall. After I went back and looked at it again I figured it out but it cold be a bit better.

And I think a lot of the problem is your speech bubbles are more than a little messy. They are bigger than they need to be and the sentences are spread further apart from each other than they should be. I think that's called leading and it is easily adjustable with the breakout font menu in Photoshop.

The joke is also a little off and would have been better if brunette guy mentioned in panel 1 the absurd reason he feels great. And I would have moved the "I feel great" line to panel 2 and had the word great somewhat interrupted by the gunshots.

Brunette Guy: You're taking my money and threatening my life but I don't care because I just had some Kellogg's Nutri-Grain Cereal and..

Also you may want to add some text to the sign about the masked guy's head.

Hope I wasn't too rough on you. I've told some bad jokes in my strip. Some might be worse than these. Unfunny happens to the best of us. The art on the whole still looks pretty good though. Way better than mine.  ;)

[Funderbunk]

No, it's fine. Joke writing IS my major problem - I'm just not very funny  :'(.

Also, yeah the Beatles are really pretty ballsy. Helter Skelter is what I consider the original metal song, hah. It was just a bad joke, especially because I had never really gotten into the Beatles and really had no idea what I was talking about at the time. It really comes down to it being a transcript of a conversation I had with someone, a 'had to have been there' moment. :-X

The last one actually works best, I think. However, that's only because it references something else which you pretty have to have seen to get it. The joke is far too obscure. (This is it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC2gIPnUCgw)

[Rob]

The video was funny, but mostly because they kept playing off each other and saying the same line over and over. That's hard to replicate in a webcomic.  ;)

[Funderbunk]

Since we're on the subject right now anyway, the reason most of my comics fail is OH GOD I AM NOT FUNNY. What can I do to prevent lamepunchlineitis?

[Rob]

If you are a good artist and you can check your ego the best solution honestly is to get a writer to work with. Do you think Mike Krahulik (Gabe) would be very good without Jerry Holkins (Tycho) writing his jokes and scripts for him?

I've met Mike a couple times, he's an amazing artist. Jerry is the funny one.

The only other suggestions I can really make are to immerse yourself in culture, expose yourself to a lot of comedy and study how other webcomics writers script their work.

Frankly it's a lot easier to just work with someone else. You just have to manage expectations. Teaching yourself to be funny and learning comedic timing both in real life and in scripting is a challenge.

[mattstout]

I find that it's incredibly hard to write "one shot" jokes day in and day out.  Sometimes I collect random jokes and then run a week of them, but by and large, I write my humor through a story.  Usually I take one or two weeks and write a continuous story for one or two of my characters, putting them in a funny situation, and then write jokes based on that.  I think you might have more success if you tried putting your characters through a story, it may help your writing.

I can't think of anything about the art that hasn't been said before, other than the 'cracking' punchline was ruined for me because I read the word balloons out of order.  I would suggest moving the communist guy's word balloon all the way to the upper left side of the panel, and the blue shirt guy's balloon down below it.

[Funderbunk]

Yeah, I know, that was a horrible idea. Since then (again, this attempt is six years old :-\), I've read a lot more comics and also Scott McCloud's books on them, and I think the days of really stupid word balloon placement are behind me.

I also find it a lot easier to write humor into a storyline (even short stories), or even inject some into a conversation. I guess I'm just not cut out for gag a day stuff.

[KidGalactus]

I've met Mike a couple times, he's an amazing artist. Jerry is the funny one.

HAH!

Beautiful.


And as for Funderbunk a good rule of thumb I think is:

If you don't laugh... like actually laugh out loud when you think it up, or say it outloud, it's not very funny. If you don't even chuckle, it's not funny at all.

If you can't make yourself laugh, you got a tough way to go, insofar as making other people laugh. The difference between you and other people as far as joke go is that you already care. They don't.

[Rob]

That's great advice KidG. Jeph Jacques is always Twittering about how "tonights comic is cracking me up... having trouble drawing" and all that. And now that I think about it, every one of my comics has made me laugh (the Badly written, badly drawn stuff not Remedy... Remedy is long form and is only funny sometimes) before I decided to make it a comic.

Good advice.  ;)

[Doomami]

Okay, a bunch of years ago, when I had only JUST discovered webcomics through the miracle of the internets (I found Real Life Comics, through that was linked to Penny Arcade, and have been completely hooked on all things webcomic since), me and a good friend made a Penny Arcade ripoff. We did it 'together', which meant that I did the art and the writing, but I came up with most of it by bouncing ideas off him which I felt was enough for co-creator credit.

Anyway, the attempt was never put online until now, because I thought it would be fun to see what other webcomic fans have to say about it. It's old, and not very representative of work I do now, but I haven't made another attempt after this due to being busy at my animation school, and it's all I have. I put this in the art forum because I didn't know where else to put it (it's hardly a plug considering it never existed outside of this), but critique any aspect of it you like. Perhaps I can learn something from it which could be helpful for a next attempt. :)

I'm going to step away from the comic itself because everyone so far have been giving you good advice. What I want to point out is the first thing that I saw you do wrong: the introduction.

I appreciate the honesty, but you had the tone of "this is old and bad but it's okay because I do work that's new and good." Never insult your own work if you want other people to look at it, critique it, comment about it, care about it, or generally give it their attention in any shape or form. Truth be told, you're selling your work to us. We're not paying you money but we're paying you time and consideration. So you need to make sure your sell pitch isn't hurting your product.

Let me give you the summary of what I read: "Years ago when I stumbled into a new medium, me and another guy you don't know decided to rip off Penny Arcade. I would like to know what people think of it despite the fact that it is outdated and irrelevant to my current skill level (take my word for it)."

My biggest pet peeve is an artist going "it's not too good but look at it please". Well you just told me it was bad so why should I? I don't mean lie to us or shower your work with praise. A simple intro along the lines of "here's a comic I used to do, I'd like to know what you think" would suffice. Now as a reader, I don't know what to expect which is better than expecting something the artist himself doesn't respect.

As a suggestion: if you want to do a humor comic like Penny Arcade and you don't care about doing story archs such as PvP or any daily newspaper strip, don't be afraid to stray away from your characters. PA often stray away from Gabe and Tycho to feature game execs, game characters, Twisp and Catsby, etc etc. If you thought up a funny joke about Superman one day, just draw up a strip about it. It would be a lot less limiting than having to fit it into the mouths of one of your characters.