Negative Zen

[NZSteve]

Hey folks.  I hope that my third post isn't considered too soon to pimp my comic  :-\

Negative Zen has been going on for a few years now, but never consistently (and by consistently, I mean both in terms of plot, art, and updates...  ::) ), but recently things sort of made themselves clear to me and I've been working on a 3-day-a-week schedule with (believe it or not) consistent characters and all sorts of strange things.

NZ is about folks at university who (by virtue of living with others) are discovering unexpected things about themselves and by virtue of going to college are learning their course in life might not be as obvious as they first thought.   I know that sometimes what you've planned for yourself isn't what turns out to happen, and the folks in NZ are no different.

Right now it's character building time, but things get kinda... odd... in the near future.  There's some hints that this might not be as "normal" a story as it seems to be at first glance.  It's not going to be plot-heavy, but there's a "soft" continuity that hopefully will bring people back to see what new adventures end up in.

Please give it a look if you have time.  I'd appreciate any input you fine folks have to give.  ;D

[Rob]

Not at all. It's never too early to pimp your comic. That's what this section is for. The only folks that bother me are the ones who come in, pimp and then leave. Makes me feel so used.  ;D

Good luck with your second year.  ;)

[JGray]

Rob is often used but never cheap. He's free! :)

Seriously, looking it over, you've got some good character interaction going but it is tempered by your art. You need to work on maturing the designs of your characters. I'm not against the anime/manga influences but with the bigger eyes and thin bodies, they all have a younger look. I look at them and think high school at most, not college.

[NZSteve]

Yup.  Character design (and consistency thereof) is my major concentration these days, art-wise.

Thanks for your input.

[Edit:]  I should add that I'm glad that someone I don't know has confirmed what I've suspected (and friends' comments have said as well).  It doesn't surprise me that the writing is good but the art is middling, since I've been writing my whole life, and only seriously started trying to draw anything seriously in the last year or two.

[Gibson]

Hey, I've done pretty well with good writing and middling art.

[NZSteve]

So has XKCD ;) Still, my ambition in terms of "artistic stylings" are fairly high, so my standards for myself are similar. It's somewhat frustrating that I'm not sure exactly what my "style" is yet (I have a lot of various other artists' styles I like), which probably doesn't help me in my quest to have consistent character designs ;)  Practice practice practice is my regiment (when I'm not doing the comic, that is), and hopefully it will settle out from that.

Interestingly, I've found that, to an extent, doing drawings in small cells is much harder than having to sketch out whole bodies and the like.  That in particular isn't what I would have expected.