The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
The Wide World of Webcomics => Not Daisy Owl => Topic started by: jay-ell on November 24, 2009, 03:22:57 pm
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I may be taking my life in my hands here, but I wonder what you guys think of my brother-in-law's webcomic.
http://www.pod-comic.com/ (http://www.pod-comic.com/)
He is just starting out and hoping to make a real living of it. It's a journal-style comic, but mainly because he's working on his art and also doing a set of mini-comics with his Characters, which he takes to Cons. So he uses his fictional storyline material for those and does the journal comic on the web.
To his credit, he has done a great job of meeting deadlines and sticking to his self-imposed schedule. And his art is improving by leaps and bounds. But he has a hard time finding a story to tell each week, and I think he is a much funnier person IRL than he appears to be in the comic.
I ask for your opinions and suggestions because I am in a position to Make Webcomics Better by offering your suggestions (carefully couched) to Gabe. As I said, he's just starting out (He has been publishing 3x/wk since February) and really wants to make a go of it. So please be honest. I will not direct him to this thread, but I may forward him your comments if they are useful and not mean.
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I may be taking my life in my hands here, but I wonder what you guys think of my brother-in-law's webcomic.
http://www.pod-comic.com/ (http://www.pod-comic.com/)
i got a couple good chuckles out of the archive, not bad at all. he might want to run his dialogue through a word processor before he inks it (it's gynEcologist). i like the little recurring bits like ryan's face never being drawn, and the photo-comics.
also it takes balls to draw yourself -- even half-honestly -- in boxers, playing guitar hero. that was one of the better strips.
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i got a couple good chuckles out of the archive, not bad at all. he might want to run his dialogue through a word processor before he inks it (it's gynEcologist). i like the little recurring bits like ryan's face never being drawn, and the photo-comics.
also it takes balls to draw yourself -- even half-honestly -- in boxers, playing guitar hero. that was one of the better strips.
Agreed on the word processor; on comic 2 I nearly stopped reading because of the THREE errors in panel 2 alone. *shudder* However, grammarcuntism aside, I like it. I'm drawn in, the art is good, I want to read more. Thumbs up. (or should I say, "Thumms up?")
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I have mentioned the grammar/spelling issue to him before. I will bring it up again.
Any other comments/suggestions? I just poked through the archives and realized anew how much better his art has gotten in the last 8 months. It is pretty awesome.
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Actually, I feel like the only useful comment I can make regards the art: It seems his style and technique are on the verge of coalescing into something more personal, drifting away from what I feel is a pretty standard cartoonesque template - so - doodle, dude, doodle away like there's no tomorrow.
Actually actually I just checked the first strips and yes, he's quite the bounder, eh.
(as in, a guy who leaps a lot)
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As opposed to a cad, one assumes.
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I just poked through the archives and realized anew how much better his art has gotten in the last 8 months. It is pretty awesome.
I like the art in the earlier strips better. Relatively simple line drawings will almost always trump all that shading and stuff in my opinion. I mean, if you're gonna go that route (really intricate), you have to be really great at it to make it work and even then it usually comes off as unnecessary. You can get away with a lot more without dampening the product if you tone it down. It seems like he's going out of his way to make things more difficult for himself and the end result doesn't really justify it. More work, less quality.
As for the humor, I'm just not a fan of that genre. That's not his fault.
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I don't really, uh, understand where the humor is.
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I don't really, uh, understand where the humor is.
It's there! It's gentle, somewhat self-effacing, occasionally ironic humor. I like it. And I like his art, whether it's the clean lines or the more shaded style. (Or, it could just be that in the strip with his photo I found him awfully damn cute.)
Edited to add: Also, sometimes you don't need humor. I teared up at this one, and that's just fine with me. http://www.pod-comic.com/?p=313
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The art creeps me out. If I saw those people walking towards me I would cross the street to avoid them. I give him high marks for how realistic that impression feels, but it has the unfortunate effect of making me not want to read the thing because I don't want to spend time with those people.
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The art creeps me out. If I saw those people walking towards me I would cross the street to avoid them. I give him high marks for how realistic that impression feels, but it has the unfortunate effect of making me not want to read the thing because I don't want to spend time with those people.
How odd...it may be because I read so few webcomics, but I really like the art for the same reason I think you don't; its expressiveness. I think the faces speak volumes, and they aren't all prettied up and fake. It makes the stories more real, to me.
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i just hope the people he's drawing are really not attractive, and that they're flattered by the drawings of them, because yeesh they're not pretty people in the cartoons.
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Can't say that the genre is my cup of tea but I dig the art style.
I guess that on some weird primodial basis, I think that if you're going to use drawings as your medium, you might as well explore it and do all the things with it that you couldn't do if you were taking pictures or making film or writing it down or something. Not that comics gotta be necessarily one thing or another but when it is just drawings of people doing more-or-less people things, it is pretty difficult for me to get into it.
Whether it is... exaggerated comedy or exaggerated action or fantasy or whatnot, it seems a waste of the medium's potential to just write straight realism with it. I feel the same about animation, too, when I see some kid's show and it is a bunch of things that actors could be doing except animated so that the people are part-animal or look animesque, there is difficulty getting drawn into it if you'll excuse the pun. Maybe it's just me.
To a synthesis of blue and Keith's points, though, I'll also say that the quite gentle humour and the sometimes not really going for humor is kind of at odds with the superexaggerated art style. You look at the line-work and the general design and you're thinking "this is going to be exaggerated and harsh in tone" and... y'know... it's actually these really kinda quiet explorations of a dude's life who just kinda wants to go to school and make a kid and stuff.
It often doesn't mesh, the story with the style, we'll say. The subject matter feels like it would be better complimented by either a minimalistic or a realistic art approach.
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Yeah, I acknowledge that this is not the kind of strip that is necessarily going to appeal to everyone here. I know that he takes a lot of inspiration from Tom Beland (http://tombeland.com/tb.asp), not in terms of art style but in terms of the type of work he's doing. And I think he knows that journal comics are sort of what people do when they're not full of good jokes. He's young and has a lot of years ahead of him, and I get the sense that PoD is sort of a dry run for him to practice on until he gets a handle on his art and writing stylezz.
I think it's interesting that some of you like his current drawing style and some of you prefer the sparer style he started out with. I prefer the richer style, but then again, I know what these people look like IRL. I think that makes a difference, somehow.
Wombat, if it helps, his art style will probably be completely different in six months or so. Look at how Jeph Jaques' style has (http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1) evolved (http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=712#).
Who else hates the art style? if more than half of you are put off by it, he should probably know that. He might not like it, but he'd want to know.
Edited to add: smets, that is very insightful. I will definitely pass that along as food for thought.
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To a synthesis of blue and Keith's points, though, I'll also say that the quite gentle humour and the sometimes not really going for humor is kind of at odds with the superexaggerated art style. You look at the line-work and the general design and you're thinking "this is going to be exaggerated and harsh in tone" and... y'know... it's actually these really kinda quiet explorations of a dude's life who just kinda wants to go to school and make a kid and stuff.
It often doesn't mesh, the story with the style, we'll say. The subject matter feels like it would be better complimented by either a minimalistic or a realistic art approach.
Wow, that's a really good point. This hadn't occurred to me, the contrast between art style and story style. But I don't know, I think the artwork complements the story, such as this one: http://www.pod-comic.com/?p=385 Love the perspective of the face in the mirror.
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Interesting point and I wonder if it's a question of what you are used to. This reminds of comic books with a style of art where everyone is always overreacting and yelling about the least little thing. They always put me off, but it's clear that it's a genre. The comics I read don't fall into that genre, so the art seems harsh and unpleasant to me.
But, that doesn't make it bad. If that's the effect he's going for, he's doing a good job of it, I'm just not his target audience.
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Wait - a color-blind (http://www.pod-comic.com/?p=519) graphic artist? Does that work?
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the comic is in black and white, jaydub.
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I'll just jump on the bandwagon and agree with LFM. I liked the art. I liked the writing. Something was bugging me and keeping me from fully digging the comic as a whole and I think Li'l Falzmetz expressed the trouble well.
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Der. He's in school to be a graphic artist however (or was, apparently).
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Past tense. And yes, it's a definite handicap, which is probably why he's trying to focus on his writing at the moment.
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Now that I am writing after work, not on lunch with my broken "v" and "b" keys having to cut-and-paste them in to make any sense, keyboard periperhal plugged-in... it's like in the Scott McCloud book, right? "Understanding Comics". Everyone even slightly nerdish has read that, right?
You simplify to draw people into identifying with your characters, "oh I went to art school like him, I was totally pregnant once like here" and you edge toward photorealism to underline the specificity of the character's experience "wow, this is totally this one person's life and I am getting to look in on that, that's rad". Either approach could totally work with the whole "slice of life" approach that your kin is going with.
But the whole "super-charicature of super-specific people" thing, which don't get me wrong, I like in a vacuum outside of the context of the strip's concept, sort of manages to fall in a valley between those two approaches and ends up with few of the expressive advantages of either and many of both of their flaws. Total bizarro-venn-diagram of what I think he's going for with the story and characters.
Womblet is full-on that this style... exaggerated, shaggy, bulbous and jaded... would totally work for a strip where people scream at each other about popular culture. Which isn't a bad thing, either, those few times it is done well. It would also work for a story about characters who are totally surrounded with wonder but ignore it all because of their petty self-obsesssions. This would also be a great style for a strip about, like, a dude working at the last Barnes and Nobles after the Rapture, having to kill mutants and wizards with a zap gun as a matter of daily course but only seeing value in his quest to climb to assistant manager at the bookstore.
But for such an essentially gentle story about a dude trying to get a simple life earned more or less the right way... I just feels lke it begs a siimple universality or a fairly strict trueness-to-life.
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Now that I am writing after work, not on lunch with my broken "v" and "b" keys having to cut-and-paste them in to make any sense, keyboard periperhal plugged-in...
You should try the On-Screen Keyboard. I think it's built into all versions of XP. Look in the Accessibility menu. Clicking letters is a hassle but it sound less annoying than what you were doing.
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can'd for tech support!
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I didn't really care for it, sorry.
I like biographical comics, Harvey Pekar comes to mind, love his stuff. Your cousin's life however bored me to tears.
I don't have a beef with his artistic style either, but he does draw really ugly people, especially the women.
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JL: did you ever run our thoughts by your in-law there?
did we help him out at all?
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While in no way impugning your SIL's attractiveness, after seeing her in pics on Facebook, I've gotta say Gabe nailed her in his characterization. Um - so to speak.
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We talked about it briefly at Thanksgiving, and he appreciates your thoughts. He readily admits that he's learning a lot from this experience, and may incorporate some of your/my suggestions into the Pitt, and may take some of them to heart in designing future projects.
Incidentally, I don't think I mentioned this before, but the title is a play on where he lives -- Pitt County, NC. Which I thought was a bit clever, particularly since he doesn't really like it there.
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Also, the Pit of Despair (he changed the spelling earlier this week with his website redesign) is on Facebook as "The Face of Despair". Gabe is running a fan drive - he wants to get 100 facebook fans before the end of February, at which point POD will become a comic strip about a baby.
So if for those of you who liked the strip, I'd encourage you to participate.
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You should try the On-Screen Keyboard. I think it's built into all versions of XP. Look in the Accessibility menu. Clicking letters is a hassle but it sound less annoying than what you were doing.
Yeah im still doing this now when I dont have keyboard plugged into my lappy. Except when Im playing some fullscreen multiplayer and the only way I can communicate is like: "Sorry 6uys my key8oard is 8roken. All of 7he keys down from 7he #five are dead. SNIPER ON 7HE ROOF." And then I just look dumb.
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For those of you who sort-of maybe liked the strip, I'd encourage you to check out his first major story arc (http://www.pod-comic.com/?p=1195). It completed today, and I think he did a great job telling it. I'd be interested to see what y'all think. It's a boy-and-dog story.
I think his art has gotten better, too, and a lot softer to match his storylines. If you guys want to take credit for some of that, I think it's justified.
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You'd have to be dead to not be touched by that story.