Wait a minute, I know what's going on here.



Over the Edge

Over The Edge sounds like the standard webcomic everyone and their brother tries to do. Two geeks, playing video games, having some pretty retarded life experiences, and with a couple furries tossed in. But though the early strips are weak, Over The Edge picks up vastly as time goes on.

The artwork for the earlier strips is weak and generally lifeless, but the changes are dramatic and impressive. By the most recent of strips you'll notice the art has improved to a professional level and looks more than a little captivating. With its bright colors, bold lines, and great looking characters, Over The Edge is a stand-out on art terms.

The writing follows the same pattern, with the early strips being immensely dull and being what I term 'Friend Gags', meaning if you aren't one of the author's friends you won't get the jokes being tossed out. But this too improves with time, and now the jokes are quite accessible and often funny. Especially some of the video game references.

Overall, I find it hard to criticize most of this comic. It works well, is handled quite expertly, and has some genuinely funny moments. In fact, my biggest criticism is probably with the comic's terrible updating schedule. It updates, on average from what I can tell, once a month. This isn't good news for someone who wants more of this quirky comic.

I could easily be tempted to recommend Over The Edge to a large number of people, but the sporadic updating turns even me off and I hate telling someone to read a comic that only updates once a month.

Still, if you're a fan of video games, or of furries, checking out Over The Edge is a good idea.

OTE is not my cup o' tea.

The art has matured strikingly over the life of the strip. I'm impressed by the artist's obvious determination to improve. Major kudo's to Mr. Artist. The character's expressions are WAY top notch. I like the fluidity of his characters, as that adds an animated feel to them that makes them feel oddly life-like. I'm not a big fan of the photoshop backgrounds, but those tend to come off less distracting than most times that technique is used.

I think the one fault I consistantly find with the art is the design & direction of the scenes. I find them bland, partially because there's little to no (apparent) forethought to ow to best maximize the dramatic impact of each gag.

The writing... I don't know, the dialogue is fairly well done, but I think the situations, & overall execution of the gags falls flat to me. Most of these type of "Slacker" books rely on the same, cliched slacker jokes, & OTE is not exception. The characters are not realised enough to really make me care about them. They never really rise above the cliche.

There are almost no Slacker books I like (Butternutsquash, being a glaring exception). OTE, while it has improved dramatically since it's inception, does not rise above the shortcomings of the genre, & gives me little reason to change my opinion of the said genre.

Later,
Chip

To start with there is little or no info on who they characters are, what they do, or what kind of age they are supposed to have. A few strips in we find the main guys in school so that at least gives me some kind of hint. New characters and guest characters pop up all the time and disappear as quick as they appeared.

In this one we are just in the middle of something, being introduced to a bunch of people out of the blue. People that never show up again.
http://www.drunkduck.com/Over_the_Edge/index.php?p=83934

I'm assuming the comic follows the authors life pretty closely but, unfortunately, we as the readers miss a lot of things that are obvious to the author. There is no clear storyline and the situations and settings just change depending on the joke.

Strange collaborations with other comics pop up and i'm totally confused.
http://www.drunkduck.com/Over_the_Edge/index.php?p=199453

The comic also takes up recent events and recent videogames which causes some problems if read now. I know of the game "Fear" and have played "black and white" but the general jokes are lost when i have to figure out what is poked fun at.

Now, all that said. I must say that the overall expressions on the characters in the later strips are VERY good. The same goes for the coloring that is absolutely top-notch.

http://www.drunkduck.com/Over_the_Edge/index.php?p=246889

If this talent was turned into a comic with an actual story and a script it could be pretty spectacular. It's just a shame the art is "wasted" on a bunch of inside jokes. Really.

Noice, those are definitely some very useful critiques!

Steely Gaze: Yeah those early comics were a major learning experience, and definitely too much focus on inside jokes... I'll be workin' on that. Updates-wise, thanks to work and the fact that I do a lot of single-frame pictures (on DeviantArt), updating is as you say... pretty much once a month, so I've gotta decide whether to change that (less single-frame pics) or just rely on folks using their favourites list to let them know when updates have occurred.

cs3ink: Thanks for the art kudos, guess I've gotta put some serious work into the rest of it now. Any suggestions on maximising gag impact, or is it something that just needs practise?

VegaX: Can't disagree, it isn't really clear that the characters are at university level, though plans are afoot to do a graduation comic to help there. That first comic you linked to is an example of the inside-jokes I need to avoid... those were guys from a local forum that I met up with once. The comic does follow my life at times, but I'm workin' on making it more accessible, though it's still designed to be most accessible to those who've experienced student life and all the silliness that students get involved in.

It's primarily a gag-a-day (or rather gag-a-month) comic, and considering the update schedule, having a storyline probably wouldn't work out so well. I dunno, it's a difficult balance between appealing to those who like getting involved in a story, and those that just want a quick comic fix amongst all the others they read, but I appreciate all the feedback an' I'll keep workin' at it!

Do what you like, when you like. People will respond to quality, & you'll be happy with the results.

As far as storytelling, look at how your favorite comedy directs cut a scene. See what angles, shot, & edits they use, & figure out how to apply them to your work. Plus, it really does come with practice.

Keep at it.

Later,
Chip

It's tough to critique a comic thats only 20-something pages old. I genuinely feel that people don't really figure out how to do comics till around their 50th page, and even then they don't get into the swing of things till the 100th. What exaserbates this issue is the fact that your comic is rife with fillers, "hey we're back" strips, or "hey we're going away" strips, or one panel crossovers with other comics I don't read. Take all this junk out of your archive and drop it into an "Extras" page. I don't mind the occasional peice of filler here and there, in fact, being to lazy to make an extras page for my DD mirror, I haven't bothered taking that stuff out of my archives myself. However I have one peice of filler for every 10 or so actual comics, the ratio may actually be larger. Your ratio is like 1:2, I can't get into the comic if youre constantly ripping me out of it by breaking the fourth wall to deliver a message from the author that could easily be done in a newspost while you update an actual comic.

Ok, the lack of actual comics to critique aside, lets get started.

The art:

It's not fair to talk about the early art, because that's clearly changed alot, so I'll talk about the art from the most recent strip. Your backgrounds are photo's with a photoshop filter on them, it's fine they fill the space. But ever since Machall they've been a staple of the lazy comic creator, and frankly I find them tacky. I thought it was an interesting dichotomy the first time I saw a comic creator use them, but once so many people jumped on board the approach to the problem of backgrounds, I quickly grew to find them amateurish. Plus, they hurt your progression as an artist in the long run. You'd have a much better grasp of perspective if you had more practice drawing backgrounds. Next, your character models now are better than your character models were, you know, back when they were blurry, heavy inked chibis. However you still have big issues with anatomy (a problem you handle by drawing your characters from the shoulder up 90% of the time) and where you grew as an artist out of the anime style, you also lost a level of cartoonishness. You try to connect realism to cartoonish expressions, and it doesn't work, it just looks awkward. You need to get a better feel for when your expressions need to go straight to cartoon, and lose those lip lines when you don't need them. Your wrinkle lines suffer too, it's like you know there should be a wrinkle there, but sometimes its concave when it should be convex, or a little lower than it should be, or a little further away from the mouth or nose than it should be or visa versa, and really you don't need those lines go get across your expression in the first place, so rather than aiding you, it's just distracting.

The Presentation:

Firstly, let me get this out of the way. Your characters are always looking at me. Why are they doing that? I'm not there. They should be looking at each other. They're talking to each other. This affects the writing, which I'll get to later. The title sequence has got to go, it just looks like crap. You're using the same logo for your comic from when your art was much worse, so the resolution is lower than the rest of the comic, plus it's big, it's distracting from the comic. I don't need this information to read the comic, you can put it there for the tag, but don't make it so big that I can't overlook it. The most noticable thing about your presentation is that it's constantly changing. Page size, panel distribution, comic length, font, everything changes from one page to the next. It makes the comic seem less cohesive as a whole. Changing to a cah-razy font when someone gets kicked in the junk has less impact when you're changing the font up all the time anyway.

The Writing:

Remember when I said I'd get back to the whole "characters are looking at me" dealie, well here's where I do it. There isn't any interaction between the characters, that is, they don't have individual personalities, instead they're simply a medium through which a joke is delivered. Once the joke is delivered they look at the reader to indicate that the comic is over and someone cues the rimshot. None of the characters speak in a different voice, they all have the same inflection, speak the same way. You could switch the text bubbles around in any given comic and it wouldn't SOUND wierd, because, again, they all talk the same. This comic is arife with fourthwall breaching to set up jokes (which doesn't make sense, the reader doesn't wonder how glasses stay on a character's face, because he's a cartoon. You might has well have one of the characters ask why another's mouth goes off the side of his face when he's angry. These aren't realistic characters, how are we, the audience, supposed to distinguish between what cartoony elements are part of the style, and what cartoony elements are out of the ordinary to the characters in the comic, it just doesn't make sense.) It's also full of in-jokes that a regular person, who is unfamiliar with the ins-outs and goings on of your life would possibly understand, until we read your newspost and go, "oh, it's an 'in' joke, I'm not supposed to understand this." The jokes that are broad enough that an average joe could get them are often very poorly telegraphed. For example, the joke with the fact that everyone agent 47 switches clothes with is the same size as him. You shouldn't end the comic with the funny thing you observered, you begin the comic with that and use it to build the joke. For example, on the sopranos dvd's I noticed that in the early seasons on the episode summary they gave you a whole paragraph so you could identify what the episode was about, but on the dvds near the end of the season the summarys were so short and vague that theres no way you could determine which episode you were watching. They were like "Tony has financial trouble and Bobby eats a delicious sandwich." But I wouldn't make that my punchline, I'd start with that and build a joke out of it. Secondly, the agent 47 observance isn't unique to hitman, rather it spans pretty much that entire genre of entertainment, which is why it's broad enough for the average reader to understand (while alot of your other "gamer" jokes arent) however because of this, you're competing with other people who've made similar jokes in the past, for example family guy switching clothes with a much smaller bellboy and then switching them back from someone who dresses exactly the same as he normally does. When you have other people building jokes off of something, you can't just point out that you made that same observance yourself, but not make a joke.

A few other things:
Not having a joke is not a joke.
If your characters are bored so are your readers.
You say your familiar with webcomics like pvp, vgcats and penny arcade, and yet you can't recognize when a joke has been so overused by webomics that they're no longer funny? Catgirls? Leet speak?
One character doesn't like catgirls (speaks for reader) one character does (speaks for author?) Keep 'em in your sketchbook.
Offscreen violence isn't funny.
Violence without consequence isn't funny. Reacting to an everyday situation in an excessive way by escalating to violence without consequence isn't funny.

Overall:

Theres not enough comic here to critique, what little there is demonstrates the constant evolution that occurs in almost every comic in that first 50 pages. When the jokes are broad enough that someone who isn't in your circle of reallife/online friends could possibly understand them, they are generally uninspired, cliche, or just a flat out miss. My recommendation? Go back to formula. Scrap this comic, take the lessons you've learned thus far and create a new comic with a larger plan in mind, not nessecarily a storyline or anything just have a better idea of how you want your characters to come across, what kind of mood/tone you want to convey, and where you can best place jokes without telegraphing them.

Before I start my review of this comic, I'm going to agree with Kingofsnake. Comics really don't really get started untill about page 50, when they know more about the characters and a definable goal. This doesn't make them bad comics, this is a good example of this.

Over the Edge seems to me to be a college comic. The college comic is a sub-genre in which college students get together and just make pictures of their friends and have fun with it. There doesn't seem to be much recurring plot, each comic of OTE is a stand-alone joke. Some were good for a chuckle, but others I'll admit I just didn't get the joke. But the drawing style is cute and the characters are fun. Also, while the cameos and filler pictures of other people's characters didn't further the plot, they were often very cute, charming and added to the 'I'm just doing this for fun' feel of the comic.

I would like to see some more character development and some real storylines. But I started out with a college comic myself. So my only real advice would be to just keep having fun with it! Otherwise, what's the point, right?

The coloring is very good throughout the strip. Vibrant colors that really match the tone of the strips.
The actual art improved greatly since the first strip. The first couple the bodies looked a bit awkward compared to the heads. Now they seem to fit better. I love the expressions and poses of the characters. They're expressive and and make the jokes a bit more humorous.
Lettering could use some work. The letters tended to be a bit too close.
The layout can get very confusing. It ruined a couple of the jokes because I had no idea which way you were going. Humor strips to build up to the punchline with is normally the last panel but if I read some of the panels and text in the wrong place it ruins it for me.

Jokes, we have alot of fillers. Which is unfortunate for so few strips. I got the gaming jokes it's just all the crossover jokes I've never really understood. My favorite joke was the Black and White one. Some of the characters were introduced but never made were never seen again. Some good college humor especially the one about first year students. Over-all not a bad comic it needs more strips and more characters maybe actually connect a couple of strips to expand a character.