REVIEW FASTER AND HARDER.

http://www.drunkduck.com/Dribble_For_Kids

Let's see...
Well, beginning from the beginning was a mistake. There was chaos and confusion and... oh, wait. There is still chaos and confusion even after the fact. Dang.
List of bothersome things:
#1. Why does the size of your images have to change so often in the beginning? Changing from 3 to 4 panels is one thing, but having small easily screen-fittable comics one page and then BANZAI screen-stretching-must-scroll comics on the next page is not only frustrating but confusing and leads to a sense of alienation.
Obviously in recent comics you've done a good job of keeping things the same size and the black background really helps to unify things, but I think you could edit the previous ones for more cohesion.

#2. There is no sense of time, location, or real relationship set out at the beginning of this comic. Are these brothers? Best friends? Classmates? co-workers? Why are they always together? Beginnings are important. If I was just looking to see if I was interested in this comic, I wouldn't have read past the first five pages out of sheer confusion.

#3. I'm not going to lie, many of the jokes are lost on me in most of it. I fail to see the humor. But I can tell by others' comments that there is humor to be had, so my critique is merely uninformed.

Good things:
#1. The dialogue is pretty natural. No outstanding grammar or spelling mistakes. And the words are easy to read.

#2. The comic is well-drawn in the sense that it's clean and you always know which character is who. Very distinctive characerizations. The girlfriend's head gets a little cluttered and I don't understand her hair, but that's okay. Most guys don't understand girl hair. ^_^

#3. This comic grows and improves. Obviously with the addition of color, the comic explodes with possibilities. We have far more ideas about backgrounds, foregrounds, props, etc. Once your line starts to thicken and you really start to develop your style, the whole comic starts to gel a lot more. Also, the story dramatically improves as we go. All of a sudden there is a story!

So my suggestion to you is to redo your first two years of pages. That doesn't sound difficult, does it? ^_^ You're almost done anyway, right? So you'll have plenty of time in retirement to do so. Riiiight.

By the way, I liked your drawing style best around issue 5. The lines, colors, and shades all seemed most balanced them. Still, I can understand wanting to change every now and then.

Good luck with your last chapter!

Cheerio!

Okay, a review.

Now, at first it was a little hard to get into. There was very little background, no color, no depth, and crappy computer editing that made me wanna dig a knife through some soft and squishy. I'm really glad you improced your art! Truely cartoon style. :) You gave more attention to colors, back grounds and expressions as you continued to draw. XD That made me really glad to see such improvements after two years. :) Good work!

Now, the jokes is partially not my understand. :/ I'm not big on humor though. So 'm at fault. :)

It's really good to see you're still makng this comic after two years. You've kept to your own style, you've improved your style to your liking, and you kept to your own thing. :)

Keep it up!

(note: My "I" key on this laptop is hard to work with. :()

Time to comment and answer some of the questions & comments posed:

iagojester asked/said:

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Yeah... the beginning totally sucks! :-D

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I did try that, but i ended up losing one comic in the process. (don't ask.) So, for the time being (i'll explain later) I'm going to leave as is. On my homepage, I have a link regarding this, but being Drunk Duck is the mirror, I'll admit stupidity on not wanting to touch the templates to add links, etc due to fear of ruining the template. And I'm lazy. Sucks.

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Yeah, I know. While the location becomes to be hinted at from comic 50+, before that, it's more of a WTF? It was more considered 'back in the day' to myself as a gag strip. So I didn't think the location, etc was going to be important. Of course, writing in general, for a 4 - 6 panel comic 'strip' is hard for me. It's not my bag. Whilst my humor hasn't changed, it's still an Aqua Teen Hunger Force/Futurama-style of humor, and it was a lot harder to do it all within 4-6 panels. Plus trying to add background stuff for the reader regarding the characters? Whew. I'm glad I'm not doing them as that anymore. Plus I have respect for those that can pull it off.

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Well my biggest problem, and admittedly so, is that being my humor is Futurama-like, I tend to go for hardcore geek stuff. Also, since I started doing the full page format, I was in a mindset to get a pun out in 4-6 panels and I'm not really good at that, as you can easily tell. So ones where I did prolly have a chance to make a funny, I prolly horribly fucked it up. :-/ But, this is all a learning game for 99.9%, so hopefully when I jump back into the funny after the last chapter of "Lord of the Sweaters" (the current serious storyline), my writing style has somewhat improved and thus, maybe a bit more universal, while still catering to my inner geek.

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Thank you. :-D

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You are SO RIGHT! I am self-taught by sorta doing what others have done and then creating my own style from there and lately I'm in love with John Allison's style of drawing women, among a few other artists (Sean 'Cheeks' Galloway being one of them as well). My current Ashley designs are not great, but much better than it was before. In general, for me, girls are hard to draw. I draw my characters sorta 'blocky', or "Godzilla" like, as all the legs are stalky, and girls should be damn cute and fine when you draw them.

Oh and... Are you talking about Penny the blonde or Ashley the brown-haired girl?

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You're right. I do have a plan to eventually re-do the first 50 comics. While the first 100 would be perfect, redoing the first 50 to be more coherent, would be amazing as, the first 50 are somewhat cannon, but somewhat not. Re-doing them would be making the first 50 officially cannon again, and would be awesome.

And last but not least, Chris chris:

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Can I join you?

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Gracias.

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Yeah, see above regarding the humor. so I understand.

Thanks for the great reviews, as I appreciate ones who are balanced like both of yours were. That and I enjoy ones that are honest but aren't harsh. Rock on.
I wanna thank both of you for taking the time with reading the archives and to give it an honest read and thus, review. I appreciate it. Same goes to anyone else who wants to give it a try. And if you have any questions, etc, I'll check back up here. (I didn't know this was up until someone pointed it out to me as I requested this like, a year or so ago! :-D)

--Nitro