I remember this one! I reviewed it waaaay back.

And, COME ON PEOPLE REVIEW DAMNIT. Perils of the Bold sat there for like 3 weeks with only two reviews! GRAGH.

http://www.drunkduck.com/Magical_Mania/

Link fixed. You forgot the "http://"


I'm not good at reviews, but I'll give it a go with a quick one:

I like Magical Mania beause it's fun as well as a bit cheeky and sexy. This apeals to me greatly!
Magical Mania is an interesting read; one moment it's all sweetness and light with a nice jokey atmosphere, the next you're plunged into sickening horror where people are being pulled appart or having the flesh flayed from their bones in the most disgusing manner.
The art is of a Mangaish nature and the story is based on the "magical girl" type, with a sailor moonish flavour, but twisted into a new creature entirely.

Aurora is a good artist, she knows her figures well amd her backgrounds usually contain a lot of work. One critisisim I do have about her figure drawings though is the shakey linework. The figure drawings would really look a lot better if the lines were smoother and straighter. That is an area that really does need a little tighting up.

The web design looks good, and I'm glad she's got all the text sorted out now with some good comic fonts. The text styles and speech bubbles are two areas of huge improvment and that's done a lot for the comic.

Magical Mania is a very confusing comic, and not for the usual reasons a comic would be confusing...
The plotline is very straightforward, it's classic magical girl fare. Queen of darkness, reincarnation, teen girls, magic...so on a basic level it's like a cross between Sailor Moon and Pretear. Though some people would consider that to be a bad thing, I think it's good, taking a classic idea and putting your own spin on it. Plus, it could go in some interesting directions later, it still feels like it's only really just got going.
The dialogue is, thankfully free from both bad spelling and grammar and from 'manga english' (by which I mean, when dialogue is written by somebody who's read too much manga and writes dialogue like 'Don't underestimate me!' and 'Oh no, he's going to use THAT weapon!') Though it does have some Sailor Moon style weird attack names near the start. It's written in straightforward, natural english. Sometimes it sounds a little flat, like it's getting across the meaning more than the emotion and character. Still, I'd rate it above many comics, simply because it's easy to follow what's going on.
So the plot and dialogue are generally fine, where I find it gets confusing is the actual style, tone and artwork of the comic.
Firstly, the artwork. It's really kind of inconsistant. Occasionally you get a panel that looks absolutely fantastic, with good anatomy and use of foreshortening, fully finished and shaded and with clean lines and detail, but on other panels of the same page, you can find the same character looking fuzzy, wobbly and strangely shaped. If all of the comic looked as good as the better, more finished panels, it would look amazing. The colour often overpowers the lines, especially when things have been coloured with gradient fills, the blur tool is used extensively, often compromising what could be clean, solid linework, along with a number of other photoshop filters that in most cases would be better left unused. I think Aurora needs to have more confidence in her own drawing ability, and spend more time on the drawing phase rather than adding loads of effects in afterwards.
The tone of the comic is likewise inconsistant and contradictory. It's about teenage girls with magical powers, and has a simple plot and dialogue, drawn in a bold, brightly coloured manga style and a clumsy, clutzy misfit heroine with bubblegum pink hair and a sun and moon on her forehead. That makes it sound like the comic is made for kids, right? But the actual content of the comic involves frequent cussing, full frontal nudity and quite a lot of violence and gore, which would make it seem that the comic is meant to be for adults. What this lead to was pretty much me not really understanding what the comic was meant to be going for. I couldn't take it seriously as an adult comic because of the cartoony style and plot, but I couldn't enjoy it as an innocent, fun children's story because of all the dismembering and swearing. The panty shots didn't help much either, because that just made me think maybe it's aimed at guys? But that would contradict the bishounen and lack of a central male presence. I couldn't work out what the target audience was supposed to be.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's a bad comic. Far from it. It just doesn't appeal to me personally, and I couldn't connect with it. I think that some improvement could be made to the artwork, to bring up the overall quality of the comic. I don't think changing the tone would work beyond making me less confused, since I get the feeling there are a lot of people who like it just as it is, and don't see it as a flaw, but a strong point.

I'm currently assuming that this is one of those 'Marmite' comics, as I could call them. A comic that you either get and really like, or don't get and just feel bemused by. It seems to have a good number of readers, so I'm guessing that other people connected with it and enjoy it very much. So I'd suggest to everybody trying it and seeing what you think. It's just one of those things where you can't know until you've tried reading it.

I reviewed this way back, so I'm just going to write a short little critique on the art.

Basically your art is really really inconsistant. I mean, look at This page. Do you see how removed the character looks from the background? The background looks all good with correct perspective, if a bit pixleated. The character looks sorta MS-Painted. No real proper proportions. He changes every panel. Also the characters look really flat on some pages, like This . But then you'll do a really good shading job on a later page which will make them almost look like cell-shaded character models, except with some wonky proportions. Your panel layout on the page I liked to was also kind of confusing, and you have these big kind of malformed text bubbles obscuring things even more.

I mean, you've got some good basic knowledge of how to draw a face Link however you're not applying your drawing knowledge to the comic or creating solid character models to work from here. You're also not using your computer programs well enough either. There's all these big white spaces everywhere. Or in some places the lines around the characters aren't full on black.

Basically the art strikes me as odd and in need of improvement for the reasons I've listed. You need to get character models down and keep them that way. Also the mouth should not be where the chin is. And try to combine your drawings and backgrounds better.

Thanks for the reviews!! ^_^

Yeah, I do have an slothful problem in terms of my artwork. There's days when I've felt really lazy and not really giving it my full effort in drawing...so that's why some of the characters look so sloppy at times in some pages. It's been an very bad habit that I've been trying hard to defeat. I've been sincerely trying to give it all my best effort for every page, but as you can see in some pages, I relapse a little bit on my bad habit.
and then there's some days when I just can't seem to redraw an old scene perfectly as I would like, so I end up reusing some of my old artwork from before when I restarted that comic. probably not a very good thing, huh?

But like I said, I've been working very hard to try to change that... and hopefully your reviews will inspire me to do even more better. as always I'll just practice some more on that and hopefully that bad habit will go away in time.


I'm glad that people are enjoying the story, even if it's a little bit confusing in the tone. ;)
I'm certainly happy to know that my script for this story doesn't sound way too cliched or too "Mangaish".

To explain what my intentions for this comic was... I was actually aiming this at an specific group.. mature teenagers of 17 and up. so you could say I was aiming for the middle group between the kids' group and the adults' group.
In mature teenager movies they'll have mild nudity, some cussing... the same for Anime and Manga directed at Mature Teenagers as well as adults.
Even in an mature anime they'll have some cheery bright colors that makes it seem child-like, etc. So I was only doing what seemed natural to me.

on the subject of the colors and everything...
I was also trying to aim for an world that on the surface seemed cheery; even seeming like a child-like, modern fantasy setting--but one that would actually have a much more darker, sinister undertone, that not everything is not as it seems. I hope that makes sense?

Anyway I hope that cleared up any questions that some reviewers might had. please keep on reviewing if you please... every constructive criticism bit helps~!

My review is a bit late, but better late then never I guess.

Nice job of starting the story out with a big battle. It really caught me attention and made me want to read your comic, rather than the annoying “Okay so this is my comic….” You’re fairly good at drawing action sequences, though there is definitely room for improvement. I’m so glad your characters didn’t announce their attacks as they were sparring their opponent. Though in some sections I was confused as to how a magical move was destroying an opponent (there was just this white lightning blot thing and bam supposedly the evil chick was dead).

You’ve also done a nice job of making distinct character designs, however they could be more consistent in appearance (but as you draw them more often they will become more consistent on their own).

To improve you could change up your page layout. Overlap panels, give them variations of sizes and shapes, instead of putting one big paragraph in a huge box disperse that paragraph around the page, that will be more visually appealing.

Final notes: Overall it’s a good parody comic, and I could see it becoming popular as you continue to grow as an artist.

I read over you comic and I like what I see the comic has a good title and great characters