Sprite Comic.

http://www.drunkduck.com/Mishap_Mania/index.php

Story - Like the stuff with agents as it is actually a proper story that you have created yourself. The problem is however, that poke'mon battles are really boring. I mean really boring. I'm not interested in two sprites "tackling" each other for ten panels. Surely there is something more inventive to be done. While the running joke with the poke'mon professor is good there is not enough consistent jokes. Some episodes just left me wondering why.

Art - is just sprites. Sometimes what is supposed to be going on isn't discernable and far too often characters are obscured while huge patches of nothingness, languish in the middle of panels. And the characters are sometimes hard to discern. And the panels need to be more "seperate". It is painfully clear when you have used paint; it doesn't feel cohesive with the sprites.

Warning- I'm a late 40s old fart doing political cartoons, so take everything I say here with a grain of salt. Sprite is absolutely NOT my medium, and I predate Pokemon, so it's all greek to me.

Art- a sprite comic. Personally, I find them both lazy and boring- snatching art from somebody else and doing a Mad Lib.

Text- far too small. I can't comment on the story, because it was too much work to try to read it.

Lay-out- great big panels, tiny little characters and words. I felt more like the eye doctor was asking me to read the bottom line than like I was reading a comic.

Conclusion- perhaps it's just a personal thing, but there are a lot of people here working pretty hard to draw great comics, and the sprites really strike me as cheating. Maybe I just shouldn't opine on this style of 'toon.

STORY:Mishap Mania is a Pokemon based sprite comic that revolves around Lukas a young boy who has no interest in becoming a Pokemon master but by a series of events is forced into the role. A comedy this comic starts off running with a ton of humor and i found myself laughing on nearly every page, but this changed within the first two chapters as i realized i was going through 2 or 3 pages without so much as a giggle. Some pages are dedicated to Pokemon battles that i would call boring and made me reluctant to continue reading while the panels were bland and simple. The text bubbles often were positioned poorly causing me to reread a page multiple times before understanding exactly what was going on. Overall i think the first chapter is worth a check but i would stop short of reading beyond that.

ART:Due to it being a sprite comic i find it rather hard to discuss the art especially good things about it. The Panels are simply a series of rectangles attached to one another with no space in between and no change showing importance or pace. There is a ton of negative space in many of the pictures when you could easily use the crop tool to allow more important areas to be emphasized. The paint brush tool is poorly used but you can over look that considering you are watching a sprite comic, but something that cant be over looked is the poorly placed text bubbles.

CONCLUSION: Overall the comic is good up to the end of the first chapter, the story is sometimes funny and the art is poor often leading to confusion on what is happening. I personally would not jump to the computer to read this but if you have some time on your hands and don't mind having to double check a page to understand it then its a good read.

RATING: SPRITE COMICS:7/10 GENERAL COMICS: 4/10

Thanks for all the reviews, I do love constructive critisism.

With the pokemon battles, they are changing very soon. If you check filler 1 it will show you what the new ones will look like.

But yeah, I didn't think so many people would bother to read it in such a quick time.

Sprite comics, I think, are a wonderful way for a writer to create a comic without the hassle of finding an artist. They can become truly hilarious, great creations (such as 8-bit Theater or they can stagnate in their own set of sprite-based humor. Thankfully Mishap Mania eschews the basic stumbles of sprite humor to try and craft a story. . . unfortunately it isn't clear what that story IS.

The characters seem to be fairly unimportant, despite being set-up as the main conflict in the first couple of pages. There is a world of Pokemon out there, and a young man uninterested in becoming a trainer. And there is the first of the stumbling blocks, as we are treated to events that might be funny to someone interested in Pokemon, but fail to capture my attention. Why is it so important that Lukas become a trainer? Why doesn't he want to be a trainer? Why should we care? Make us care!

The art is essentially unmodified sprites, which removes all expression from the characters. Hence, we rely upon the text for the entire amusement and continuance of the story; the text fails to manage this. It drags. It doesn't always make sense. It is, thankfully, well edited. Why is anyone fighting? Why is Lukas searching a haunted house for food? Is he really dumb, or simply oblivious? And why, after just a couple of pokemon battles, is Lukas suddenly all gung-ho for beating people up with his pooch? These are the sorts of things that could be worked out in dialog, but aren't.

In short, I think that Mishap Mania needs more explicit plots, more time spent with its characters, and less time on extended pokemon battles.

Thanks for the review Mina_Lunga!

Someone
Why is it so important that Lukas become a trainer?

It's a joke more than anything, because in the pokemon games, you can't get anywhere without becoming a trainer.

But yeah, everything you wrote there was true. But this is my first comic, and I am learning new things all the time. That's really why I put this up to be reviewed, to make it a lot better.

Of course, all these pointers to improve will take time, such as the new battles, and facial expressions, and all that.

Alright, I was all pumped up to dig in and do a review.

That did not last.

So this thing is a sprite comic about pokemon? Okay. Those two factors alone immediately turned me off. But despite the initial misgivings, I pushed myself.

For a sprite comic, this is pretty bad. Zoom in, man. The sprites are tiny. I can't tell who is doing the talking half the time, and there's no facial expressions to speak of. Seriously, get us in there!

The writing, well... I don't get it. I don't know pokemon, so that's a big factor. But really, your writing should be able to stand on its own without prior knowledge of the subject matter, you know?

Keep plugging away, and look to other sprite comics for examples of what to do and what not to do.