Runway

Get your fash-on with the colorful, trendy adventures in Runway! Keeko is a 13-year-old fashion designer who is a student at Franz's Design School. With the help of his design team, he'll try his best to make it to the top, and leave the other teams in the dust! But it won't be easy!

"Runway" follows the misadventures of a group of students at a design school through such challenges as girls, assignments, poise, girls, annoying siblings, the weather, girls and girls.
This is a very cute, funny comic, good for a few laughs and for if you're into endearing slapstick comedy and cute art.

THE ART. The characters' designs seem to be a fusion of Japanese chibi-style art and Western cartoons. Their clothes fit their personalities: the "emo/goth" girl wears dark clothing, the eccentric hyperactive girl wears bright clothing, and so on. The art is, let's face it, adorable. Lots of bright colours and the like. I enjoyed this comic's art very much.

THE STORYLINE. Mostly consists of one-shot gags, though a few continued storylines such as the "Princess Nyakami" and "Animal Daycare" plots do crop up from time to time. Mostly cute, silly antics from the main characters: Squish's hyperactivity, Keeko and Ronni's attempts to get Keeko into the dating scene, Keeko and Gregory's rivalry and so forth. One doesn't actually see much fashion design outside of certain storylines, but the rest of the comic is so good you don't really notice.

THE CHARACTERS. Are very well defined; everyone has his or her own distinct personality. Not entirely sure where the talking octopus came from, but regardless, the characterisation is very well done. In my personal opinion, Squish happens to be my favourite character, simply because of her silly childish ditziness shining a beam of light and warmth into the depths of my shrivelled, undersized, black heart.

THE HUMOUR. Is silly, cute and entertaining. Raises a few eyebrows here and there, such as Drew encouraging Squish to cut off the finger she slammed in the door, but you can't help but giggle even as you're raising the aforementioned eyebrow. There's quite a few "awwww" moments in there as well, mixed in with the "ha ha" moments.

SUMMARY. "Runway" is simply adorable. Cute art, endearing characters, silly humour. I loved it. One suggestion I might make is to look more carefully at the spelling, but really, a couple of goofs here and there do nothing to detract from this comic's quality. Also, a look at the layout might help: the lack of a date stamp or comic selection menu makes reading it ever so slightly confusing.
All in all, however, "Runway" is a must read.

10/10

Runway is a comedy webcomic, telling the stories of a number of young fashion designers in training.
It consists of a combination of one off jokes and longer story arcs.
For this review, I found myself a bit out of my depth, because this is not my sort of comic at all. It is quite squarely aimed at a younger audience so in order to give the comic a fair crack of the whip, I decided to have my daughter (who is 14 years old) help me out, as she quite liked it.
Megan (my daughter) tells me that there are some good jokes, such as this one which she enjoyed-
http://www.drunkduck.com/Runway/index.php?p=465775

She also liked the design of all the characters, because they were simple but still very expressive. She found their personalities easy to to spot and understand.

Now some things that I didn't like so much.
I felt the characters were all rather stereotypical, sulky goth, ditzy blond, angry red head....heck, you could define all the female characters based purely on hair colour). Evil fat rich kid, shy hero....I could go on. Beyond these one word descriptions I did not feel there was any real depth to the characters.
Aiming at young people is not an excuse for lazy character writing.

The long running story arcs were far less funny then the one off comics, perhaps because fashion design is just not very interesting, but also because the simplistic characters are just not substantial enough for me to want to watch through drawn out adventures.


Were I to review this comic for myself, I would have given it something in the region of 3 out of ten, but I am not the intended audience.
If you are a 14 year old girl, or know a 14 year old girl who wants to read a web comic, then give this comic a look, as the cute look and lively adventures are bound to raise a smile.
final score-
6/10

I haven't been on the forums in ages! Thought maybe I'd start showing my face again a bit.

Okay, so, Runway. It's a gag comic about students at a fashion school with cute, consistent art in bright colours and well-defined characters.

The art is done in a cute, inoffensive cartoon style that most people should enjoy, or at very least, even the most critical person probably wouldn't have their enjoyment totally spoiled by it. It's nice, fits the mood and the colours are bright, but still just keeping on the comfortable side of garish (though they get a wee bit close to the line at times).
The gags are largely character based. At times, I feel this is a bit of a waste, since the setting, as a fashion school, is original and untapped, yet very few of the jokes or plotlines are anything to do with fashion or the fact that it's a fashion school. It'd be nice to see a few more stories and jokes which stem from the fact that the characters are fashion designers, thereby utilising the comic's main original selling point better. The character-based jokes work pretty well, but tend to be quite generic.
As Harkovast said, the characters are pretty stock, the main character is the typical American gag comic main character who just can't get the sweet girl next door, though he's made a little more interesting by being very camp and fashion concious. There's a morbid goth, a ditzy blonde an annoying kid sibling...they're well defined but not ground-breaking. Some of the jokes are handled better than others. Often there's just not enough set up or explanation for a punch line, and you're left sort of going "...what? How did that happen?"

My main problem with this comic is more how it's presented on the page than the comic itself. Firstly, the panels are way too small. They look about 150x200 pixels! The panels are so small, that sometimes it gets really hard to tell what's going on in them, especially if the panel is dark and there's more than 2 characters present. It's not so bad for dialogue, but when there's any kind of action or activity, it gets quite difficult, the thick lines which define the art style make things very muggy when there's a lot going on. Lighter colours, thinner panel borders and using finer inking on more distant objects would really help open up the comic and make it more comfortable reading. Better yet, bigger panels would be great.
My other main complaint is the position of the navigation buttons above the comic but not below. This is reasonable, if unintuitive, on the shorter strips, but on anything with more than one row of panels, you'll have to scroll down while reading and then scroll back up to the top again to read the next comic. It's rather frustrating when reading through the large archive to keep scrolling up and down!

So all in all, Runway is a decent all-round gag comic which could be much improved by just making itself a little easier for the reader and taking more advantage of it's unique position as a fashion school-based gag strip.

Many have already gone over what Runway is about. It's a comedy strip about students and their humorous lifes. It is full of humor based on embarassments. And, just as the drawing style suggests, it's very cute.

Art:
The design and the panel sequentials are fitting. Stick with it, I would say. I have two small critiques. One is that sometimes it looks a bit messy and one has to guess on some details. It shouldn't take very much to clean those up. Two is that the speech bubbles are sometimes too big and overspilling. I know you want to keep all of the panels as small squares but sometimes it looks cramped. I notice that sometimes you would draw a line to separate two speech bubbles in two seperate panels that are too close to each other. This is very distracting and draws attention from the comic and pulls the readers out of the comic's world. If you simply enlarge the squares a little you would have plenty of room.

Story:
My critique is that if you are going to have a character based comic, give them some kinks. Like Harkovast said, the characters are quiet stereotypical. The humor you are delivering is dying for some kink in your characters. I think Harkovast liked the one offs (and so did I) was because their actions were odd and unexpected. Your characters need the same kinks in their personality to make them odd and unexpected.

Hope that was helpful and good luck!

I'm just gonna repeat the setting, as it makes sense to. This comic is about some kids at a fashion design school and their "crazy" antics.

The art is, although very cutesy and simple looking, are very well done. I've gathered a liking for the character designs, such as the goth. She's awesome. ^_^
This comic doesn't really follow a plot, as it's a short gag comic, so it's all about the jokes. And the jokes make me laugh, so that's a plus. As for the problems, well I thought this was brought up already, but the panels are way too small for my taste. ):

Another thing that may be off-putting is the template. While it may not be a problem for some, the bright sherbert-styled background burned my eyes. I kinda felt like I was suffereing though the pages because my eyes were hurting on every page. However, this may not go for everyone, I just have sensitive eyes, so I prefer somewhat darker templates. All in all, this comic should be given a look. It's definately great.

Runway centers around some fashion designers, and gags that make your chest hurt and eyes water.
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Each page centers around some sort of gag, and then it rolls on from there into another gag, which gives the comic a semi storyline with gags.

Some of the characters ARE a little odd, in their own little ways. Ronnie, or Ronny seems to be in love with his body, like some guys that in the real world we call "fags?" I don't but that's just society.

This comic is definitely worth the read, if you need a good chuckle or something to make yourself piss your pants, I recommend reading Runway. I have a couple of complaints nothing major, sometimes the text is hard to read..no biggy. And sometimes I can't really follow the story, but that might just be me.

But overall this comic is great, and you should read it..or else.

Runway is colorful, laugh-nerves tickling webcomic about fashion-design students. It's a strip webcomic that tells random, wacky stories that are delivered in nice and tasty candy colored panels and smile-inducing sequences.

The charaters are chibi-designed that will make you want to cuddle them over and over again. Their emotions are right on the money, with smiles, sarcasms, sadness, and other range of emotions that are expressed nicely, and made fits seamlessly with the storylines.

Aah..what else? The layouts? Well, the layout is somewhat confusing, with huge title picture that will make you think that is the comic page. Not that the title picture is bad or anything, but it really steals the show sometimes, cause sometimes the comic page itself is black and white.

Overall, worth your time :)

art
its bright it colourful and its interesting. my only concerns would its size. because its so colourful i find some elements of the comic are harder to make out due the overall size.
the characters do generally fit in a niche, such as the blonde ditz and the emo goth girl and though this could be seen as stereotyping in short 4 panelled comics making over complicated characters that aren't instantly recongisable cant be off put so here i belive there a good balance between the stereotype interesting characters

layout
its a good layout, the 4 panel system is a tried and tested method so stick to it! the change of panel style also it a little refreshing though the HTML is a little acidic and harsh on the eyes and can detract from the overall comic experience

writing
i quite enjoy the quirky script and nice one liner, i believe that the longer story arcs can be quite exhausting where as the shorter ones are a whirl!
but i do like the wording of the characters, very youthful and 'hip'


small quirky and fun!
i love the character designs and they are indeed highly expressive! i love the short and punchy gags! i would say a wonderful comic all round!

Runaway is a nice a simple comic, it delivers funny jokes and are delivered well with the cute cartoon style. Possibly my favourite part of the comic is the way the charecters express their emotions on their face, the body language and expression is exagerated really well so the reader can follow what the charecter is feeling. This is pretty important since a lot of the comic uses theese expressions for the joke to work.
The art is simple without being over done, it is perfect for the kind of comic.
The majority of strips are hillarious, every once in a while I don't really get it and although I like the story lines, they aren't as great as the regular single strips. That doesn't mean that the storylines shouldn't be there though, a little story now and then in a strip comic can be a good thing.