Stitches

Stitches is a story of death and second chances in which Carter, a zombie, finds hope in his creation, Nora, only to have her kidnapped by his own creator. He soon embarks on an adventure of hardships and oddball characters, being forced to face his past.

Stitches is a gothic sort of comic with a similar feel about it to 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' or 'The Corpse Bride'. It's quite a touching tale about a guy who is undead and his friend, a girl who seems to be stitched together like a living ragdoll.

The first thing that jumps out about this comic, regrettably, is the font. It's uncomfortable to read, the capitals are huge meaning that the lowercase letters are all tiny in order for it to fit into the panels. It's distractingly fancy and would best be used just or titles, sound effects etc, with something a little plainer for dialogue. It does get more legible in later pages, but I still find it distracting and think something simple would do the job.
The actual writing, once you get past the font, is good. It has a nice smooth flow to it. There are some well-written, very tender character moments and overall the premise of the story seems good.

The art is experimental and a bit hit-and-miss, but interesting. The actual draughtsmanship is good, with generally well proportioned characters, good clear expression and movement and consistent. The backgrounds are a bit sparse...okay, very sparse. Just a little more time and detail there would really give the comic a lift. There's a lot of empty space in the comic. The art style uses a lot of effects, which sometimes work giving a lovely painterly textured look, but sometimes look lazy or tacky. I think the paintery smudgy effects on the colouring work well, but some of the effect filters don't so much. It seems like the effect filters become less and less common though, and the art is developing nicely as the comic continues, with more background detail, better panel layouts etc.

Around page 40, suddenly the art quality leaps up with the two latest pages looking much better with crisper inking and more confident use of colour, texture and effects. This bodes well for the comic overall in the future.

I'd call this a sort of 'growing' comic. The art keeps improving as it goes, and while early on it falls into a few beginner holes with sparse backgrounds, a lack of establishing shots, a rather uncomfortable fancy font and lots of people stood in the middle of panels, I'd still recommend it. It's original with a distinctive look and atmosphere, and the artist really does work hard to improve, and I'd expect the work to continue to improve too. It's a comic with a lot of potential.

If you want something original and a bit gothic without being overwhelmingly emo, and if you like watching an artist grow and develop, I say check it out!

I never liked gothic\emo sort of comics but this one I surprisingly liked.

Story: It's kinda a mix between "rescue the princess" and an odd "love story" type of story. Basically a zombie makes a doll, and some guy takes the doll, and the zombie sets off to rescue it (well he didn't rescue it yet but that's what the description says). The story is strange but pulls you in, the weird love between Carter and Nora is fun to read. The dialogue is simple and does the job but the font is kind of hard to read, and this is the weakest part of the comic.

Art: Really fits the story. It kinda has this traditional art feel mixed in with browns and other muddy colors to give it its goth-type feel that matches the overall tone of the story. The manga style also is pretty easy on the eyes. The panel layout however is pretty simple to, not bad but not the best I've seen in a comic.

The book is pretty good, I've never liked these sorta comics but this one is a good read. I give it a 7.9/10.

If I had to sum it up in two words it would be dark cuteness. Kind of like emily strange or the music video Luna from Moonspell (not sure if you've seen it). At first my only complain on the artwork would be the lack of backgrounds, but that fixes later on so. Improvement is always a plus. The font however is something I found very very hard to read. I mean the font type is nice, but too thin for sore eyes. Only on the last few pages could I read without zooming. But that improved too.

Character Design: Very unique standing out characters, as I mentioned earlier cute in a very creepy way. Love Nora's design and outfit. I'm guessing Tim burton is a huge influence lol.

Plot: The darkness of it is a huge plus. Story runs very smoothly. And at random times creeped me out in a good way. The strange love between the protagonists is probably the highlight in my opinion of the story.

Overall, Decent art. Very thematic both story wise and art wise. I'll give it a 7.5/10 Keep it up

Art: The font for the first forty or so pages is very distracting, and often hard to read. Fortunately, in the most recent couple of pages, this problem is fixed, but it still made the first chapter a little hard to follow. The panel layouts are fairly standard at first, but suddenly take a jump towards the experimental at page forty- this isn't a bad thing, as it is also around this time that the art starts improving in leaps and bounds. The earlier pages can tend to look pixely, but the newer pages look very crisp and clean, and the art is a much higher quality. The sudden improvement really astounded me. However, the use of backgrounds is still fairly minimal.

Story: as there are only 54 pages so far, I can't really say all that much about this yet. However, from what I can see it revolves around two undead friends. The paceing is generally pretty good- things flow fairly nicely, but there are a few conversations in there that I'm not sure of the point of. Once again, this seems to have improved in the recent pages.

Characters: I'm not entierly sure what the personalities of the characters are- I mean, I know that they are dead and probably depressed because of it, but I think there should be more to them then that. What are their hobbies? Favorite food/TV show?
This is more of a personal problem then anything, and it may just be that I've spent so much time with my wacky, over the top characters that I've lost all understanding of subtlety.

Overall: Needs some improvement, but by no means is it bad. My main suggestion would be to try to redo the font in the first chapter, this change alone would make it instantly easier to read and follow what is happening. You've shown massive improvement already, so just keep at it!

Art: At first I didn't enjoy the start. The art a felt was a bit odd. Bad in some way. The lines didn't look very well, nor did the different images in picture to picture. However the art improved a lot from the very beginning to where it is now.

Story: I really enjoyed the story and though the text at the start is a bit troubling and hard to read. I was able to get a good impact from what you were trying to say. The story seems very slow however. I know what is going on and I know it takes to time to explain story, I just feel it's going a bit too slow, for me at least.

Character: I love the characters, number one because of their styles. The way they are drawn makes me enjoy them better. Though I did get very confused with the fact a few characters may look the same.

Overall: The whole comic is wonderful, the art now is lovely and I think that it has a nice theme to it. Very dark and Gothic like. Which in this case is a very good thing.

ART: It didn't look too good at the begining, with its lack of background and characters that looked a little flat, but has improved greatly. The overall mood with the colors was something I liked a lot for the first 30 or so pages, and I thought worked better than the greys used later on. I didn't care for the use of the bright colors as it helped to take me out of the gothic, dark tone it established earlier, but it seems to be coming around again to those dark colors. The character design was decent and an almost storybook look to them, and it's a good thing to see them with improved artistry, although I'd like to see more background added to this comic.

WRITING: I kinda liked the dialogue between the main character (Carter) and his creation (Nora)and would have preferred to see more of the things that they would have done together, ya know, in a sort of unforgiving and lonely world, but then it almost turns into an action comic which I felt wasn't the way to go. It was hard to read the dialogue, but it was interesting enough to make me wanna read what they were saying. The thoughts of the characters was a good read.

It would be interesting to see where the artist goes with this comic, so I would highly recommend!