The Penguin Monolouges

Review it if you want your own comic reviewed. I'll review this myself later. Oh, and it doesn't have very many comics up yet, but go for it anyway.

*Insert witty review-based thing like Eggbert used to do here*

Okay I lied, I'm reviewing it now. It's only 4 strips posted so far so that's not hard to read through.

Art- Needs LOTS OF WORK. Absolutly no grasp of anything slightly resembling proportions. Now for a cartoon comic that's okay, but at least the proportions need to stay the same, and not shift from page to page. The linework is messy and looks pixleated, and the speech bubbles aren't filled in. Speech bubbles have two purposes:
To show which character is talking. (yeah, you've accomplished that)
And to make the text easier to read.
Look at that last one. You aren't doing that. If you have photoshop this is easy to correct. Make a new layer and lable it 'bubble' or something like that. Then go over to Layers>Layer Effects>Stroke and make the stroke a black 3. Then use the marquee tool to make the bubbles and fill in the bubble with white, and type the text in on top of it. Easy. And your comic NEEDS readable text. Also you can put a white stroke around the words temselves to make them easier to read, which is something I do a lot.

Writing- When I could read it, it was pretty good. Or okay. Nothing that was laugh out loud funny. It's above mediocre, but work on making it better and better because the art doesn't make up for it.

Characters- I feel no connection with them. But there's only 4 strips. You have time to fix that.

Overall- It needs a lot of work. Examine comics like Penny Arcade. A lot of times I don't find their stuff so funny, but it's very easy to read and the characters stay in proportion. There are also comics that don't have such great art, but the writing makes up for it. Work on both, or choose one.

Just so you know, I'm not trying to be mean. I'm just judging from what I see.

Um, we don't hate you at all. We all drew at that level once. Oh, and since you have Photoshop, check out some of neondragon's tutorials on the subject. www.neondragonart.com

Myxomatosis liked the tribute to DrunkDuck at the begining, that was nice of you.

Let`s see, the art is well. It`s getting there. Big heads and kinda small body is kinda creepy though, but it can be improved on. That the good thing. Your style kinda unique. Try harder, you`ll get there. Or don`t. And tell all people like me to go screw themselves. It`s your choice man.

The writing? I`m not one to judge writing since well. I couldn`t do that for shit. The writing is okay. (irony.) Some jokes made me laugh, so didn`t. It`s kinda hit and miss. By the way. Try to not make the speech ballons invisible or with the text red. To me they look kinda paint-ish, and the red does not look good. But to hell with what I think.

I`m sick so what ever I say might not be the best. Your comic, with a little more improvement, can become something better, right now it`s kinda good and best of luck.



.: Myxomatosis :.

No idea how to start off with Photoshop?
Well that's what I'm here for bro

You've got great funny writing, at least in the last few pages. I also approve of your limited pallet: black, white and red, that's very effective in giving your simple style a solid theme.

Those are the good points. What you're doing wrong is that your pages are atleast 3 times bigger than they need to be with that level of detail. They could be MUCH smaller and work a lot better, like a newspaper strip.
Your drawing style is lazy, you haven't bothered to develop a neat style that you can easily reproduce. Do it.
Lastly: Finish your stuff of nicely, don't just think "ah fuck it, that's good enough" and post messy, half done pages. It doesn't take much just to get that drawing a little smoother and go back and fix those stupid speech bubbles in the earlier work, or fix up any other little problems.

Those jokes work and they're funny, turn the pages into small comic strips, neaten the artwork, fix up the messy bits, and you've got a great comic!

This isn't a review, but your art seems like the type that could end up being very pretty if you learned to do the lineart on the computer. I just have a mental image in my head...

OR, for now, or just try to mess with the Brightness/Contrast or Levels to make it look less...."dirty" or "scanned" and more "pretty black&white"....and yeah....proportions and all that. I also agree that the page would look nicer small...ish.

Ahh, time for me to burn some bridges in the review forum.

THE GOOD:

The art shows definate signs of being able to grow. Some basics inklings of a unique style are there.

THE BAD:

Obsessive, unfunny violence for the sake of violence, lack of grasp on basic proportions and anatomy.

THE UGLY:

The writing did not make me laugh, but then again, I'll admit this is difficult to do. Furthermore, the dialogue balloons are painfully bad, with lines from characters and backgrounds within the balloons, kind of defeating the purpose of them. The writing is especially irksome. Flow and humour is often brought to a screeching hault by unorganic dialogue, it just doesn't flow, at all.

OVERALL:

This comic seems to want to be like Penny-Arcade. But where Penny-Arcade has excellent writing, intelligent and clever use of violence and an artist with a grasp on anatomy and proportions, this comic lacks them.
Work on those things however, and there should be a noticable difference.

I like this comic.

I have no idea how long this guy has been drawing, but the comic is only on 22, so maybe the art just needs to find it's groove. There is a definite and deliberate style to it.

The female character has a respectable rack.

Lots of guns.

Flippant characters.

I like it.

I just do, nothing else specific that makes me like it.

Well, I do like that you can see eyes through hair. Everyone must be so blond their hair is made out of acetate or something. That's always cool.



I don't like that only blood gets colour. The black and white is good, but more things than just blood could get colour. I am not an artist, just a writer, so I could never go about telling you how to do one of those nifty half-way black+white/quasi-colour things where the artist picks one or two things about the characters to always be coloured constantly or some crap like that. Maybe put in a cloudy sky sometime, who knows.

Some pet peeves of mine include dialogue bubbles that cover faces though. Then again, there isn't a whole lot of room.