Hey, did you guys see the winners for Rising Stars of manga?
It's here:

http://www.tokyopop.com/C-159/

And you can read the comics here:

http://www.tokyopop.com/peoples-choice-voting.php#

I read through them, and I wasn't thoroughly impressed with the action and horror. Although, I really liked the mystery one.

What do you guys think?

Yeah, the action one that ended up winning is really off putting. Not only are the character designs kind of generic, but the person doesn't know that if you're formatting a comic from left to right, you need the page to FLOW that way too. So it really is confusing.

I'd say that the one that looks most interesting out of all of those is Utopia 13. However it didn't win, so the story must have had problems. I don't really like the whole contest though because they force the people to adapt a style close to manga, which isn't really definable anyway.

BlueBlood also has solid art. A little low on shading though.

haha that's funny css, the only ones I liked at all were the mystery one and Ares Maier, the action one... it was nice and depressing. at first I was like, "wtf no dialogue??" but the ending... gee, it was pretty sad, without being too whiny.
I thought the other ones were kind of terrible. "melody" had so many spelling errors in it I wanted to gag! and the other ones didn't really sustain my attention long enough for me to finish them.
I'm really surprised that "I'll be waiting" won for best romance... I felt like it was really, really contrived.
I dunno, I'm pretty disappointed; I read an older volume of RSOM at Borders the other week, and the stories were like 100x better than these.
Also, I don't think I like how they have "best *genre*" rather than just ranking the comics regardless of genre.

I plan on entering this next year!!! AND WINNING!!!!! (well... after I magically improve my art skills. actually, I scanned one of my character sketches and one random setting design sketch, if you guys wanna see!!)



character sketches and set design are mostly ripped off from hinduism, and the female lead looks quite a bit like matsya, the first incarnation of Vishnu... (although it has non-indian societal themes... and is really depressing!! YAY!)
so...
anyone know when the contest is gonna re-open?

OMG do yourself a big favor and buy a better scanner plz. You can get a good one for just $50 nowadays, which is exactly what I did.

Edit: Unless that shadow on the left side is due to you scanning a notebook, in which case ignore the above.

oh yeah-- no worries, I just didn't feel like tearing the pages out of my sketchpad, because I'm not going to use those pictures (they were just pencil-sketches...) my comic's pages are scanned, with added toning, so as you can see my scanner isn't deathly-terrible... XD
however, I *am* going to be having some scanner problems in the future, bc mine doesn't scan at 600 dpi, which I heard is a better dpi to work at than 300. (I might use the scanners in the art building at school...)

thanks for the advice though~!

I think 300 dpi is the max anyone needs for scanning line art or pencil art. I work at 150 dpi.

150 won't print good. 200 is alright for color, but 300 is the best. I think some professional companies want pages at like 600 dpi or something like that, but after 300 it doesn't really make much difference.

Yes, 300 is usually considered the print standard. For scanning purposes, it is often better to scan at 600dpi, clean up the image and then scale it down to 300dpi and then color or tone it from there. 150 may be fine for web format, but for a contest like this, they intend to print the comics eventually, so it's best to work with something that prints well. While they don't define a preferred resolution, they also expect you to submit your work as an 8.5x11 hard copy.

I remember doing some work for a client that wanted pages scanned in at 800 DPI, for some ungodly reason. It was a nightmare, my computer could hardly even open them, much less color them at that size. I normally work in 300, there's really no reason to work larger than that for book-size printing, but you absolutely don't want to work any smaller.

And to be honest I didn't read past the first four pages of any of those comics because I'm too lazy to sign up for a TokyoPop account. lol! I guess it says something that none of them caught my interest enough in the first four pages to make me want to sign up to read more, though.

300 dpi, huh? OK thanks.

I stopped scanning at 300 dpi a while ago because my co-author shrinks the finalized pages down to such an abominably small size that I just quit scanning high-res for him.