Jump is a good attempt at some serious storytelling and character development that is challenged by the lack of a background. I know you don't want to take the focus away from your characters, but without a setting, it's hard to establish a framework for the story. You don't even need a background in every panel..just often enough to establish a scene or a character interacting with it.
I was worried that your text was a bit too small, but you've improved that in the last few panels. Good job!

-Dave

The first issue I notice with your comic is that you have some dithering issues, especially around your outlines. It'd be more distracting than it is if you were working in color, but at the moment all it's really doing is giving a rough feeling to otherwise sydicated level artwork.

Reccommendation: save your image files as .png's instead of .jpeg for true image capturing

A flaw I noticed are the pixelated edges around the characters and the speech bubbles on your latest pages. Your early ones don't seem to suffer from this and to me look much better.

Recommedation: Looking at the evolution of your comic it looks like you've switched from vector art to raster. I'm a true believer of vector art so maybe you can consider going back to the style of your first pages which I think look great and very original.

FAL, ya know I love your comic, so it's hard to come up with things. All I can say is to watch out for putting too many things in too small of a panel. You haven't been doing it lately, though, so good work!

Word balloon shape is the thing that immediately jump out at me. I would try playing with the handles on your balloons so that they aren't just scaled ovals.

both comics need tweaks here and there but nothing hugely noticable... Really both of them are fine the way they are.

I'll bet a butterfly that the person who posts below me is going to write something about my grammer or the speech bubbles :P

awww, come on tweaks. Gimme some specifics mate.

as I've said they are perfect the way they are...

but I'll use this post to try and write something.

EDIT: yeah I was right. I can't find a thing wrong with it.
those tweaks I was talking about... I can't even find what needed to be tweaked anymore.

If your comic was a bit larger I think I could see more of the detail work - there seems to be quite a bit of detail that's getting smushed down.

GregC
If your comic was a bit larger I think I could see more of the detail work - there seems to be quite a bit of detail that's getting smushed down.

that's a filler comic read another comic:P

and whomever posts below me criticize gregc's comic not mine. this is just a reply.

Here's my take on Abandon, GregC.

I think quite a few people might look at this and give generic, safe advice, so I'll dare to be more specific: from here you can either go with a more serious, real-life approach, or a looser, more expressive cartoon approach, and either would add to and improve your current style.

It is possible to do both at once, and I'm going to recommend that you should study creators who have done it.

Find stories by Will Eisner. If you want, you can even skip his original Spirit comics and go find his later works, like: New York, The Building, City People Notebook, Invisible People, A Contract With God, A Life Force, or Dropsie Avenue.

If he isn't your cup of tea, try Terry Moore's comic series, Strangers in Paradise (you can get either the graphic novel collections or the same stories in pocket book format).

I admire anyone who can do ONE PANEL and Memesink does it quite well! Only criticism I have is the use of your halftones...

It seems you use various shadings of halftones to distinguish characters and to add persepctive, however...maybe you can add more varied color to them in addition to the shadings.

Great stuff though!

I've already commented this on your comic, but what I notice in "better luck next time" is the absence of panel borders. This is not such a problem but the text bubbles also overlap parts of the picture of other panels making it a little bit less pleasing to the eye.

Recommendation: You can try paneling your pages and trying different page compositions to see how it works. I think it would also look great if you bring more variety to the text bubbles and escape from the feared standard oval shape ;)

What is there to say? Your comic is almost perfect. lol!

I guess the only thing I could recommend is maybe posting comics just a little bit bigger in size, because there's soooo much detail in your linework that sometimes it gets kind of crushed together when the page gets shrunken down for the web.

Also, one minor thing that bugs me occasionally in your lettering is when words get hyphenated between lines - like in the last panel of your most recent page, where it says "holy poiso-nous fangs". You should probably try to avoid words getting cut off like that, but I know it's hard to squeeze them all in around the detail work, haha.

Dare I? All right, my major criticism about Hello Nano is that it's terribly light. The problem is, if you were to change the coloring or make it a deeper tone I don't know if it would take away from the atmosphere of it or not. Part of what makes it interesting and dream like and weird is the color of your line art and that pinkish backdrop. On the other hand I really have to stare at the page to make sure I catch everything. There's very little contrast and a hell of a lot of detail going on. Maybe you could add some variation in the boldness of your lines making foreground objects more prominent and easier to make out? My minor criticism - sometimes the lettering is a bit on the small side.

Oh noes, I was too slow! So here's Purgatory Tower too: What I've noticed is everything tends to look the same, at least in the most recent pages, there's not a lot of variety in the backgrounds and the character's costumes are all blending together. Not that they should be wearing neon pinks in the forest or anything, but I dunno, mix it up a bit! Also, text size may be a bit on the small side. But this may just be me going blind...

Ok. This one's a bit hard. I'll have to be super nit picky about it. The only thing I noticed is that when the characters hands are facing the audience...

like this...


...the anatomy gets a bit distorted. I tried making those gestures myself and it's very hard. Pay attention to where the edge of the hand where the pinky is and where the thumb is relative to the wrist. The angle at which the hand is bent should be no more than 90 degrees. I'm no anatomy expert and I can't draw hands to save my life, so take my advice with a grain of salt.

EDIT - Ah buckets of crud! That one was for Purgatory Tower...

For alejkhan, I don't wanna do Lola cause I like it too much, so i'll do one i've never read before, FireBorn. My only gripe about it is that some of the exposition is a bit awkward. Characters reveal things in their dialogue that the listener should already know for the sake of the reader. Try to write it so that plot points are revealed a bit more subtly rather than straight out explained.

...oh crap, it's a comic I like.

Hmmm, well, the comic has an excellent flow of movement, you are a layout master. The coloring is also great as well. As for something critically helpful? It's hard since I love this comic. You might wanna change the font back to the one you used in the earlier pages. It looks much better and is a bit easier to read than the one that is currently shown. Other than that, all good.

I'm not sure if it's your style, but the lines seem a little rough. If it is, then forgive me for my ignorance. It's a great comic overall, though.

I don't read sprite comics, so I don't know much about them. But, I think each comic is a little too big. It distorts your site layout. I think you could find a way to make them a little smaller.

This is a hard one...I wish you had a regular updating scedual. I was looking at the dates, and they are all over. The only real thing I could see is that in the earlier pages, there were some proportioning problems (though since a chunk of my style revolves around misproportioning, I'm the last one who should be saying that), but looking at more recent pages, you seem to have fixed that. I love your style and I have faved this, in hopes of seeing more.

Somax, I've read the archive of your comic Mosaic, and I see that you've recently made the jump from black/white/grey to color. I think I liked it best when it was in black-and-white, because the program or tools you're using to color the comic make it seem very strained and rushed, with certain areas appearing more pixelated than others. I'd definitely stick to black and white, but that's just my personal opinion... And bear in mind, since you just went brom B/W/G to Color, you're no doubt going to get better at the coloring technique as it goes along, so that's more "Your choice" than a critique.

I can see you've gotten better with art as your comic has progressed, which is definitely very good! :3 I can tell you're striving for a sort of Japanese style (and forgive me if I've used the wrong word because I know nothing about Eastern comics really... would it be Manga, or "Japanese-comic" or what?) but I think some of the facial expressions look too excited for the text and punctuation that go with them. Mainly it's the mouths I think.

I always sort of feel like a jerk after giving crits, because some people take them harsh, but I guess if we didn't want to get better and take advice, we wouldn't be posting here, eh? :b

Oh my... looks like my post is quite "Tl;Dr" D:

Puff
Somax, I've read the archive of your comic Mosaic, and I see that you've recently made the jump from black/white/grey to color. I think I liked it best when it was in black-and-white, because the program or tools you're using to color the comic make it seem very strained and rushed, with certain areas appearing more pixelated than others. I'd definitely stick to black and white, but that's just my personal opinion... And bear in mind, since you just went brom B/W/G to Color, you're no doubt going to get better at the coloring technique as it goes along, so that's more "Your choice" than a critique.

I can see you've gotten better with art as your comic has progressed, which is definitely very good! :3 I can tell you're striving for a sort of Japanese style (and forgive me if I've used the wrong word because I know nothing about Eastern comics really... would it be Manga, or "Japanese-comic" or what?) but I think some of the facial expressions look too excited for the text and punctuation that go with them. Mainly it's the mouths I think.

I always sort of feel like a jerk after giving crits, because some people take them harsh, but I guess if we didn't want to get better and take advice, we wouldn't be posting here, eh? :b

Oh my... looks like my post is quite "Tl;Dr" D:

I like your art a lot. I wish I could see more of it. You use WAY TO MUCH TEXT on each page. We barely get to see anything except peoples faces. I'd much rather you SHOW us as much as you can. It feels better that way. Your usage of word balloons is awesome, btw. I love how you do them.

Once again: MORE ART!!

I had the feeling I've been having that problem! I knew it was the first thing someone would say... but I'm glad you said it! I'll be sure to make that the first thing I do once the fresh batch of sketches come about. :)

Do you think maybe I should use less panels, but make each panel larger? Or simply cut down the text? That'll be hard, I'm such a textaholic. D:

Ps-- Next person to reply has to say something about RobertTidwell, NOT about me, that's not fair.

Puff
I had the feeling I've been having that problem! I knew it was the first thing someone would say... but I'm glad you said it! I'll be sure to make that the first thing I do once the fresh batch of sketches come about. :)

Do you think maybe I should use less panels, but make each panel larger? Or simply cut down the text? That'll be hard, I'm such a textaholic. D:

Ps-- Next person to reply has to say something about RobertTidwell, NOT about me, that's not fair.

Use MORE panels. Not per page, but take a moment to tell your story. Each caption should contain one idea, not one paragraph. or page, like you did on one particular image.

I see Ogre hasn't changed at all since I last saw it. The only thing I can say about it is to be careful with the lighting since you're going for a moody feeling but you're the writer/letterer so it doesn't really matter much.

Anyways, this is a helpful topic. I never noticed that my pages were too big because I have a 32" plasma monitor with an incredibly high resolution so all my pictures seemed too small actually. I guess there are still people using 800x600 resolution (you guys are living in the STONE AGE) so I'm going to keep all my pictures atleast 750 width.

It seems that your characters always completely face the reader (especially the monster). This may detract from the emotions that are illustrated so eloquently in words, so I'd advise trying a few more angles, like three-quarters shots and a little more plasticity in the way the monster moves. It may be sort of hulking, but its torso should be able to bend and be shaped slightly out of shape to underline emotion :)

I hope this was helpful!

For Wolf.

I think the art's pretty good. There are just a couple of things that bother me (thought I may be nit-picking). I think you could vary your lineart a little. When all the lines are the same thickness, things look a little strange:
http://www.drunkduck.com/Wolf/index.php?p=235420

The panel all the way at the bottom of the page; on the left. See the lines for his veins and hair? Those could be a lot thinner.

Another thing I see is that you already do pretty detailed art. I think maybe a little shading could help to add more depth, especially because this comic is in color.

Lastly, I have a problem with your speech bubbles. I respect that they're hand-drawn, but the wording is too small/too messy at times. I think you should either write in very clear, fine pen, or type the words.

I hope that helps. Maybe too picky? D:

Presence: I like the idea. Some of the three-quarter views of the people's faces look a bit off; the nose sticks out a bit much and is slightly too high. Other than that I can't find anything.

Tales of Kenah:

I'd say the thing that's hurting you the most right now if your storytelling. There are times when I can't track the actions or who is speaking. Sometimes it's that there's little continuity in positions within the panels. Other times it's because you've neglected to draw the person speaking within the panel they're speaking it. That's okay to do sometimes, but in strips like this: http://www.drunkduck.com/Tales_of_Kenah/index.php?p=235896 it becomes a real problem.

Nicotine
For Wolf.

The panel all the way at the bottom of the page; on the left. See the lines for his veins and hair? Those could be a lot thinner.

Argh! You are so very right about that. My tablet though had stopped replying to pressure while inking at that particular page. :( It was really disconcerting. I do try to vary the line thickness. Thanks :)

Lastly, I have a problem with your speech bubbles. I respect that they're hand-drawn, but the wording is too small/too messy at times. I think you should either write in very clear, fine pen, or type the words.

I hope that helps. Maybe too picky? D:

No, no :) At the starting pages the handwriting was pretty horrible. Lately it has become more or less standardized :) I am still striving to make it even clearer. It would be easier to type the words, but it takes away from the style I want to create :)

Thanks!!

This is for Superfogeys:

Hmmm. I must really really make an effort to nitpick for this strip. It's pretty well done artistically speaking as well as writing is concerned.

The only nitpick I could find was that at some panels the action is not entirely clear because we have zoomed in too much, like http://www.drunkduck.com/The_SuperFogeys/index.php?p=236355 here.

I would also prefer a white background for the bubbles. It's not that they are not easy to read now, it just would not tire my eyes after a few strips :) But that's A LOT of nitpicking done there :P You have a very nice comic strip :)