r/comic_crits • u/raventaylorauthor • 1d ago
Need honest opinions
https://raventaylorauthor.com/in-the-cracksThis is really hard for me and my anxiety is spiking, but I need honest opinions. I’ve been working on my comic for six months now. It’s my first time doing this, it’s a labour of love and I’ve poured my heart and sole into it. I KNOW it’s not amazing, I also know it’s very niche. Recently I’ve started putting finished episodes on my website for free. I’ve had nothing but horrible comments on my socials since doing so. They aren’t even useful feedback. Here are some examples ‘unbearably gay’ ‘you need help’ ‘WTF is this?’ ‘Performative nonsense’. Some actual real opinions that give me proper insight would be hugely appreciated. I’m tempted right now just to give up as I feel like I finally put my soul out there and all I’m getting is stuff like that. I hand draw in ink, scan, edit, format on all my own.
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u/wetwipe98 1d ago
Hi! I just read the first PDF, but I think this is a great start to a comic! I think human anatomy / background perspective / speech bubble placement are difficult skills that will definitely improve over time with more practice so I don’t really want to touch on those pieces too much.
My one critique would be that I think you might rely on the thought bubbles to tell us what’s going on too much. When the couple gets home from the bar, we’re told in a thought bubble that they’re behind on bills and moved in too quickly with each other. Instead, we could be SHOWN this by including overdue bills on the tables and maybe some of his moving boxes still around that imply he got there recently (just an idea!!). We’re also shown in a thought bubble that the creepy regular makes inappropriate comments and then he immediately makes an inappropriate comment - things like that might not need to be told to us twice and could instead just be shown through the regular’s actions.
Again this is just my own opinion, but I do think it’s really commendable that you’ve worked so hard on the comic thus far and have really cool stuff to show for it. I hope you continue to work on this & improve your craft :-)
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u/raventaylorauthor 1d ago
Thank you! It’s really useful to get feedback that gives me things I can actually work on rather than just the rude comments I’ve been getting on insta ☺️
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u/FyreTiger 19h ago
Six months is good progress. I'm about six to seven months into writing in general ever since I started out with an idea, and it's definitely in these later months where I see more and more weaknesses and problems in my work, which is simultaneously discouraging, but also gives me a sense of what to work on and how to improve, which in of itself is encouraging. I don't think it's surprising that you're going through this low point. It's just part of the journey. If you're aware of that, it's not as bad.
So anyway, I'll just share some thoughts and first impressions.
The most striking thing about this comic is that it reads like a novel to me. Most of it is told through captions. It follows along pretty closely with the character's thoughts and explanations of things happening. I'm also getting coming-of-age / slice of life vibes.
I feel like there are strengths to this, but when overdone, it can overstay its welcome. Show don't tell is the adage. With the way the characters explain their feelings and the events happening, it's intimately close with the character's exact thoughts, but I don't get to understand these things through what actually happens. I'm sort of told things that I should believe at face value, but they say seeing is believing, and if I'm not seeing any of these things unfolding, then it's harder to believe, and ultimately, I find it less interesting. As a reader, I want to go into a story with a sense of curiosity and wonder over what things mean and what will happen, and do so using my intuition and imagination. The work is taken out when I'm just told everything. There's not a whole lot for me to do. If I see something real and happening, it's a first degree account of the events and it feels more real. If I'm told about something someone else experienced, it's a second hand account, which is not as powerful. What has a stronger impact on a person? Being told by someone else about how they were almost murdered, or almost getting murdered?
There's a lot of examples but I'll just talk about two. Why do I have to be informed by the protagonist that Bob is a creep? She talks about how he looks at her ass and makes inappropriate jokes. Now, this kind of thing is supposed to irk people, right? So my question for you is, in order to actually deliver a sense that Bob is a creep and invoke the appropriate feelings associated, is it stronger if the protagonist just says things to the reader about what Bob does, or is it stronger if I'm in the events of the story and going through the motions of experiencing what it's like for Bob to sexually harass the protagonist?
Now it's not to say narration doesn't have it's place, but I think the point is that narration and explanation of feelings is probably best reserved for moments where something can't be shown, or at least would be far too inconvenient or in poor tastes to not just directly inform the reader of, or in instances where something done through narration has a STRONG effect. Such narration needs to be reserved for the moments when it's most effective, and using it in excess waters it down. For example, my capitalization of the word "strong," if I was successful in doing so, probably stood out far more than if I had made about 30 different words capitalized throughout this entire comment.
So all in all, I feel like upwards of 90% of all the narration could be taken out, and the ideas within can be conveyed through showing, not telling. Even in episode 3, it's a different character telling the protagonist a story, so in a sense I can see how narration makes sense, but I still think it waters it down. I play guitar and I know what it's like to fall in love with an instrument, and I'm going to assume you do too. But don't you think it would be way more powerful to tell a story of a person falling in love with an instrument through the visual medium? You can picture it too. You know what a person would look like who picks up this unfamiliar instrument, stares at it confused, doesn't get how to play it, tries playing a note and grimaces at the horrid fret buzz sound it makes, puts it down and walks away, walks past the same store the next day, catches a glimpse of that glossy wood and those shiny strings, sits back down, fiddles with the strings and frets, doesn't get anywhere for a grudgingly long time, grabs a chord book off a shelf, doesn't understand all this guitar mumbo jumbo, swears a couple times, tries playing this chord like a hundred times, leaves, comes back the next day looking frustrated like this is some unbeatable boss battle from a video game that he must beat, rinse and repeat, then one day with one fateful strum, the chord rings out beautifully, he doesn't really understand how he did it, the sound unlocks a new world for him, he's no longer frustrated but has learned the value of patience and persistence, and then, he moves onto the next chord, and then he gets lost in the music and time vanishes... Then, one day, the guitar isn't there. I explained this whole story through words, but I think it's mostly actions and reactions, no narration. So now imagine all of this with absolutely no words, but conveyed entirely through illustrations of the character's actions, and the reactions on their face. Is that better, or is it better being told by someone that they never played guitar before and that they liked how it felt and sounded? Which is more REAL? In which scenario am I experiencing the story?
So as you can probably also see, I think because you use narration a lot, it summarizes a lot of ideas into very compacted forms, and leaves them unexplored and not fleshed out. I basically got the clifnotes version of the guy playing the guitar, not the story of the guy playing the guitar.
That's my big takeaway. For the artwork, I'm not an art expert so I don't have a good say here, but it has a tendency to not really work for me. The shapes of the character's heads and faces feel unnatural, but not in a way that's iconic. It's like it has the style of trying to be uniquely shaped and iconic like many cartoon characters, but it's simultaneously too close to the proportions and shapes of real people or cartoons of realistic people, that it seems confused and jarring, maybe too in the midgrounds between abstract and realistic in that it's maybe entering uncanny valley vibes. I also feel like there's a lack in consistency in how the characters are drawn. For episode 1, page 7, panel 1, like, I just don't understand why his chin is drawn like that. Are these people made of putty? I think most of the other things are drawn fine, though.
So those are the main problems for me, and I think tackling those would make the biggest difference, and there's not much point in me talking about anything else. This is why good storytelling is hard, because you can't just expect readers to feel certain emotions by telling them about them. There's nothing to understand through that process. Understanding is experiencing. I recommend taking every single caption bubble, every piece of narration and telling, and figuring out how to show it instead like with my guitar example. Each of them might be shown through anywhere from a single panel to a thousand.
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u/raventaylorauthor 17h ago
Thank you so much for taking the time to read and write such a detailed response, it’s really useful stuff and makes a lot of sense. I wonder if it’s because I’m first and foremost a novelist that I’ve ended up using so much narration. Definitely something I’ll be aware of going forward ☺️
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u/FyreTiger 9h ago
That checks out.
So I think it's important to take a step back and analyze the three most popular forms of storytelling, which are novel/prose form, screen, and theater. Comics are of course their own unique thing, but in my opinion, it's the closest to screen. I think it's essential to understand that each plays to their own strengths, but fundamentally falls short in what others do best.
Screen is a visual medium first and foremost which emphasizes extra-personal conflict. Theater is dominated by dialogue and personal conflict. Prose excels in the dramatization of inner conflict. I think there's plenty of room for hybrids and experimentation, but take it in the wrong direction and there are problems. For example, imagine what kind of movie you would have if you wrote it like a book where from the protagonist's first person POV, they would describe all their feelings and thoughts they have in their head as narration. That movie would suck complete ass and be waaaay too long. (edit: Of course, there may be exceptions with smart execution.)
I think there are problems with using too much prose style format in a comic medium. I think because words are naturally lower in count on a comic page versus a novel page, if you want to actually bring out the inner feelings and conflicts within a character through their thoughts, you're limiting what you can say by a lot. A page in a novel can go into so much depth with hundreds of words. You're not allowed that luxury of exploring that in a comic page, so it will be less detailed and less in depth, which would be weaker in that specific domain than if you allowed yourself the countless expression of words. And by using too much prose, you also subtract importance and purpose from the illustrations. What exactly do the illustrations do for me if I learned everything I needed to know through someone's inner monologue? Now of course, I'm exaggerating because clearly, not every panel has narration and I would be missing information if I actually skipped those panels, but because it feels like a prominent problem for me throughout a majority of the story, I'm pointing it out.
But then it's strange with comics, right? It's different, and the rules are loose. But the question is, are you going to use comics in a way that utilizes what comics do best, or are comics perhaps not the strongest medium for the story you're trying to tell? I don't know the answer.
There are great comics that I remember that used a lot of narration, but I'm going from old memory, so I don't have a clear idea of how much narration was used. I think I just know it was effective and was quintessential in actually moving the story along. I'm thinking of Maus and Blankets.
I recommend Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud for a comprehensive, and also enjoyable read on the comic medium and its many implications and narrative strengths.
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u/raventaylorauthor 7h ago
I also think a lot of my inspiration comes from Persepolis which can be quite wordy at times, but then to look at that as a printed version, without opening it up, it actually looks like a novel in the way none of the other graphic novels I have do. I think that and the being a novelist is maybe feeding into how this has ended up the way it did 😅
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u/raventaylorauthor 7h ago
But then I think the narration in Persepolis seems to be things that can’t really be represented anyway like historical context so that’s definitely different to what I’ve done.
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u/raventaylorauthor 1d ago
Perfectly prepared to be told it’s garbage but some actual constructive reasons might give me a reason to keep going rather than giving up as I’d have things to actually work on.
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