Elijah and Azuu

Author notes

#999 Youth: Faith

Inkmonkey

on April 30, 2006

Not entirely happy with how the dialogue came out on this one, but I think it gets the idea across.

Oh, and before I forget, I still haven't gotten that many contributions for my 1000th update fanart jamboree. As it stands, I actually have less art submitted than I did for the 500th or 250th updates. The details on the event are to the right, but keep in mind that the image should be fairly simple, and just e-mail it to me at the_only_great_cthulhu@yahoo.com



So, anyway, I was poking around DD for something to read the other day, and I came to an odd realization:

I cannot read sprite comics.

Seriously. Even ones that were reasonably entertaining or had no particular errors were just… unreadable. I think it stems from the stiffness of the characters. Maybe I'm just seeing the bad ones, but even the seemingly most popular sprites on Drunkduck are basically unreadable to me. As someone who has attempted a sprite comic in the past, I can tell you right now that it's just about impossible to get it looking dynamic, but I do have a few bits of advice for any DD spriters out there…

First of all; vary up the panel layout. Unlike drawn comics, you don't generally get as much variety in body language or expressions. Having a stale, 4-panel (or otherwise) panel template only accentuates this difficulty.

Also of note; do something to keep the background natural for the characters, but not distracting (or so complex that the characters get lost in them). This has got to be one of the hardest thing for sprites to deal with, since backgrounds aren't that easy to come by, apparently. I'd recommend adding a fade to them of some sort, or doing something to make the character itself more predominant (one successful method I've seen from time to time is adding an outline to the characters in the foreground).

And am I the only one who dislikes color coded text balloons? For those who don't know what I'm talking about, it basically implies using a distinct color for each characters' word balloon and/or text (Mario's would be red, Sonic's would be blue, etc.). It is my personal opinion that the pointer from the balloon should be all it takes to tell who is saying what, and the special text color only forces some sort of implied accent or inflection to the text (red being angry, for example). In that same vein, even in drawn comics, I'm generally confused when each character speaks in a specific font, and I usually find the practice unnecessary and a bit distracting. Esepcially now that I've been taking a class specifically for comic book lettering, I can really see the importance of fonts and font colors in a comic.

Ahem, back to my sprites rant; avoid mixing characters of different resolutions. More often than not, having a 16-bit character next to an 8-bit character looks odd.

And just to top this off; for God's sake, there are people other than Sonic and Megaman. When was the last time you saw a Bubble Bobble sprite comic?