…for a critique. so, it's actually a contest about critiquing.
I'm really curious how people percieve my comic so far. The most well detailed critique will get to choose a subject for me to paint such as fan art, your character, your portrait, cartoon characters. whatever you want.
post your critique here.
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Comic Talk and General Discussion *
I will paint you a picture..
OK I'll be the first to post my review of Dreams in Synergy.
This won't be a final review as the comic has just begun really.
This is the first time I review a comic so give me some credit,
I'll try to be as sharp as possible, just hope nobody gets cut ;)
Intro: Before I start talking about dreams in Synergy I'd like to talk a bit about it's author. If you are a regular on Drunk Duck, Subcultured is more then just a name.
He's known for his dynamic speed paintings and continuing experimenting in style.
A good example of this is MUTE http://www.nightgig.com/subcultured/mute/index.php
But I think Sub's best known comic is BilaranWars: http://www.nightgig.com/subcultured/glo/issue0/index.php
Be sure to check them out! It's awesome!
Review
Intro
Dreams in synergy starts of smooth and dreamy. Porter gazes at the beauty of nature as beatifull Danielle emerges. Unfortunatly for Porter she's taken. Her boyfriend Dane happens to be one of Porter's best friends too.
Before you can adjust your eyes to the beauty of SUb's art and colors the smoothy opening turns into one dark twist after the other. For people with an eye for detail you'll see a lot of jokes appearing in the comic. From dialogue to subs' own t-shirt designs on his characters.
Visuals:
More then comic art, Sub tries to make each of his drawings into an experience.
He is literally painting the pages with vivid and peronsal brushstrokes, the naration (I hope I use the right word here) does not only tell a story it sort of weaves the panels together to let you flow through the page.
This is quite a unique approach and you'll either like it or hate it.
I think it's kinda fun having to twist your head to read the comic :)
The most astonishing part of this comic is how Sub uses colors to match mood and tension. Colors play on people's emotion as music fullfils this role in movies.
Story
The story can be quite confusing. I had myself reading the comic all over again to actually get an idea what happened up untill now. This is mainly because Sub writes in a graphic novel script. As a webcomic that updates only ever so often you'll forget who is who and why is what. So I'd reccomend people to go back to the ebginning every so often an reading the comic from the beginning. In the end you won't mind going back to look at Subs' amazing artwork.
Overall the story flows pretty nice and at the moment we have 2
scenarios running which will hopefully soon tie in together.
I'm dead with excitement to see what happens next…
Critiques
These are some pointers for some of the pages in the archive.
1) Cover: The cover is part B of the first page, has no title, text or anthing on it.
I think Sub just went very lazy here and got something there.
I hope that by the end of chapter one, we'll have a real cover! :D
2) Flow of panels: on page 9 and 12 I got confused what panel to read next,
This is because teh panels all shift into each other so you don't know what direction to go.
3) Women skin: I said it before but you could just make the skin on the ladies a biut smoother. Women are beatifull and weak, rough textures are good for rough looking characters.
Overall
Subcultured is an artist to follow. He might just make the next step in comics.
Look at him for inspiration to make your novel more interesting.
And follow dreams in synergy, it's going somewhere! And it won't be pretty :D
Reviewer: Hamorhage form The Flea: http://www.drunkduck.com/The_Flea/index.php?p=25224
I'm not part of the contest, but I figgered I'd toss up a critique anyway.
The Art: Is Awesome. Simply put the style is unique, and very pretty. Sometimes to form or facial features are off a little, but it's pretty easily forgivable, it often looks intentional. You choose some great angles that give it a very cinematic feeling. This thing is more of a peice of art than a standard comic, and really deserves to be read for that if for nothing else. I am stressed to even call it a "comic" because it's like you reject every other form of comics before yours and were like "hey, i'm going to do a bunch of oil paintings that tell a story."
The presentation: As I think I alluded to in the previous section your panel layout is pretty great, it adds to the cinematic feeling, there were a couple of times wherein I was unsure which panel to go to, but the way your comic is presented, I'd far rather struggle through it on my own than have the arrows or panel numbers that some people have done. The only slight gripe I have is the text that circles around something or someone. Sometimes this works, sometimes it's just makes it more work to ready. I think this will probably drive casual readers away more than anything else. I'd be cautious how much you use it.
The story: It's good enough that I want to use my english lit degree to rip it to peices. I don't have control over this. So even if this part ends up sounding mean, understand thatI'm only being so critical because I like it on a whole.
Firstly, its obvious to me that you have quite a bit planned out down the line, which is the main reason that it is forgivable that I have no idea what's going on. I think this is probably the most common complaint that you're going to get, and I think I can nail down some of the reasons:
Who is your narrator? Is it one of the friends? It doesn't seem to be a 3rd person omniescent narrator. There are times where it seems like it is a first person narrator, like when he's running from "killer" and theres times when it seems like a 3rd person ominescent narrator, like when he's talking about Harry's parasite. Maybe he's a narrator from the future looking back on the situation in retrospect? It's really hard to tell, the way the text is set up, who is talking. It seems in present tense but he knows too much about somethings and to little about others. Maybe theres multiple narrators? I can't tell. The narrator should be the safe zone for the reader, everything gets filtered through them so there needs to be something static about him that the reader can latch onto. If theres multiple narrators theres a pretty easy way of distinguishing, color coded text, maybe a light yellow for one narrator and a light blue for another, or something. I like the font you use, i dont know how I'd feel about multiple fonts, generally I'm against them. I'm not saying your narrator needs to be trustworthy or anything, but just that the reader needs a better feeling of who this person is, whats his vantage point, and what should the reader feel about him.
The plot is a little confusing it feels somewhere inbetween kafka and a 50's scifi b movie. it actually reminds me alot of dreamcatcher, but I think thats more for the dialogue than anything else, but I'll get to that later.The cinematic feel of the art and presentation really helps convey suspense. And really helps tell us that the story is going somewhere. However because comic is such a slower format than film you're dangerously close to losing your reader because of the focus on details. Its hard for me to tell which details are going to be important later and which aren't. If you were writing a book,you could spend some time describing something thats important, but you don't have that luxury in art. Maybe you had a close up of an arrowhead for cinematic feel or to develop someone but it wont play into the future at all. Important things need to be reintroduced to the reader. The rule of thumb is three times. "Hey whats that you got there?" "It's an arrowhead, danielle wanted me to give it to you." "fuck that what do I need a rock for." You can remind the reader of something that may be important later without letting them know you're reminding them. It's hard to comment on your plot as a whole, because it's clear you're really still in prologue mode, so it could go almost anywhere from here, but you're very successful in a scifi/horror feel.
The dialoge really helps add to the scifi horror feel, but unfortunately this is for both good and bad reasons. It often sounds scripted, most noticably, some of the curse words used just aren't placed in the most natural way. You really need to think where you'd drop an F-bomb, not where you want the character to drop an f-bomb. Also you need to be careful what sort of details characters divulge, even unimportant ones, for example: your masked robbers, are british and one of them isn't just a rapist but rapes "every girl he meets" clearly its an exagerration, but it still indicates that this pair have a string of crimes under their belt. Top that off with something very specific like british accents, and now you have a pair of criminals that are either a) really good at avoiding being caught by the police, in which case they would be trying to stay off the radar, and not pulling unplanned jobs with crimes of passion (not getting into the sematics of rape at the moment) mixed in. or b) are just a couple of dumbasses and would've likely been caught. Either way it seems less believable that they're doing what they're doing, just because of the little detail's they've let out. Writing dialoge between friends is often the hardest dialogue to make feel natural. Take each person you have and think, what do they have in common, what don't they have in common, what do they completely disagree on, make up a fictional situation, how would each one react to something ordinary like, being fired or breaking up with their girlfriend, or finding money in the street. This stuff will give you a better feel for the characters and allow you to let them interact within the universe more naturally. The general problem with well written characters is that they don't alway react to situations the way you originally planned for them to react. It's one of the things that makes writing so much of a challenge.
Final Thoughts: I have a hard time comparing this to other comics, becaues I have a hard time thinking of it as a "comic." It's probably never going to be something thats easily accessible to the casual comic reader, but as time goes on, if you can iron out some minor problems in the writing, then you might end up having a very strong cult following.
Your stuff is top notch as a fellow painted comic we know how much goes into it if only the others realized how long it takes. Ive heard the mention of speed painting do u know any faster techniques? Well this isnt going to be to long winded but your books are tight as hell. Like your video showing your crew very Tarratinoesque (could be a word).
haha thanks
i think speed paintng is as fast as you can get
here's a site where you can see a lot of examples
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=4058965#post4058965
that video was mostly influence by the movie "snatch". we used to do a lot of videos together, but now that a lot of them moved out of the city it's harder to do them.
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