Thread " QUACKCAST 89 - needs your contribution! Subject: feedback, advice, praise, criticism!" in forum "Comic Talk and General Discussion *"

Posted at 7:07PM, Jul. 28, 2012

Hm, I'd say a webcomic community or any art community can get just as acidically unfairly and non-constructively aggressive as it can get sycophantic. Which are the two extremes that lead an artist to not improve as previously said…

I think in the end it comes down to a few tested readers that you will be able to trust to tell you what they really think in a way that agrees with you and you can actually use. All the rest is going to be chance meetings, good or bad, that will simply either add to your experience or stop it- because like most things in life dealing with an audience, whether professional or amateur, is a sink-or-swim deal.

Posted at 1:07AM, Jul. 30, 2012

Tantz Aerine wrote:
because like most things in life dealing with an audience, whether professional or amateur, is a sink-or-swim deal.

Of course being drowned in praise, although one may indeed be sinking, is a pleasant experience.

Good critque, even if it tears you apart, can be as valuable as gold. Good critique will be specific and will give you hints on how to improve as opposed to just saying how awful something is. I'm usually pretty good at getting past the pain if I've given something specific to work on. Tell me "your paneling doesn't flow well, here's a tutorial on paneling" and I'll run off to the tutorial and read it and live it and print it out. And years later still do it wrong, but at least I know I'm doing it wrong and how to tweak it so it's not that bad.

And then there are things that were on their third to fifth rewrite and still weren't quite right because I had extra time to question myself and throw in stuff to make it worse. One of the problems pointed out in the Lite Bites review of Attack of the Robofemoids is that many of the gags seem to have been injected and repeated just so there'd be a gag there. That was part of the rewrite process as I was second-guessing myself all over the place because of the prior critique I got from the DD Awards.

Be specific and always include a tip as to how to make it better.