Little bit of behind-the-scenes info today.
So, I was doing some thinking over the weekend about the current format of the comic. As in, the comic format entirely.
Sometimes I feel as if the comic format has become, in a way, limiting to the telling of the story. Each page needs to be self-supporting to a degree and dialogue that might give context or explanation to characters actions sometimes needs to appear a page or two away from when it actually happens, and it can cause scenes to be interpreted… wildly until that context can be delivered.
Basially, I’ve been wondering for awhile now if Selkie wouldn’t work better in a prose format. So I thought I’d try it with my intended dialogue for this update. One thing you will notice here is that there’s things mentioned in prose form that didn’t make it in the comic itself. This is a problem I’ve run into for years, trying to work out fitting intended dialogue in within the confines of panel borders:
In fact, this simple single double-spaced page of prose was so long compared to what would fit on a comic page, I decided to take the last paragraph or two and use it towards Wednesday’s. It seems like I can fit approximately two comic pages of dialogue into a single prose page.
It makes me wonder if prose wouldn’t yield a FASTER telling of the story, honestly. Just food for thought. I think I’d miss the drawing aspect of it too much to commit to a full prose format, but… well, I can’t help but wonder I suppose.
And additionally, I have FANART TO SHARE! š MerryThornS shared this with me on the Discord server:
And these Teenage Versions of Amanda and Selkie were drawn by Lord Obvious:
Thank you both!
I know some comic authors switched to pose with one or two drawings to accompany each page due to the limitations of comics and that prose is faster for telling the story. Others will give the comic form but provide a script below it, which will show things that the person reading the comic might miss (such as emotions which can be hard to convey in comic form). Visual forms of a story always have limitations on the mental thoughts of people I think, unless the author purposefully has the thoughts voiced. It is interesting food for thought though.
Con!
Comics are best. They demand a level of abstraction much more comparable to that which we require in real-world interactions. I mean this in the sense that when we converse we abstract information from what is stated, what is omitted, context, and facial expression.
We, the readers, are more involved collaborators with a comic strip than with prose. I would rather be wrong about what is intended and retain this more visceral involvement, which stimulates discussion, in which discussion such issues are typically resolved. The comments are all the prose I feel to be necessary.
Are not all the best discussions initiated with the words: “Wait… what?”
Perhaps approach it like Erfworld where there are often long bits of prose with mostly textless environmental shots interspersed with the comic passages. It would become mostly illustrated prose with occasional comic’d out splash pages and segues. That way you could tell your story more thoroughly, concisely, and quickly while painting the world to a higher quality ā you could literally work on a major image for two months of prose leading up to a major scene, like the laser beaming out of the lake would be a huge, single SHTF panel after the prose lead up for the most jarring visual.
While you have to do what works for you, I would strongly urge you to go read (or at least skim) Erfworld until you get to the text updates, and get a feel for what it’s like to go from a mostly/exclusively visual medium to a mostly text medium with some actual pages.
Erfworld is totally understandable — IIRC, they had Life Emergencies with not one, but *two* artists, and eventually it was decided that the only way to keep telling the story at anything like a reasonable rate was to use text updates. These became their own thing, and are interesting, but it’s undeniably a different feel, and somewhat off-putting, especially for a newbie.
The choice of medium really is a choice of which areas to focus on. Text allows for internal dialog and nuance of description; comics, film and the like are much more limited in that vein, but offer far more opportunity for background nuances that text couldn’t possibly convey. In fact, the comics medium allows a thing that film cannot: a large, richly detailed panel that can be perused at the reader’s leisure, granting a level of surrounding detail that can even be appreciated in layers over time (“oh! I didn’t realize that the girl in the corner had a monkey! and the bad guy’s standing underneath a sign that says ‘sneaky plot-relevant info’!”).
Try to imagine how either a film or a book could convey a richly detailed background without making the ongoing story grind to a halt.
The medium of a play script is one that varies over time, as different actors give the characters different nuances around the same central idea. Audio performances (radio, podcast) allow an unprecedented lack of visual detail (it’s possible to do this in prose, but uncommon) — see Welcome to Night Vale showing its main character, Cecil, as “average height, average weight, has the regular number of eyes” and literally no detail to really hang a definitive interpretation on.
So, your choice of comic or text is going to have its positives and negatives; it’s up to you to decide which medium is best for the story you want to tell. And I wouldn’t worry too terribly much about people misinterpreting it; you’re telling the story in a page-size comic format, which means it would normally be experienced as a book where the answers are a page turn away, but getting one page every other day means that the readers have to develop a little patience and not be too quick to judge everything based on the one piece they’re seeing.
I trust you as a creator, and you’ve yet to let me down, so.
To build on Kilyle’s point of choice-of-medium…
I personally think that this particular story benefits more than the average by being in a visual format. It’s incredibly easy when reading prose to ‘everyman’ characters, ascribing personal voices and looks to them. In some works, that’s a good thing- a lot of adventure fantasy uses that to help ground the reader in an otherwise fantastical world.
Your story, however, is one where the characters are _very specifically_ of two different species, and that fact is integral to the story- not just the plot, but also the themes, and the emotions that your tale imparts. Every time we look at Selkie in an otherwise ‘normal’ setting, we’re reminded how out-of-place she is. Background characters staring at Sarnothi, the little quirks of cultural movement (claws in eyes-closed, for instance)… Those all help to build the characterization of the people and the world you’re building here.
In addition, there’s some things that, while they CAN be conveyed in prose, are difficult to do so without bogging things down in description- clothing choices, drawings or handwriting or things like Pohl’s fingers and his fish-tank-egg-baby would have had to be either described right from the get-go (leading to some Chekhov’s Furniture) or else the action would have to be interrupted with stuff like “Todd had noticed the fish-tank when he’d walked in, but had assumed the jelly-like orb inside of it was just an exotic pet. Now he was finding out it was actually a Sarnothi child!” etc. etc.- a comic format, however, allows you to just draw the thing, and then allow the readers to either notice it or not. It ‘sets the scene’ in such a way that it allows for much freer plotting and writing.
In other words, I enjoy this story as a comic, and would appreciate it staying as such.
Not to mention, you’d probably stop drawing if you went to prose, and thus you’d not continue progressing so much as an artist. Having something like a comic is a great way to guarantee you draw a little every day.
Actually, there’s a middle ground of “illustrated text” — wherein some of those points, such as the Sarnothi greeting, or the fishtank, or the characters, would be accounted for in a pic before the text that went over a lot more detail.
That said… there’s a book I’ve read countless times, called The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm (by Nancy Farmer). It’s set in futuristic Zimbabwe (which I did understand to be part of Africa). The characters have weird (by Western standards) names. The cover art shows two Black characters prominently, and a white character less prominently.
And I still pictured 100% of the cast as white people until one character gets described as white. And then my brain went “wait… if that guy’s white, that’s outside the norm, which means the rest aren’t white, which means–” and had a full paradigm shift as 90% of the cast solidified into Black people instead.
It is far too easy, in a text medium, to get the “but they’re all the same as me unless otherwise noted” effect. And your comic, Dave, has such a wide variety of races/cultures and appearances that, largely, go unremarked upon (e.g. the teacher with a Muslim headdress… Mina?). This is a strength of the comics medium that would not come across in text nearly as strongly, and it’s a strength of your comic that would be good to maintain.
P.S. Merry Christmas! Or close enough ^.^
I’d add some sort of Christmas-themed ASCII art, but (a) most of the ones I found in a quick search are huge, and (b) the inability to edit these posts means it’d like end up gibberish that I can’t fix. Oh well.
Sister Claire kinda does this, with their Missing Moments. They update comics 2x a week, & MM 3x. Their MMs are past events, however
Strangers In Paradise did the prose thing. I thought it worked OK.
not to mention Ash(the one who handles the writing for Missing Moments) Livestreams her writing process… which means I constantly feel like I’m on the back foot as the rest of the comments section explodes with “oh! it’s this moment that was alluded to in the main comic and we’ve basically already read over the shoulder of the writer!”
Pretend this was a reply to Grath, please?
I wish I had the capacity to move comments. š
Personally, I really dislike when comic artists flip to a prose or semi-prose style; I’ve left behind a few because of that change, but I also realize it’s a matter of how I consume literature.
Comics? I’m totally fine consuming on a “x per week” schedule. I look forward to the renders, the story come to life, etc.
Prose? I can’t stand waiting for it. Many people like “penny-prose” and serials… I just don’t. If I want to sit down and read a short story, novelette, or novel, I expect I’ll be able to read the whole thing in one go (which is generally how I read books, personally). It’s the same reason (aside from awful writing) that I don’t haunt places like Fictionpress or the like.
Now, that all said, while I would hope you wouldn’t change from the comics, I’m pretty invested in the Selkie’s story, so I would read it in whatever form you chose, but I’d be very sad to see the format change. I would hope that, if you DID write it in prose, that you would eventually put it to comics as well, even if that means the comics would have to wait.
But you’re the author – you do what works best for you! Just a reader’s opinion.
Man, I am a dyed-in-the-wool binger, so having to wait for weekly or tri-weekly updates is something I had to adjust to. I much prefer dropping off a comic’s radar for a few months then picking it back up to run through it… but, having gotten busy, it’s actually good that I adjusted, because I haven’t the time to run through Gunnerkrigg Court or Sluggy Freelance again like I’ve been meaning to.
Still, it’s a mark of just how good this story is that it’s on my short list of “comics I keep up on.” Right now, that’s this, El Goonish Shive, and Forward (by tailsteak), with Freefall, xkcd, and Kevin and Kell that I check back on monthly or better most of the time.
Which probably indicates that I could survive a format shift, on the strength of the story alone.
But yeah, I totally appreciate the idea that switching medium feels WEIRD.
Though, it makes me wonder how you’d approach a giant novel, like The Deed of Paksenarrion (which is technically a trilogy bound into one book), or nonfiction like The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker. Not exactly the sort of thing you can absorb with a binge!
I…I uh, read faarrr too many comics, I just realized.
(Also, if you’re on Twitter, look for the microfiction accounts. I follow ASmallFiction, QuietPineTrees, and a couple others. Being able to spin out a whole story in so few letters is quite the art, and they’re quite pleasurable when they nail it.)
This update was “fast” to do in prose because it’s just established characters talking, but consider how you’d handle even just Selkie’s first appearance.
Would you have to start devoting a paragraph to describe Andi’s ever changing hairstyles? Or what about the trip to the colony where you’d have to describe everything.
That… actually sounds like a fun challenge, to be honest. See how past sequences work out in prose form. Hmm…
Another thing to consider: I know you didn’t throw that together for the purpose of being a regular text update, but your text is fairly amateur. The first thing I’d focus on is how many of your sentences start with “Bob [verb]s”:
Benny shrugged
Avery glared
Todd looked
Selkie groaned
Todd recalled
He took
Sentence structure is something you would need to develop if you’re thinking of moving to a text medium.
Incidentally, if you’d actually be interested in improving your writing style, I’d be interested in tutoring you. I was a tutor (of multiple subjects) in college, I enjoy passing along what I know and working to help people get better at things, I know where to find a ton of resources and how to spot weaknesses to be corrected, etc. etc. I wouldn’t be able to start before February, but if you’re aiming in that direction, do email me!
I think I’ll take you up on that offer, thank you. Emailing!
Oooo…. This part of the story could potentially open a lot of cans of worms given it’s treading upon race. It all comes down to how it’s handled…and even if the writer/artist is a POC and/or has best intentions, it can be trickyāeven if it’s just all centered around a Sci Fi species (having humans in the mix makes it more complicated). Hats off for having the courage to venture into it. I’m very curious where it’s going.
About changing format… Just an opinion here. Art-to-text has become more popular lately. I’ve only seen the comic-to-text format work really well once, and that with with Shades of Grey (kahmith.com). This was because the author was already planning to end the story to begin with and had a fairly clear timeline as to when it was going to end.
She communicated that well with her fans. The text format lightened her load artistically (but sometimes she’d throw in amazing drawings) and accelerated the story to the end quickly, but she took time to have a strong layout and design of the text It was more than just a bunch of print thrown together on the screen. It felt good on the eyes to read.
Pretty much every other time I’ve seen a comic converted to text, it was a sign the author/artist was either losing interest or did not have time to work on the story much longer, but couldn’t let their comic go. The comics eventually stopped updating completely or became so unpredictable with updates it the audience lost interest visiting the site.
Not saying that would happen with Selkie (I’ll totally still come here either way as I enjoy the story), but it’s just been an observation. It’s probably good to check out a lot of comics who do this well (I’m sure Kahmith.com can’t be the only one that worked) and experiment.
I do wish to state that in my case, my pondering of prose form is motivated by a bit of impatience and a bit of frustration, not by burnout or an urge to quit. Impatience because I wanna just GET THERE with some of the story elements that are upcoming, frustration because sometime,s on comics where the dialogue is the whole purpose of it and the art is mostly “talking heads”, it kind of frustrates me to not DO more with the visual element. (But I also think throwing pies in the background just for it’s own sake is an unnecessary distraction in itself.)
Dude, I totally get it. We had so much story to get through in SHARDS to finally get to Chapter 4 (which is starting next year!!!) that I had to do what Sister Claire does. Sure, I prefer to write as oppose to draw, but I started a webcomic. Readers expect to see a comic. So I promised after cutting through 4 or 5 Journal-type stories, I would go back to actual strip pages. That time has finally come. Have I lost readers? I believe I have, yes, but I don’t get paid to do this. It COSTS me money and a lot of time. I do it because I love the story. Do what you feel, go for some change, see how it goes and how people feel about it while perhaps doing only a strip a week. Prose is ALWAYS faster! That is my advice… from someone who has already done it. But I also don’t try to make money on SHARDS. At least… not YET!
If it’s just a “but talking heads” thing, you might consider taking one update section/scene that is almost entirely talking heads, and having that as prose updates with initial banner-style art per update. That might, or might not, make things a lot easier on you.
I honestly don’t think the “talking heads” thing is a problem with yours, but that is certainly one way to do it: point out that when there’s not a lot of action but certainly a lot of discussion in a scene, you’re gonna do illustrated text updates.
Are you saying you are partially frustrated by how people misinterpreted the story, because of how they saw your artwork (I missed the debate)?
If that is the case, it may be wise to visit fan forums for books before you make your choice to change format. I’m going to guess their debates about characters are as badāespecially for the more popular stories like Game of Thrones or Harry Potter. I’ve seen people set up blogs to dedicate arguing with WOG over works where the author fairly clearly wrote the character’s intentions and beliefs and/or followed up to clarify afterward when questioned about it.
But I totally hear you on frustration. I’m currently taking a hiatus from my work. I’ve been feeling uninspired so I’m re-studying graphic design. Meggs’ History of Graphic Design is a mighty tome!
If you decide against prose, one alternative could be to change from a 3x a week schedule with one page per update to a 1x per week schedule with three pages per update, or something along those lines. I’m sure some followers would be disappointed with fewer updates, but your overall output would be about the same and you’d have more freedom to structure a narrative across three pages (or four, if you were feeling adventurous).
This idea could be stretched to accommodate any number of pages per update, but fewer updates may lead to fewer followers.
If you feel like having the regular updates helps keep you on pace, then you would lose that with larger, less-frequent updates.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
For me this would be the best option (beside keeping thr status quo, that is), at leat for the more dialogue-rich portions, in order to give a more complete context in one go. Many webcomics have one update per week, so I don’t think the frequency is unreasonable at all. Another option is do the diagoue-rich pages at a higher frequency but with black-or-white temporary updates, like you already do sometimes: I don’t know if that actually lightens the workload, though, that is only conjecture.
I personally would prefer if people interpret scenes wildly less frequently, but hey, people are people and that’s bound to happen, especially when we are passionate about the subject. Don’t let it get to you. š
Finally, don’t take this the wrong way, but personally I do enjoy more your comiƧ than your prose…
Anyway, happy holidays! And don’t worry too much, you’re doing great work in any case.
No prose . PLEASE. I enjoy reading my comics. i have considerably less incentive to read a wall o text. I personally suspect you’ll be driving away more readers than you keep, but my opinion is biased. so there you go.
One other thing… Step away from using Times Roman or other serif-fonts if you are going to text format. It’s great for print, but harder on the eyes if you use it on screen. Try playing with comic styled fonts or sans-serifs, and increase the size several points if you are going to make it into a graphic. Try putting a light soft color in the background versus just white. Subtle light-colored soft textures (like what you may see on parchment paper) can be useful as backgrounds, too.
Actually, consider putting together a few variations and giving us a link to try them out, what they’d look like on the screen, so we can give you feedback on format. Different fonts would certainly make a difference, and it may be much harder on a small phone screen or something, compared to a PC.
If it’s not hand-drawn, and you have the ability to set up an option for viewers, you might also give us Dark vs. Light schemes — press a button to switch between black-on-white text and light-pink-on-black text, or something.
Comics are easier to read.
And honestly, despite prose being more words it can sometimes take longer to get to the point.
For pages like these you could considered something like this instead: http://talkingcomicbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/auntmay.jpeg – just one picture and multiple text bubbles, instead of several panels all with their own art?
I’ve done that on a few occasions. It depends on if I want facial expression to change according to each bubble of text.
Obscure relevant quote from the computer game Ultima VI (possibly re-used from an older quote, not sure; also I might not have the exact wording right): “By tearing down another’s ladder, you become no higher. They merely become lower.”
I was 10 when we got a television (monochrome), so I find some of the ‘no prose’ objections without merit. That said, I loved the morning cartoon shows. Go with your gut, Dave – tell the story however it needs to be told. If you evolve, so be it. Perhaps in the future you will even de-volve! I love your work.
You’re welcome! And I’m glad that Todd’s vetoing that. It really wouldn’t help either of them in the long run. Especially if they’re supposed to be getting along.
I have ADHD and it can often be a struggle reading lots of prose. Some people have mentioned the Sister Claire webcomic earlier and I often can’t read the prose based one all at once. I only stick with it as it explains history in the universe the main comic is in. I love reading this comic and seeing both the art and the story unfold and really want to continue on with seeing where it goes. I’ve already had to drop one comic because it’s just stopped doing images and is now blocks text too much I can’t read it.
I’m not saying that you must not change you could even have the prose along side as extra but just adding more information to help see how I am and how other readers might be.
What about when the emotion you write in the script turns to something subtly different when you draw it — different, and better? Look at panel 2. That’s a much richer expression of where Benny is coming from. Benny shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly. makes him careless and unconcerned.
And honestly, that’s true for every panel on this page. Except maybe the last one, where the written script makes the important point that you DO mean to have Todd equating the Sarnothi clans to human races.
Also, we’d miss out on wisecracks like “Because they are, SIR.” I’d be sorry to lose that!
Prose can be tricky like that, word choice affects how the action is flavored in such a notable way. “Shrugged nonchalantly” could have also been “slumped his shoulders” or “hitched one shoulder upwards briefly” or just simply “shrugged”, and entirely different tones would be conveyed.
This doesnāt in any way help with your musing on the format of this story, but as a writer who works with another artist on a web-published comic, Iāll toss out a couple of simple examples:
It took me about a week or two of actual work, spread over a few months of real time, to write, edit, have proofed, and re-edit a short story/novella (about 50 pages of text). It took the better part of two years working with a second person turn it into comic format (about 300 pages of manga). The prose version has more detail than the manga versionāthings that can be inserted, described, or asided that had to be cut for time, pacing, or necessity in a visual format.
Heck, it took me longer just to clean and letter the manga version than to write the entire prose version.
Other projects Iāve done have indicated that I can easily write a prose story faster than I can write even a comic *script* of the same story, much less actual comic pages, and the prose version will contain more material and more detail than the visual medium. If youāre writing āon the flyā rather than finishing a story, proofing it, running it by test readers, re-editing, proofing, etc, I imagine writing prose is exponentially faster still.
Your creative process and how long it takes you to work is Iām sure different, but if youāre talking about getting every detail out there, and/or advancing the story faster/more smoothly, Iād be willing to bet that writing prose would be WAY more efficient than the comic formatāyouāll complete the story sooner, include more detail, and spend less time.
BUTā¦ I personally put in all that extra time, effort, and money to create manga because thatās what the story looks like in my head, and thatās the format I prefer to read it in. I can read an entire page describing a tragic instant or hilarious facial expression and it will not have the emotional impact on me that a single panel of a comic does.
Were Selkie a prose story, I would not have read it. Not because itās not good, or because your writing has any problems, I just donāt read that much prose and this wouldnāt have been what I chose to read. I feel more connection in a visual medium than I do prose, and therefore enjoy it more. Itās as simple as that.
That turned into rambling, but I guess the point is, tell the story the way you want to. If thatās prose, make it prose. If thatās a comic, make it a comic. Each has advantages. Prose is faster and more information dense. A comic can form a stronger emotional bond for some readers. But do it the way you want to do it.
Or, heck, do both if you feel like it. I published that novella online in addition to the comic. In terms of audience, though, the end of the run of each, the comic had around 1000 readers, while the novella had 20.
Occasionally including the prose-version below the comic is awesome. Occasionally having a prose-page without an illustration is fine.
Switching entirely to prose without the drawings, or even to illustrated prose, on a permanent basis, gives it a completely different feeling. It honestly feels like a cop-out. You’re close to when you should give yourself a yearly break. Are you sure this isn’t the “almost burnt out” talking?
If this is prompted by the whole “Benny’s being a bully” debate, that would’ve happened even if you had changed to prose. See, politically correct culture is pushing for more inclusive definitions, meaning that minor things are given a word implying something much worse than what’s happening. Like, ten people each comment once on a woman’s appearance being called harassment. Or a single mean comment being called bullying. They miss the bit where it’s supposed to be ongoing, not a single instance, essentially turning everyone into bullies and harassers. It waters down the definition, and makes it harder for people who really are being bullied and harassed to be taken seriously. Which really hits home for me, as I was bullied in elementary school.
I have greatly enjoyed the comics. And I love the discussion in the comments. This is the only comic where I actually read the discussion, let alone participate. I love that you haven’t shied away from illustrating some very ugly things, and the way you’ve handled these things. And I love that you use normal behaviors, without demonizing them, even when they aren’t so nice.
You’ve been doing a great job all year. It’s the end of the year. Please collect filler from fans and take a vacation.
I’d be lying if I denied that feeling a push to at least see how a prose version would work out wasn’t motivated by the Benny Debate (Todd too, people getting angry that he was angry). But I’ve been thinking off-and-on for awhile now that things would just plain speed the hell up if I were going prose format, or “picturebook” format of prose with illustrations.
I don’t want to give up the drawing aspect of it, and I’m not feeling burnt out on the comic, but what I am feeling is a bit of impatience and maybe some frustration. Impatience because there’s stuff I really really wanna get to telling, and frustration because sometimes the comic feels so dialogue focused that I feel like it’s a “talking heads” piece where the artwork is barely even necessary.
But I don’t want to miss my chance to draw things like Panel 5 though. XD
People interpreting your work is…kind of key for any sort of discussion and engaged following. Maybe people get a different takeaway than you were intending, but that’s the nature of this kind of work; people are going to interpret things, and those interpretations are going to vary.
Also, just because it was something coming up between the commenters as well, people being mad at Todd is not at all the same as them being mad at you, and a criticism of a character as a person is not a criticism of the work. There’s room for that too, but that seems different from what people were saying with Benny and Todd.
I like how it was handled in ERFWORLD. Mostly comic pages but end chapter page with single panel to set tone of the narrative. They would use the narative portion for information or dialog intense scenes that really was better read as a block then try to take up multiple comic panels and break up the pace of the story. Granted the ERFWORLD was about a war and the narrative breaks were about behind the scene or in enemy camp stuff.
I could see Dave using that to have deeper conversations between the characters or for history lessons. Example would be how Scar got his scar. How he survived and learned from the experience because I get the feeling he was not nearly as chill before his injury as he is now.
Either way I really enjoy Selkie because you have taken the time to actually develop people we want to visit time to time to see how things are going. Well done.
I realize as a comic-reader I’m going to be biased here, but I like the comic version way more than the text version.
I think if you go the text route, maybe do it homestuck style? One picture accompanying big blocks of text.
I must say I like what Alien dice http://aliendice.com does. It has comics along with prose posted beneath it that expands upon what’s shown in the comic but isn’t typically essential to understand the story.
One possibility (though more work, certainly) would be to go back and write prose for everything, and sell the prose through your store (maybe have the same stopping points as Volume 1 and 2 (and any more volumes) of the comic). When the prose catches up with the comic, keep writing so YOU can get the forward progress, but hold off on publishing the prose version until the comic catches back up with portions of the prose/the story is finished (that part hurt to write, but, while I think most of your regular readers who would also enjoy prose would have the common sense to not post spoilers, there’s always *someone*…)
No thanks, I’d have no reason to visit if you changed to this, since your art isn’t good enough to carry paragraphs of writing to begin with.
I donāt think thatās very nice to say, honestly. I really enjoy his art and I feel itās plenty expressive. You are of course entitled to your opinion but honestly what you said was really rude.
Well, hes not entitled to no criticism. I started reading when the story really captured my attention and back then the art was really bad.
You can see how the art gradually has gotten better and better as they’ve continued work on the comic.
With that being said, I stand by my statement. If they wanted to go in the direction they are talking about, I’d simply need a much higher quality art than what is being delivered right now.
Sorry if you don’t like that
I have always kept up with this comic because of the story. I liked the prose version, and I liked the comic version. Do what you want to do, I’ll keep reading! I can’t leave the story now!
Have you read any of Ursula Vernon’s kid-books? Danny Dragonbreath and/or Harriet the Hamster Princess? They’re moooostly text, but with varying chunks of comic as it fits. The much older Thieves and Kings goes the other way — mostly comics and the occasional page or double-page spread of “illuminated text”: the edges have stuff that relates thematically to what’s in the print.
I’d check out those, as well as maybe the Alien Dice one mentioned above, and perhaps experiment now and then — but it’s also true that sticking with comics can keep you from doing REALLY LONG infodumps, ’cause they fill up so much of a panel… ;D
The other thing to consider is, indeed, whether your writing is going to carry the story without as much cute quasi-alien kid. *holds up the halo* And if you might want to go even more script-like — see M.C.A. Hogarth’s Spots the Space Marine for an example of really scripty. (I mean, I could see a minimalism kind of script, with some emotional cues, running down one side of the page, and drawings of the discussion on the other.)
(As for the current situation in-universe, I speculate-as-reader that someone needs to bring in an adult Sarnothi and ask them if the clan-stereotyping behavior is considered normal! *grin* There being a difference between “Kids, you are getting really inappropriately clanist here” and “…kids, you’re setting a bad example for the humans.”)
You could take the Alien Dice route; give us the comic, and then give us the prose format for that day underneath. That way you get to add more little details with the prose, but also get to draw the actual comic. But honestly given a choice between just prose or just comic Iād rather you stayed with the comic because your art has improved a lot and I love seeing the expression people have.
I agree, I would rather see that than abandon the expressions. (Also I already have a million books I haven’t read.)
This pretty much sums up my preference, too: give us the comic, please, and then — if you want to add extra details — it’s fine to give us a prose version, too.
Don’t worry about the opinionated discussions in the comments. Remember, if people care about your characters enough to be mad at one of them on another’s behalf, that means you’re doing it right.
I’m not in favor of multi-page updates, by the way. Not unless the html can be tweaked to make sure people don’t see the last page first! (Unsounded does it right, Snow By Night gets it wrong.)
I think it read more tightly in the comic format.
I remember when you did the prose for Christmas a couple of years ago combined with comics around it – I enjoyed it. I thought it added something to see what Todd was thinking and feeling and not just saying. But I love the comic format too – I guess, whatever works for you, and it sounds like you don’t want to go 100% 1 way or another, just delve some into each now and then. Yea us! We get awesome story this way
I like it much more as a comic. It feels like prose adds maybe a little more character but it’s mostly just flowery gestures and explanations that the comic shows jut fine, and extra jokes that don’t further the plot.
You’re great at tightening it up for the comics, people who misinterpret it will just have to change their mind. Don’t get too down because of the comments, for some reason you’ve attracted a hyper-judgemental bunch that’ll criticize everyone’s actions in the comic whatever you do.