Technique Tuesday: It's Valentine's Day! Let's KISS!

Let's Kiss, With howtodraw.com, DragoArt and Mark Crilley!

Spacebox

Ladies and Gentlemen!
Today I present you...
A man trapped in a box!
In space!

SpaceBox by James (no last name given) is about Tad Bardeaux and he is drifting through space in an escape pod.

The box has got everything to keep Tad alive. It doubles as a hypersleep chamber which slows his aging down. He has food and water through some hamster feedtube, and he has an A.I. to talk too, which looks like a red dot of light. If you're thinking HAL, you're close. It's VAL.

For a fully featured box that practically gives him immortality, it lacks one thing: a window.

How Tad got into this situation is never explained, but I found it a fun, quick read.

The Rating

No one will help you... in space.

The Raves

I enjoyed the premise of the story. It's melancholy, because Tad is stuck where he is. It's also funny because he happlessly gets into strange situations and manages to come out of it intact while causing terrible things to happen.

Tad can't see out of his box and can only receive second-hand information from various sensors and his AI. In a way, he's almost entirely shut out from any outside stimuli. He doesn't know what's beyond the box. It's a separate reality that bubbles him.

In the first story, some space mollusks latch onto his drifting box. When a large spaceship comes out of nowhere, Tad thinks he's rescued, except that these folks only intend to salvage his pod so they can sell it as a mint-condition museum piece with Tad trapped inside. The mollusks turn out to be xenomorphs that devour the crew and inadvertently in the ensuing fight knock Tad back out into space. The ship self-destructs and Tad is sent hurdling into the void.

The first scenario is like Alien, but viewed from the narrow perspective of someone trapped in a box. It's darkly humorous, seemingly random, and existential, but it fits with the idea of being adrift through the vastness of space.

Later Tad runs into a giant generational spaceship through a telepathic-dream connection with it's captain. It arrives several hundred years later to devour a gas giant which Tad is trapped in (pulled in by gravity). Tad once again believes he's saved but ends up getting thrown back out into space.

I like the minimalist constraints the story has. Everything in Tad's world is there out of necessity -- he's fed through a tube, he's put into hypersleep to keep him alive, and he has an AI to help him interpret the void around him. Constraints, when followed, also force the author to be more creative in their storytelling, and I was curious what would happen next to Tad in his box.

I like how time passes in James' story and how it plays into the enormity of space travel. Tad drifts for light years, but he also hypersleeps for centuries at a time. When he wakes up an epoch could have passed by and yet he's still the same. I'd love it if future comics played on this idea more directly. Like, what if he was salvaged and put up in a museum, went to hypersleep while on the ship, and awoke hundreds of years later to find himself in the middle of a museum with people gawking at him, and then wake up hundreds of years later to find that world decimated by some apocalypse, you know, like the beginning of Futurama where we see Fry in the cryopod and outside we see the rise and fall of humanity on a fast-forward timelapse.

Oh, and back in college when I was studying computer science, I had to code Conway's game of life. So I particularly liked this comic below. :)

I liked that the game of life is mentioned in this comic. :)

Not really much of a game you can play, but it was fun setting up initial conditions and watching the simulating play out, and yes, like the comic, you can get into some stable states and even iterative ones where each generation of the cells manage to keep living. I also suppose there is some correlation to the idea of Tad hypersleeping through centuries and the Game of Life being played out as a set of rules simulated over vast amounts of cycles on a computer.

The Razzes

This is one of those comics where if you judge it by it's art, you might pass over it. The website and art are simple and minimalist looking. There's literally nothing about the comic that catches the eye and makes you want to stick around. That was my first reaction when I came to the site. It seems bare and empty...like the vastness of space. Maybe the website could be dressed up a bit to enforce that idea with maybe a simple repeating startfield background.

The minimalist motif fits the story though. We have only the things that keep Tad alive and the details that we need to see.

I wish the panels were bigger. There is a cool shot of a generational spaceship that I wish had been bigger so we could see it better.

There's some issues with perspective too. For a comic about a box, literally the escape pod is a box, I would have hoped that it was drawn with a better sense of perspective, but sometimes the box appears warped in non-perspective conforming ways. Space may not have an up, but at least when drawn it there should be some kind of horizon line so we can anchor a vanishing point to it and give it the correct perspective.

The Revue

If you're looking for a quick and simple sci-fi read, then I recommend Spacebox. The idea is intriguing and I enjoyed the entire archive.

Technique Tuesday: New Feature!

This month we're starting a new regular feature, Technique Tuesdays. Every other week, your Masters Of Ceremony will scout the far reaches of the Internet and return triumphant with an interesting, challenging or useful tutorial for your edification and pleasure. This week, Tangents! And How To Avoid Them! By the illustrious Rarnah.

For More, Visit http://ranarh.deviantart.com/

For Further Reading On The Subject, See

• Avoiding Tangents: 9 Visual Blunders Every Artist Should Watch Out For By Dianne Mize
• The Schweizer Guide to Spotting Tangents

Sunday Revue February 5: The Green Eyed Sniper

Get Something In Your Crosshairs Today With

Love. Hate. Betrayal. Guns. Those three words practically sum up Infected Blood's 'The Green Eyed Sniper'. It's the story of two women's love and one woman's hate for herself, the story of a sharpshooter with a target she'd rather miss. It can be found here and mirrored here on Taptastic.

The Rating

Aim a little better next time, you missed the bullseye

The Raves

You can never go too wrong with love and bullets, right? The great strength of this story is in its dialogue and characterization.
Romance? Check. Snark? Check. Writing style? Check.

The romantic and emotional tensions between Sekhmet and Shanti create some powerful writing moments and truly memorable imagery, as well as some very sweet scenes. Add that to Sekhmet's internal tensions and her external conflicts with her profession, and things get INTERESTING.
Speaking of interesting, a good minimalist noir style is just beginning to develop here, and it may well go places.

The Razzes

.....The emphasis is 'may'. And if so, it's got a long way to go.

The focus in this work is on character and the art supports that by narrowing in on the characters to an exclusion of background. Stylistically, that's great.....if the artist's skill can support it. Infected has a bit of work before they're at that point. Here's a few guideposts on the road.

Proportions

The human body, in all its myriad forms, still follows definite rules of proportion. Wonder why your art looks 'off'? You probably haven't got the proportion right, and your brain is picking up on subtle anomalies. For instance, this image. To correct this impression of wrongness, the creator must study the proportions of the human face.

The same goes for the human body. In many cases throughout 'Green Eyed Sniper', the figures look wrong because their proportions are off.

Anatomy

The achillies heel of The Green Eyed Sniper is anatomy. Specifically, STIFFNESS. Even in the most passionate moments, the characters appear as unnaturally posed mannequins. 

 But take heart, this can be rectified by studying anatomy! 

Step 1

The creator should study photo references and anatomy references such as Posemaniacs as they work.

Step 2

Draw figures as matchstick outlines FIRST to get the structure right.

Step 3: Study Angle And Articulation

There are a great many angle and articulation problems that the creator should focus on, especially in the eyes and heads.

These must be improved on before the art lives up to the story

The Revue

There's potential. If this comic creator keeps practicing, they'll hit the target eventually!

Otherwordly

Hurry one and all! Come and see the fantastic sights of a mysterious alternate world full of curious creatures and magical mystery. Watch your step as you slip through the portal into the realm of Otherworldly.

This fantasy webcomic follows five young adults who have recently discovered that they are changelings, magical beings stolen from their families and raised to believe they were human. New to magic and the stranger truths of the world, they seek out their true families and identities while also butting heads with shady characters and dangerous plots.

The Rating

The comic is good, but it doesn’t have any single category where it really stands out. A little polish and some minor adjustments could give some real shine to this rough gem.

The Raves

I do love a good dose of creativity and imagination in a comic. Most fantasy worlds are vaguely medieval, at best with a bit of steampunk. In this comic, the fantasy world metropolis, Alfheim, looks like an idyllic New York City with lush plant-life alongside futuristic technology.

Now there's a place I wouldn't mind being welcomed to!

I can’t begin to tell you what a breath of fresh air that is, and I applaud the creator for taking the setting in a new direction. My only criticism is that we simply don’t get to see enough of it! More, I say, more!

The mythos of changelings is also an interesting inversion. Ordinarily, the story goes that a fay creature steals a human child and leaves one of its own in the human’s place. Here, the roles are reversed and story centers mainly around five changelings, Erin, Barry, Nicole, Jerome, and Lacey, figuring out what and who they are.

In general, the main characters are sympathetic and interesting. The (arguable) protagonist, Erin, is the first one we meet, and her motivation is to find her family after drifting through the foster system all her life. The other characters have their own unique situations and motivations, but the thing they share is the desire to find out the truth about themselves.

The theme of seeking one's personal identity isn't limited to the fantastic, either; all of the characters have some kind of mirroring issue in the human world that ties into their search for their real families. These issues range from enduring an inhospitable work environment to being actively pursued by an evil version of Agent Mulder. Personally, I found Lacey to be the most interesting character. The writing surrounding this seemingly chipper girl is subtle and poignant. It's heavily implied that she feels like a black sheep in her family and it's very heartwarming to see her meeting her real family, with whom she fits in perfectly. However, even after finding them, she seems to realize her human family matters to her too, and she's clearly at a loss for what to do next.

Of course, that's just one of the five. All of the changelings are interesting in their own ways--her story is just the most complete so far.

The Razzes

Unfortunately, not all of the characters are written well. The villains are especially a problem in this comic. They’re meant to be comically stupid, but their smug attitudes and cluelessness make them terribly annoying. The evil Agent Mulder is particularly grating. I like the concept of her character as a threat to the secrecy of the Otherworld, but listening to her is worse than the sound of grinding teeth.

Oh, just shut up.

I would find her a lot her tolerable if she acted more seriously. In fact, her more serious moments tend to be her best. She really fails as a comedic character, but as a legitimate and even malicious threat, she’s a lot more interesting.

The Sidhe twins and their hired hands don't share this redeeming caveat, unfortunately. They’re incredibly incompetent and have zero intriguing menace. That’s not my opinion; the comic outright says they should be dangerous, if only they had a drop of competence. As they are, they're little more than a nuisance And that’s how I see them too. Nuisance.

There's comically inept and there's just plain inept. This is the latter.

I don’t like them. Nope.

The pacing of the comic is a bit awkward as well. The first chapter moves at what seems lightning speed, throwing a lot of ideas at the reader at once without taking the time to explore the wonders of the setting. However, since then, things have slowed down a little to give some breathing room to the characters’ individual arcs. The writing is stronger when it takes a vignette approach, but it still has some weak points. For one thing, the comic seems to set up Erin as the protagonist, but her character development lags behind most of the others'. I believe this is largely because the story has such a focus on family issues, and therefore focuses on the characters who have those issues. She's also a little bland. The other four characters are very expressive; Nicole is bitter, sarcastic, and aggressive, Lacey is quirky and enthusiastic, Barry is a playful gadfly, and poor Jerome is a lovable nervous wreck and adorkable geek. Erin's reserved, deadpan personality sort of fades into the background by comparison.

These don't look like movements so much as still poses with speed lines.

The art, as well, lacks that certain sparkle. The biggest issue is the dynamics. The movements of the characters are stiff and unresponsive. Not even speed lines seem to help bring the motion to life, as the example to the right demonstrates.

The general anatomy of the characters could use some work as well. Hands and limbs seem to be the major weak points in most of the poses. I suggest practicing with gesture drawings to help conquer this issue. This video does a good job explaining gestures.

Other than that, maybe work on the color choices. Most of the colors seem a little dull. Even when the comic uses bright, vivid hues, they just don’t pop. A lot of the pages have a weirdly washed-out quality to them. I suggest using complimentary colors to bring more variety into the page. Blend different colors on the same object, too. Here’s an example of the difference just a little bit of palette-mixing can make.

Notice how monochromatic Troll Dad and the forest look. Also, the lighting on the forearms is inconsistent with his shirt.

Here, the lighting has been corrected and more hues have been added to break up the monochrome, making the colors richer.

The Revue

The devil is in the details with this one. There are plenty of good ideas and possibilities to really pull this thing together. For the time being, though, it has plenty to offer for readers who are big fantasy lovers.

NO-Earth Comics

Welcome to the webcomics sampler.

Today we’ve got not a double, or even triple-feature, but a quadruple-feature of no less than four interconnected comics…

The Rating

…but can you even count four comics as being connected when half of them have under five pages? When the pitch writes checks the project can’t cash, you’re not gonna put a lot of behinds in the seats.

The Raves

The idea of a connected universe of comics by multiple creators is neat and the two comics that actually have a noteworthy amount of updates have decent storylines. Those comics are The Law of the Jungle and Warmage, with The Law of the Jungle being the better of the two.

Pretty good storyline, though the word balloons aren't in the right order. Try to work on that.

Law of the Jungle largely follows a family that adopted a werewolf girl during a time when people are just starting to discover the presence of magical and anthropomorphic beings living among them. The relations between humans and the werewolves are strained, with humans actively culling them in the name of security. Of course, the werewolves themselves, while persecuted, are no idle threat either.

Now on to Warmage:

Attempted boyfriend-mancy is honestly not even in the top 5 weirdest things you'll see in this comic.

Warmage is a fantasy comic that takes place between two different times and dimensions. In one timeline, a warmage deals with a dire threat that is causing all magic to wane. In another, a college student with an interest in magic and lost civilizations laments her disappointing love-life and wishes she lived in another time. This comic comes the closest to delivering on the cross-continuity pitch of the project, since the warmage, as you might expect, ends up on Earth, meeting the other protagonist.

Sadly, the comic hasn’t updated since that point. Law of the Jungle has likewise been leaving the audience off on a cliffhanger since September. And just when things were getting good!

The Razzes

Since then, not a single one of these comics has updated. The closest thing to an update was this blog post about scoping out conventions to get NO-Earth Comics out there. There's ambition, and then there's putting the car before the clowns. How about you actually finish a few chapters of these comics before you start selling tickets to your show?

I said this was a quadruple-feature, but there are actually other comics not even listed in the archives because they never got off the ground. A multiverse of connected comics is a great idea, but aside from one cameo that the creators had to explain in the comments, there hasn’t been a single sign of that concept in action. The genres and art styles are wildly different and there’s no connection between the storylines. No crossovers, no shared characters, not even a hint of an overarching theme. The only commonality is all four comics feature anthropomorphic animals co-existing alongside ordinary humans. If you’re relying on that to be your calling card to make the connection obvious, well, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but

that’s

nothing

new

by

a

long

shot.

I've seen some slow webcomics in my time, but with this many people collaborating, I would expect at least one comic to have just one finished chapter. Most of the content on the site is just written lore, reference material, and guides for prospective collaborators. So much, and yet so little. I could go on about the art in Warmage being deep in the uncanny valley and the font being hard to read, the website lacking an archives page, or any number of small technical flaws, but that’s the equivalent of critiquing a poster and a two-minute trailer.

A visual representation of this project so far.

To put it bluntly, NO-Earth Comics is not ready to be critiqued. It's too incomplete to generate anything but mild interest in the concept and its glacial rate of progress really doesn't sell me.

Consider this a wake-up call to your troupe. Get a move on, or else stop promising something you can’t deliver. With so many people involved, and the website being active since 2015 (and the concept itself apparently dating back to 1985, according to the About page), there should be a lot more material than this. Until this collaboration starts to follow through on its premise, it’s going to continue to be an unfulfilled vanity project that disappoints readers interested in the draw of a large-scale crossover universe.

The Revue

This project oozes ambition, but not much else. Take the potential this thing has and start making something of it!

Revue: Super Chibi Girl

Ladies and Gentlemen
It's a Bird...
It's a Plane...

No, it's...

Super Chibi Girl by Allen Steadham. In this story an alien, we'll call him Jeff, teleports into Allison's home while she's eating dinner and flips her entire life upside down. What follows is a rapid fire story about marriage, childbirth, and fighting alien terrorists.

As a disclaimer, I read through the comic portion of Super Chibi Girl. After several comic chapters the story is novelized and I didn't review that part.

The Rating 

There are shades of Superman

The Raves

Early in the story, Allison is killed, and Jeff saves her by taking her to the blue light -- an alien species who are apart of the B'wahii. When he does this, it turns Allison into a half-B'wahii to save her life, and I like this sudden shift. She's thrown out of her old skin and humanity and forced to take on an alien's culture and biology. Her physical capability changes but she's also forced to confront this alien on a more intimate level. It leads to some mix-ups as she tries to bridge her own human behaviors with the B'wahii way of life. It makes for a pretty good conduit to learn about the B'wahii race and to do the extended worldbuilding in the story. There's plenty of action to be had, but we also get to learn about family dynamics in the B'wahii world as well as some of the mythology behind their people.

Another major idea seems to be that love can transcend the environment you grew up in. Both Dawn's birth and her own seemed to be unwanted, but she doesn't want to repeat her father's unwillingness to love her own child. I like that change in her character, because Allison begins the story very self-centered. So much so that she lies and runs away without helping Jeff (as she said she would).

Another aspect I liked about this story was that characters try and reason through their situation. When Allison meets Jeff and before she decides to run away, she's deliberating with herself on what she should do. Later on when Allison saves Slim, he tries to think through what happened and understand it better.

Slim piecing together the clues about the mysterious alien woman.

Art-wise, I liked the pencil drawings at the beginning. As the story goes on, the art changes from the pencil drawings to full on digital color and inked pages -- and they're pretty decent. At times the visual effects didn't seem to mesh well especially with some of the pencil drawings. Some background perspective could use some work too.

The Razzes

As much as I enjoy the story's rapid-pace, I think the way some events were condensed made the story feel too rushed. At times it felt like the story didn't have time to breathe because of it.

I thought Slim's introduction in the present day of the comic was confusing and awkwardly done. Allison saves a person falling from the roof and then as they exchange dialogue that person, who is Slim, realizes that he's talking to Allison. This is juxtaposed with a flashback in the previous page where Slim is asking Allison out years ago. I had to read those pages a few times to get what was happening. Slim looks vastly different as a young person and I didn't put the two together easily. There's a lot being crammed into 2 page of comic and everything is being contorted to bridge these two moments together, but I think to better pace the scene out we needed a scene to establish his investigation of the damaged rooftop and falling or someway to connect the flashback to him. There is a narration link where Slim says that the flashback was trigger because he touched Allison, but a visual connection would be stronger.

The start of chapter 3 is also confusing. At first we're teleported into Allison's mother's home, but then Slim's home, but then Allison's mother is able to overhear their conversation. After the first 10 pages of chapter 3 I didn't know where we were spatially. Don't get me wrong there's some great dialogue and stuff in those ten pages, but trying to sort out where they are takes me out of the story.

There is a lot of suddenness that happens in this story and as much as I enjoy the rapid pace of it I want some space in between the events.

On one hand, I like that Allison is thrown into this situation and forced to adapt and learn because that's one way a character can grow in a story, but on the other hand it feels like she has very little agency in how things happen. When Allison and Jeff hug they inadvertently create a new child (B'wahii reproduce with hugging). This triggers the two being married together, and Allison who hasn't really had time to process the whole thing is pushed even deeper into a relationship with Jeff. She accepts all of this and even wants to love Dawn.

The message for all of this could be a reflection of what marriage and pregnancy is really like: when it happens, it just does and it's life-changing. If that's the case, I'd want to put up a strong parallel between Allison and Jeff and, say, Allison's mom her ex-husband Bruce to illustrate the point otherwise it feels abrupt. There is a parallel like that later, which was a scene I really liked.

Another issue I had with the story was: are the B'wahii way to super powered?

Jeff can teleport, shoot lasers out of his eyes, fly, telepathically swap minds, and have access to a deity-like blue light that can revive the dead. In a sense he's even more powerful than Superman. Yet, when we meet Jeff on the first page of the story he is being faced down by two terrorists who want to kill him. To avoid them he teleported to Earth and it starts this whole story, but why not just zap them with his eyes? They were standing pretty close to one another. He does that eventually to kill a few of them who come after him.

This always seems like the problem with super-powers (and even I have this issue with my own story). "If my character can do that, then why not this?" Wouldn't he have a better understanding of his powers and pick something in his arsenal that seemed less prone to random disaster such as teleporting light years away into someone's kitchen? Certainly, there's a character who is acting instinctively in a fight-or-flight moment, but if he knew what he was capable of wouldn't he weigh his options better? Or maybe the scenario needed to be setup to show that he was entirely surrounded with no way out.

The Revue

It's an engaging and fast-paced character driven, optimistic story about an alien, Jeff and a human, Allison who try to come to terms with the major changes in their lives by their chance meeting. There is some clumsy storytelling but otherwise still enjoy story.