Moon Freight 3 critique

[MoonFreight3]

Hi folks, I've been doing my comic for almost eight months now and I'm looking for some critiques and reviews. Please, tell me what you think. The URL is http://moonfreight3.comicgenesis.com

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

Mods- sorry to post in a 3 week old thread. MF, you still want a critique? I can write one tomorrow afternoon if the offer still stands.

[MoonFreight3]

Please do. Thanks for the interest.

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

Haven't critiqued yet, just writing to let you know I didn't forget- for some reason my internet won't let me open your site- "Internet Explorer Cannot display the webpage" bullpucky that it's been giving me on and off today. I'll try again later on tonight or tomorrow if it keeps playing these games with me. Sorry to delay.

[MoonFreight3]

Hey, that's okay. I appreciate you letting me know, though.

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

Well, it worked now, so here you go!

You have a nice gag-a-day strip going here. The humor is pretty consistent throughout the whole comic, and the writing doesn't take itself too seriously, which I appreciate. I laughed out loud at several of them, for instance the Mary Worth reference you made in... December? Whatever time, did not see that coming.
The writing is pretty good, and since you don't have big story arcs, there's not much for me to nitpick there. Bonus points for you since I didn't notice any typos or grammatical errors. The very first few comics were hand-lettered which, I don't mind, but in those early strips it was very manic and smooshed together, but that was dropped quickly so I won't linger on that point.
You have a very simplistic style which isn't bad by itself, but I kept getting distracted by how static your characters are going from panel to panel. You don't copy paste (at least not that I noticed), which is good, but while you're hand drawing each panel over and over, why not mix things up a little? It's a common thing that you see in many comics, where characters remain in the same place or position from panel to panel, but I think you could add a little variety here and there (today's strip was good- completely unusual poses that we haven't seen yet in the eight months of the comic.). I think as you continue working, your style will become stronger. You tend to lean toward a more cartoonish style as opposed to a realistic one- this is fine and good, I think you just need to be more confident about it. Try experimenting with different poses and perspectives that you can put in the comic, again for visual variety and also just to help you be a better artist and strengthen your art stylistically.
This sort of goes along with what I just mentioned in terms of adding visual interest- your comic is consistently four panels (unless you had a few alternate arrangements that I can't recall now) but within those four panels there is a lot of empty space where nothing is happening. In a panel where two characters are talking to each other (which is the majority of your comic), the most important things visually are 1) The words 2) Facial expressions 3) Body language. These are the things a reader pays attention to, more or less in that order. There's often a lot of distance in between your characters and outside of text/character areas. Play around with this more- draw bigger so that facial expressions and body language take up more space. It's okay to have the first panel be spaced out if you are trying to introduce a setting, but otherwise you can focus more on the characters themselves.
All in all, I think you have a good comic here. I think if you work on improving your art, it will better support your writing, and then appeal to your readers more so that someone quickly glancing at the comic will be more likely to stick around and see what's up.

Good job keeping at it for eight months already, and good luck for the future!


If this post was disjointed or confusing just ask me to clarify. I just drank a pint of melted ice cream so I don't think I was at my communicative strongest here, heh.

[MoonFreight3]

This was far and away one of the best and most thorough critiques I've received. Thank you very much.

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

Oh, anytime! Also I remembered one thing that I forgot to mention- I noticed on some of the later comics and on the banner for the site that there are some artifacts here and there, so just watch your compression when you upload to the web. It's nothing exceptionally big or distracting really, just something I noticed because I was looking at it critically and it's usually an easy problem to avoid/fix. Good luck!

[MoonFreight3]

Really? That's odd. I've been saving and uploading them all the exact same way since the beginning. I'll have to check it out. Thanks.