Comic Genesis Forums

Well, I've reached the requisite twenty viewable comic strips, so here goes nothing...

Sandusky is the story of a man, his dog, and the mountain lion they found on their front porch one evening. The strip is updated every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

I hope you enjoy it!

Praise: It's fantastic. Slick and appropriate web design, funny punchlines ('Weaned' made me chuckle out loud), and quality art.

Critique: In the begining I can tell you were drawing small and scanning them at basically equal-size. Right around here it looks like you started drawing bigger and shrinking them down, which looks much nicer. Words are easier to read, lines are crisper... you could continue that trend even further, though. Also - try to avoid having any dark or medium-hue speech bubbles. You tend to make them a bit lighter than the surrounding color, but in order to be really easy to read on all computers, they should stay very pale. Otherwise, the style impresses me. I will definitely bookmark this one.

Thank you for both the praise and the critiques!

First of all, I must admit that I'm quite color blind. As such, any and all color-related critiques are very much appreciated! My monitor at home is very vivid (intenionally), so I can see how there could well have been a number of text legibility issues that would have slipped past me. Hopefully, the more recent strips have improved upon this issue.

Believe it or not, all of the drawing and scanning up to this point has been done in the exact same way. I believe the two strips directly before the one you'd mentioned had been saved rather "funkily", leading to the distortions. Hopefully, the quality will keep improving as things move on.

Thanks again for the comments!

Pretty cool so far.

Very nice artwork and web design. I guess it won't be long before you get to sell that strip to the newspapers.

One self-serving question: How do you get your livejournal to show up on your main page like that? I wants to copy.

Thank you! As for selling it to newspapers... I wish. There's some sort of magic formula involved there, and I haven't found it yet.

Here's the html code I use to show my live journal on my main page...

<iframe name="livejournal" src="http://www.livejournal.com/users/sandusky78/" frameborder="0" scrolling="auto" height="400" width="800"><a href="http://sandusky78.livejournal.com/">View my LiveJournal</a></iframe>

Just substitute your live journal name in place of "sandusky78" and adjust the height and width to your liking. That should be all there is to it.

Thanks again for the kind words!

Heh.. I like it. The text is a bit fuzzy on the earlier strips (and IMO the lines are a bit thick on this one), but I like it. The art is pretty good, and I like the way you've done the shading on the more recent strips. Plus the story so far is pretty interesting, and I can't wait to see how it pans out.

In short... this one's going on my reading list!

Just out of curiosity, did you hand-letter the earlier strips? Just interested, because the lettering style seems to have changed a bit between the July 12th and July 14th strips (the later style is easier to read and more consistent).

your animals are excellently drawn. superb.

the human(s) are pretty boring and static looking, though, and oddly proportioned (in particular you tend to draw overly long forearms, which doesn't look good to my eye). I'd maybe work on developing your human beings (that's my point of view, anyway, others may vary).

great comic, though, and the animals look great.

Thanks very much, Sandusky. I know nothing about HTML so I was expecting all kinds of errors, but copying your code just worked. Just like that.

I am forever amazed by stuff that works.

Thanks.

NotQuiteInsane -

Thank you! Yes, the early lettering was done by hand. I found a font that closely resembled my handwriting and decided that would be the better way to go. I lined up that change (along with a couple of other minor changes) with the "two years later" strip. I'm always trying to improve my file scanning and saving techniques with Sandusky. There are a number of spots where I could show you both successful and failed attempts at improvements through the run of the strip. Unfortunately, I couldn't go back and improve the couple of "fuzzy" strips without redoing the entire coloring process.

twotimingpete -

Thank you, as well! I'll admit that I've spent a lot more of my time trying to improve upon my animals as opposed to the humans that I draw. That's primarily because they're a lot more fun for me to draw. I'd like to get the humans to the same quality level, but it has proven more difficult than I'd expected. That's especially true when trying to keep them in the same style as the rest of the strip (big eyes, especially). I'll never stop trying to improve, though.

Thanks again!

warbaby1 -

You're quite welcome! I know next to nothing about HTML, as well. I think I've copied and pasted just about all of the HTML on my site.