Setting the bar way too low
So since school has been over for 11 days I have gotten to serious work on the way over due comic. I'm happy to say that good progress have been made. Mostly on the writing side of it the last few days but its close to being ready to show. Well at least in black and white. I do plan to color it but I think that I'm gonna show the black and white pages around. If I waited until its all colored up it would take that much longer and while I believe in showing people complete work I do want to show people something, because I've been talking way too much about it, but not really saying much about exactly what it is I'm doing.
One of the things that I've been having problems with on the page I've been working on is the huge ass chunk of words that are taking up a lot of panel space. In my opinion writers definitely need to watch how many words they have in a panel or on a page. You want your art to carry at least 50% of the story in any given page. Otherwise WHY do a comic? If you aren't able to pare down the words then add pages to the story. Otherwise what happens is that readers either stop reading the words and just skim them or stop reading your comic if it happens too often. See comics are words and PICTURES. Sometimes like in my case its more like words and pictures. They both have equal weight, but even in these cases you need to avoid bogging the reader down with tons of words all at once. It just looks like bad cartooning. But I see this all the time. Especially on the web. I see people not paying attention to that balance and throwing half assed cartooning out there. But most people don't know the difference and like it anyway. Which is fine but I feel like it just sets the bar for cartooning so low. I feel like giving some of these people who shall remain nameless Scott McCloud and Will Eisners books. If you are using art...why not take advantage of it and use it to ...umm like tell your story or at least help it along. Otherwise your shit looks like illustrated stories and not comics. Again I do realise that you can't always do this and that its hard to do, but at least give it a shot. Be like Mike and up your game.
One of the things that I've been having problems with on the page I've been working on is the huge ass chunk of words that are taking up a lot of panel space. In my opinion writers definitely need to watch how many words they have in a panel or on a page. You want your art to carry at least 50% of the story in any given page. Otherwise WHY do a comic? If you aren't able to pare down the words then add pages to the story. Otherwise what happens is that readers either stop reading the words and just skim them or stop reading your comic if it happens too often. See comics are words and PICTURES. Sometimes like in my case its more like words and pictures. They both have equal weight, but even in these cases you need to avoid bogging the reader down with tons of words all at once. It just looks like bad cartooning. But I see this all the time. Especially on the web. I see people not paying attention to that balance and throwing half assed cartooning out there. But most people don't know the difference and like it anyway. Which is fine but I feel like it just sets the bar for cartooning so low. I feel like giving some of these people who shall remain nameless Scott McCloud and Will Eisners books. If you are using art...why not take advantage of it and use it to ...umm like tell your story or at least help it along. Otherwise your shit looks like illustrated stories and not comics. Again I do realise that you can't always do this and that its hard to do, but at least give it a shot. Be like Mike and up your game.