Critique my comic, please.
 

I came up with the idea for this comic a couple of months ago. It is somewhat based on Dawn of Souls, using sprites from the same game. Yes, it does have game elements like battle sequences and hitpoints, but for the most part the characters won't notice.
Please tell me what you like, what you don't like, what I can improve, or anything else that will help. Thanks in advance.

"Reality Ripple"
http://imageshack.us/img/is7.gif
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5
Episode 6
Episode 7
Episode 8

Edit: Revised Eps. 1-7 and added 8.

*Note: I will create a new post for each update, as well as add to this post. Each update will be at least two new comics.

Heh, excellent comics Mammoth!
If anything, i wish you made more! I hate suspence! T_T

I award you the stamp of potential. But now you have to make a few more.

Excellent. Make more. NOW.

Also, my comp refuses to load ep 1 - the operation times out. I suppose it's dialup-related (curse my 56k modem!), but I thought it odd as the others work fine.

Thanks for the comments, everyone. Also, I fixed the problem with the link to Comic 1.

I'll put up a couple more tomorrow, but I can't promise a regular schedule after that. It's pretty much whenever I've got the time and the ideas.

Silver Rose, about the text... That's ripped directly from the game as well. If I try to use anything larger, the text boxes would be too big, and if I tried to resize the panels to fit the larger text boxes, it would warp the panels. Did anyone else have a problem reading it?

It is kinda hard to read, yeah.

I'd suggest making everything bigger, then you won't have proportion problems :)

I would agree with the above statement. What I do for my comic, personally, is a proportion thing, but I keep the size of each frame standard. Like, I take the raw 1px : 1px background, and increase it by, say, a factor of 2 or 3 or 5, but then I crop it to the real-world pixel dimensions I've set for my comic frames, which for me, is 320x224.

My only issue is that the Thoughts are hard to read... Actually, any text not in a text box is difficult to read and sometimes even notice.

For stuff like damage (i.e. the Zero Damage done in Episode 7), I recommend you put in a sound effect or something with it to draw attention to it. I had to re-read it before I noticed.

Other than that, I like it. *Clap*

To make the text more legible, change the white text to... let's say... blue? Blue sounds good. The white on grass hurts my eyes >.<

Looks good keep it up. If you are looking for hosting, try Drunk Duck. It’s what I use and I haven’t had any problems or any complaints yet.

Link here

Okay, here's the deal.

If I simply double the size of each comic, it seems to solve the legibility issue. The problem: I'm working with MS Paint, which can only create bitmap files. A double-sized comic in bitmap form is well over 2000 KB, which is way too big for ImageShack. I need a program that will let me save my comics as .png files so they'll be small enough to upload. Suggestions?

http://gimp.org/ has an excellent free image manipulation program. It doesn't work on all computers, apparently, but I've never had any problem with it. It can save in .png and .gif very well. You can even choose the compression level.

In case you're like me, and have no idea how to download The GIMP from the main site, here's a link:
http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.html
Download GTK and install it first, then The GIMP.

It might just be because I'm a retard, though. Ah well. Just in case.

I go with GraphicsGale for anything sprite-related. I usually only open up GIMP for animations and special effects.

Let's see... I resized all the comics, which seems to have solved the legibility problem for the most part. I also colored the thoughts blue as per MoM's request, and added sound effects for attacks in combat.

My updates will be mostly random, and will consist of at least two comics. Here's the newest one:
Episode 8
Please keep the comments coming.

I like the battle sprites a whole lot better than the over-world sprite. If you can design the sprites to face in all directions (towards camera, away and profiles), that would definitely be a plus.
Another note, MSPaint is horrible at resizing. It's very good at resizing something 200%, 300%, 400% or 500%, but anything else is just ruined. It looks like that is what happened in episode 8 in his crouching pose. The border lines look a little off; I believe that is Paint's fault. I'd recommend the GIMP. Photoshop is super at resizing, but it is expensive (Honestly, CS2 isn't much better than 6.0 as far as most comic artists' needs are concerned). You can probably find a photoshop 6.0 for real cheap if you feel your passion for making comics is worth the cost of the program.
It's a good start. I always love seeing more comics and more people earnestly trying their hand at it. Keep it up. :D

Actually, Kikuichimonji (god awful name to have to spell by the way. Cut and paste powers, away!) was the one who suggested that. I didn't really have much to say about helping with the comic. Just a link you probably would've found on your own ;)

*winces* Sorry. I hate it when I get people mixed up. :sweatdrop
To be honest, I really can't. I suck at sprite designing. The most I can do is recolors. Besides, I'm using backgrounds from the game itself; taller battle sprites would look strange next to doors shorter than them.
My goal is to make it look like Dawn of Souls to an extent, the effect being that it feels like watching the game play itself in strange ways.