My comic Avarous, would like thoughts and opinions
 

Ok my webcomic is a few months old now and has finally passed the 10 page mark. Some of you might recall me talking about starting it awhile ago. It was also the basis of my 'demon empire' RP, a few characters even make cameos. Basically I just want some opinions on it. We are also trying to get more people to read it, and get more feedback from said people. Now dont be afraid to say negative things. Both me and the artist want honest opinions. We just haven't gotten much outsider review.

I would love to, but your site appears to be down.

I really need to get a new host. well although it doesn't have the latest you can take a look at my deviant art page, it has them all

I don't really know what you want us to say about it. You've spent five months on ten pages, and only eight of which have any dialog. There's absolutely no character development, no names have even been mentioned, and I don't even know what sequence of events even happened during the first seven.

The things I can say are that you have a good grasp on anime-style faces and body shapes, but you need to clean up backdrops and stages.

These all compound to be completely confusing. I can't express this enough; you're not being clear what's going on. He's dropping...berries? Huh? Maybe c4? Isn't this midevil times though? And then there's an explosion, and people know he's the one who did it? Why? And there's some sort of war exposition like a bajillion years ago? Which means what?

It's not that it's a bad comic or a good comic: I just don't know exactly what it is, so it's tough to be able to say something about it.

What Mirai said, although I can also add that you should work on the dialog to make it seem more natural and less stilted, especially the bandit/raider on the last page.

"YA BETTER GIVE US YER WEAPONS AND MONEY NOW!"

And preemptively, in line with Mirai's comments, I like that you're trying to show us rather than tell us what's going on, but it would be a huge improvement if the showing was a little clearer. Especially the explosive magical berries. Are they magic? Or is this some kind of steampunk universe? And you should show exactly what he's blowing up, which would help people speculate on why he's doing it, which would be revealed later or even just implied by what it is he's terrorizing.

well the 'last page' is really set up. I know diologue sucked, I will explain why when I address the other things.

Scenery, yea but thats something my artist is working on. Remember I dont draw this. I'm the creator and writer, I have someone else do art.

So to address each issue. First five pages are prologue, thus why there is no character development. Lack of talking was intentional because, the guy is alone, no reason to chat with himself, especially when he is trying to stay hidden.

As for the slow update speed, if it was up to me we would update daily. But its not my call. I write up the script, often pages ahead, then she does one a week. I try to get her to do more, but she has other projects, and of course school. Not like I can demand more from someone that works for free.

As for the bandit thing, that part was mainly to introduce another character. Because of slow updates and her odd thing about only putting in a few panels a page, I wanted to keep the whole things short. It wasn't worth the month it would take to do it properly.

Now as for whats strickly my fault, the world itself. There are things that are explained early on, such as what exactly those small objects are. But its taking forever to get to that point I admit. I was thinking about making a webpage or something to explain the world itself for those that want to know before its explained in story.

FYI, those items were human artifacts. Technology exists but its highly regulated and rare. They didn't know it was him specifically that robbed the place either. You will see what happened was a city wide effect. In addition, although they dont KNOW it was him, they suspect so. Another thing revealed later is that stealing human tech is rather serious, so is owning it without a permit, and you can imagine how they treat using it. Avarous mainly steals only human artifacts, which he uses to steal others. Because of this he has become a well known theif.

Now I am not trying to validate what you say is wrong. In fact I agree with most of it. Just telling you the reason behind it.

This needs to be explained in comic. As a writer/artist combo you shouldn't have to explain what's going on piece-by-piece.

Possible Exceptions: Donny Darko.

And that is not a model you want to follow, believe you me.

well I was also considering in comic explainations of things. I see that rather often in manga. But its kind of fourth wall breaking and with updates so rarely I worry people might not like seeing an info page instead of story advancement, what do you think? I'm fine with using things like narrative to explain stuff but I need a proper method to do so

You don't really want to go all out and have every panel with a narrative box that says something like "These are ancient artifacts forged by human hands a millennium ago. They serve as small, remote mines and are highly restricted because of their dangerous nature. They were first invented by Dr. Herbert Nordrim, a reclusive and eccentric-" I mean nobody wants to see that. And not everything needs to be explained, but it's important to identify the things that do need to be explained and the things that the audience will just accept as a given.

A lot of the problem is simply story, rather than setting based. The lack of cohesion between panels and the vague, indistinct backgrounds, like Mirai said. Since you're working with a limited number of panels (That must really, really suck) combined with a very slow update schedule, you might have to drastically change the way the story is told. Because as it is now you need to say a lot in a very very small range of panels and doing that without being incredibly confusing will be one hell of a challenge.

Have you thought of taking a more graphic novel style approach? A lot more off panel text, either narration or monologue, accompanied with a few large pictures per page? Sin City manages to do this very well, though it's a different kind of story with a very different kind of art.

I suppose another thing would be to explain in comic but without narration. A shot of the exploding berries with the label "Gravrods Remote Exploding Powder Globes" or somesuch.

I'm still pretty tired so that whole thing was pretty incoherent but whatever I'm hitting the post button anyway.