Comic Creators Free Talk

[Kupocake]

I would put "giving your characters a goal" as a pretty high-ranking writing point, but once again, Slice-of-Life follows different formats. Perhaps you should just have one character have a pretty strong goal, and the others are caught in the middle of it? MacGuffins would work, I guess, but then it wouldn't be quite Slice-of-Life anymore, the genre would be defined by how the characters try to get at the MacGuffin.

Carl and Dude of my comic Cans of Beans have their own goals, but it's more of an underlying story point that gets more and more apparent as the story goes on, since the month and date gets factored in.

[Kaxen]

My characters have goals, but they're usually kind of vague and they don't always have a concrete plan on how they want to attain it... Aurus just wants to be well-dressed and happy (though he's usually doing counter-productive things...). Whitby wants to know what he wants (he's a NEET/ took the semester off after getting turned into a monster crow and going to court against his ex-girlfriend for assault).

Landon is probably the most defined in his goals since his POV in Magical Los Angeles is more "they fight crime!" than slice-of-life, but his life is shown more than the usual crime show (it occurs to me that the vast majority of TV shows I watch involve fighting crime in some way...). Since Landon's goal is usually to help people in whatever law-abiding way he can.

I can't decide if it's weird that Landon never mentions that he was in the army. Though minus a cousin who was in the Navy, I dunno enough people in the military so personal experience is not giving me a large enough reference pool. The only way I know anyone is in the military is the guys and girls who run around campus dressed in their ACU.




My God, my watercolor class is so hard. I CAN'T EVEN PAINT A FLAT WASH CORRECTLY. And something about the professor makes me immediately nervous all the time.


And my school needs to actually hire people to sort mail instead of making students do it. They've had my book since Tuesday based on the package tracking, but haven't sorted it and told me to pick it up. Though sometimes the pick-up slips up and disappear inexplicably too. ._. I think I'll go bug them in the afternoon. My Blick shipment came in today.


...And Holbein watercolor's "Opera" is probably the classiest name I've ever seen someone name "hot pink."

[Empuska]

Kupocake

Empuska

...by conflict you mean the "grand scheme"-conflict, right?
Just saying that there is still room for comics that build worlds yet not necessarily tell anything particular. Quiet Country Cafe is the best of those type of comics I ever come across, and Para-Ten had a bit same sort of touch in it. Of course, mixing up slice-of-life and fantasy/scifi-kind of world building isn't the easiest way to win the audience on your side.

I've never heard of Para-Ten, interesting comic!

The problem with Slice-of-Life is that it follows an entirely different set of rules compared to traditional story arcs. There may be problems for the characters to solve, but they're usually not enough to constitute as a crisis for the entirety of the story. Technically, slice-of-life works better when you do have an established world with all the ground rules set. The problem is to get slice-of-life interesting.

I personally love the genre, and the comic I've been working on (Cans of Beans) does follow a Slice-of-Life format. It's just messy to deal with and hard to promote. "It's about two roommates! YEEEAHHH!"

I think it's more about the reader expectations for the story rather than slice-of-life wouldn't work in that sort of setting. I mean, most of the stories in Flight-anthologies had lots of same elements as slice-of-life-stories, yet quite many of them weren't based on this world. Personally, I was tad bothered for some to leave the world alone after reading the story.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for the slice-of-life stories, and that's why I wanted to bring this aspect, because I'm not really into the adventures what are usually expected from stories based on made-up worlds. That's why I loved Para-ten; though short and tad rough, yet still having that kind of charm, what I usually find in slice-of-life stories.

At least roommates is something enough universal to relate to. :B

[Sunen]

burning_eyes