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Your art is improving as you progress. The things that stand out too me the most is inconsistencies in your characters, their faces sorta change depending on the expression or angle.I would suggest you make a chart of each characters with notes on their construction and measurements.

Here is a clean up of a character turn around from Iron Giant:

At the very minum you should have a front, back, profile, and 3/4 view.
Take it a step further and figure out your characters structure (for example: my characters eyes are 1 and 1/2 eye apart, the mouth rests exactly 1/3 on the face, the eyes rest i half, blah blah blah. This will be like your cheat sheet, it helps a lot.

My other suggestion would be in your coloring style, i notice you like to isolate areas but be careful. Your colors are very over saturated . Dont be afraid to experiment more with your palette. Right now your mostly object painting, that is when you paint an object with only 1 color and than add white or black for values. I see you do some lighting effects but i would keep in mind that shadows can be warm and cool, that a red object like an apple can have a purpley shadow, that its highlights can have orange in it, ect. This is sorta advanced color theory but i would read up on it, and look at how color behaves in real life.I understand that comics are stylized but i thought i throw that out there. Other than that id say your color has improved quite a bit, keep at it! ^__^

My first impression is that the story is okay, and I actually read it through because of the story.

I'm going to go through the issues I have so far in a list, listed in no particular order:

- You have some inconsistencies, like on page three. The chest has a round top at first however when he closes it, the top becomes a flat plane. Give closer attention to the details!

- Eyes are not aligned with this character (the uncle). Unless he has lazy eye (and/or it is explained in the comic) there's really no need for making his eyes like this.

- Not enough establishing shots or wide-angled shots. For example when the girl exits the house on page nine, the transition is strange because she's simply outside, however you don't get a good idea of where she is, if she's just walked outside, if she's a mile from her house, if her house is actually farther away from the main village and walking to the village, or if she's simply taking a stroll through either the village of surroundings.

Also on the same page, panel 5 is too obscure; I cannot tell what's going on in that panel at all. I suggest redrawing that particular panel.

- Still on page 9: The panels on the bottom feel too crammed, as we went from snowy scenery (which did not have much of an establishing shot in the first place) straight to a guy's face and in the next panel the man is sitting in a room. Where is the room located? What is the relation between the girl and the green-haired man? Also the page doesn't feel very exciting, as all the panel shapes are the same, except for the bottom two which have softer edges than the rest. What was the importance of this? Should the reader pay attention to this more? Are the blurry edges to imply that it is memory or something that happened in the past? Pay attention to your paneling. Smudging it from time to time (like the transition from dream to reality at the very beginning of the comic) is fine, but don't use it too often unless it truly fits with the comic.

- Page 9 yet again. The last two panels should probably actually be removed and placed on the next page, or at least altered. It's too crowded on the bottom there and the last panel would do better as a bigger, wider panel that shows the environment of the room (setting).

In addition to that I feel the scene with the two brothers talking about commissions should probably be removed altogether until later in the comic, for it ruins the pacing of the comic.


Summary: Slow down. Your story is fine and I actually read it until the end. However remember that you don't have to jam pack every bit of information in certain parts of the story. (A common thing for new comic artists is to rush everything to the point or action of the story, however do not think about things such as establishing shots, pacing, paneling, character development/actions.) Think about the flow. If a character is walking, and if you want to indicate time that time is passing as they walk, then slow the pacing of the comic a little to give that feel.

XD!!

Yes, you are quite right about page nine. It was an experiment with stylization that went hoooorribly wrong. Although I now realize that it cost far more damage than I had thought! And in that case, I may redraw the whole page! And I think I will edit the scenes with the brothers, and package them mid-comic. The scene is vital to introducing part two.

The uncle actually DOES have a lazy eye.

It seems that there were no complaints about the later pages, so I will take that as they are good enough.

bump

Read the whole thing.

I'm picking up a Ben Templesmith (Fell, 30 Days of Night) vibe from your artwork. But every so othen there would by a manga-esque detail, like those weird teary things after the girl woke up. I'd dump that all together, it jars the reader from the creepy feel of the book. Every other aspect has me in this gothic, Fall of the House of Usher world, and I'm a happy little camper there. Don't dilude it by going "cutesy" with cheap manga tricks. You're figures are getting more consistent as you go. Keep up the good work there.

You're sequential work is interesting. You're experimenting quite a bit, and that's good. Don't be afraid to let something break your panel borders when you need it to 'pop'.

The coloring really ads to the feel of the story, great work and it's getting better. Keep it up.

On to storytelling. I'm seeing two different stories moving along. One involves the family. The other involves the two guys hussling for work to getting an escort job. I need a little more to show that the scene has shifted. This is easily accomplished by a little caption bubble at the top of the page.

Keep up the good work and keep making every page better than the last.

There are many ways to lighten mood without resorting the cheap cutesy manga tricks. There was one comic that got posted in here that claimed "cuteness", but resorted to using those chibi things on nearly every page. *Insert vomiting emoticon here* Mood lightening should be done within the style of the work, and not as a departure. That one of my biggest gripes with manga.

Looking at the CD comic The All new Atom they throw in all sorts of outlandish stuff and it's hilarious, but they never resort to cheesey art tricks.