Looks like the Axe comic influenced more than we thought...

Eh some criticism:


Storyboard


The storyboard for this comic didn't seem as well thought out as axe's. Like this idea that she's looking for some hero or something should be central to the her plotline and yet they don't offer anything around that idea to give more sense to the character. I also think they focused too much on essential character aspects as opposed to a rounded out character. Take axe's comic for example. You get to see many faces of Axe and you get a sense of character development beyond the core personality of Axe. This gives the reader a sense of future character development when the comic ends.

General points I feel this comic missed on character:

  • The comic seems to focus more on the reader's attitudes towards the hero through the third person perspective on said hero. Take this example:

Faces of Axe (first 5 pages):

http://imgur.com/a/M7w7x

Faces of Poppy (most of the comic is like this):

http://imgur.com/a/Vhvk8

It seems like the character is very very static. Usually you'll see more than minor facial expression changes when the idea of the panel is to display the main point as the dialogue. This is done because - especially when the main focal point of the frame is the character's face - the focus should alert your attention to that factor instead of the speech bubbles. With the added effect that it's obviously drawing instead of an animation, when you have too many static facial expressions or relatively static as in the poppy comic, you're going to have less motion overall and the text becomes more bland because the scene itself is.


Art style


Obviously you can't comment saying x,y,z are dumb, but there are obvious shortcomings regardless of the art itself. For instance the actual overall structure of the webcomic, I feel, is lacking a dynamic effect because it focused too much on the dynamic effect of a web comic. For example:

In the Axe immortal, you can see that the way the page renders the setting/"action" of the scene is not dependent on the other frames so much as it is on the page being rendered. What I mean by this is that each page has a relatively new structure between the frames whether it be two frames with a underwrapping third scene as on page 8 or a single frame with the turn of events as the filler on page 25. Now those two are obviously close and formulaic, however they're sporaticness and distance make it hard for the reader to tell when/where it will happen in reference to full pages or framed full pages.

In comparison, the poppy webcomic is rather short, and every page can be determined by a two page book style framing with 5+ frames per page. THAT IS WAY TOO MANY. Especially with such a short comic, the more frames you put in per page will determine the pace of the comic and the amount of focus on each element. Especially with such small frames, with so many frames per page, the speed will be higher than that of a comic with more detailed environmental elements. In conjunction, the frames that are supposed to be of the hero's environment are often extremely small and forgettable and might as well have been just another smaller frame grouping of the hero's static facial expressions.

Along the same lines as art style, the amount of phrasing per comment bubble is quite important. In axe's comic, while it may seem slow, the breaking up of lines per frames allows an element of movement between facial expressions and character development as I mentioned in the storyboard comments. So when you stuff as many lines as you can fit - to where if they were on an actual page, they would be too small to read (Poppy comic).


Conclusion


The Poppy comic seems like a good start but there are a lot of compounding issues with the comic overall (length, speed, character development, dynamic movement) that I could expand further upon which makes the comic relatively amateurish asides from the actual art inside each frame. I would even go on to say that the overall idea behind having a webcomic limits the comic itself with these compounding factors and that a longer comic with a longer development cycle would've promoted a better comic. But then again they could've print shit on paper and it wouldve been eaten up by the community since it's just tacked onto the already done hero changes. The real challenge would have been to promote a comic for a hero that isn't new nor had any overall visual changes recently to add to the hero itself instead of tack onto an already new topic where the baseline is not even there.

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