Young Guns Loaded Review

[Wispus]

So what I'll do here is break down my review into three sections: first impressions/extra material, art, and writing, just to cover all of the bases.

My first impression of the comic is that the theme is a little garish; I personally don't mind it because I love yellow, but it's a very distracting color, and I expect other people might find it off-putting. You could definitely still keep the yellow-red color scheme for the layout, but possibly whiting out the main background color would make it more appealing to look at-- in fact, I think you could just slap a gradient to white at the top of this and that would make it significantly less obtrusive, like so.

Next, the amount of links you have in the header seems really gratuitous and seems like it wouldn't look as good on smaller monitors; ideally a site should be the same no matter which monitor you're looking at. Right off the bat you could put the schedule in the "About" page, and you could shorten "First Page"/"Latest Page" to just "First"/"Latest." I would also merge the "Sketchbook" page into the "Character" page, but that's just personal preference to make things shorter and less cluttered.

But speaking of your character page, making the header and div you're using thinner will also make that look less empty. The problem with the list format in character pages is that is leaves a lot of space. Try using smaller paragraph breaks-- (br) instead of (p) in between list items to get rid of it. You could touch up on the character page by removing eye and hair color from the lists (because I think we can all see), but I think the amount of information you gave on the characters in the character page is very good; it's not too little, and it's definitely not too much, which is a problem I see a lot when people write character summaries. I like that your interest lists only give main interests and that your descriptions don't tell me the character's entire story before I even read the comic.

Other smaller things I noticed: the sketchbook looks a little empty, but good so far, and you might want to center align the affiliates page and the schedule page if you're not following the advice above. Your "About" page looks good.

Now onto the art-- critiquing old art is a bit pointless, so I hope you don't mind if I point out specific things in only your most recent work and recurring problems.

First of all, your forms are stiff. I think it's very important to have interesting figures in a comic that updates in a three-panel format; it's a shorter amount of time to grab a potential reader's attention and convince them to read more. Even a few week-long studies can benefit your anatomy and art so much; it would really be in your best interest to read up on some anatomy/drawing books, draw strangers as you people watch, or, better yet, take a life drawing class at a community college. All of these wouldn't be to get rid of your style, but to really give your forms the life they need. Also, drawing more than just the bust up is a good way to get more lively poses in, but I see you might have already been working on that, because you worked up from a lot of head shots to a lot of bust shots, and there are still shots that come close to full body, so that's good.

Also, your drawings can seem a little unpolished, especially when they're just black and white. You don't really have a firm grasp on negative and positive spaces... Have you thought of using very light overlays or a splash of gray to give your black and whites depth? If you have the sketches, overlaying them can be a great way to add depth too. It took me five minutes to do something like this, and it has a lot more depth than the original. You should be careful with them if you use them though, because they're more like the sprinkled seasoning on a comic steak; people often try to use them to make an underdone comic look good, but it can become a crutch.

I think those things are your biggest problem right now, and if you improved on them, your art would be a lot stronger. I would also recommend maybe making your panel space bigger to offer you more room when drawing.

And for the writing... I think it could be stronger, but it could also be weaker. Some pages don't seem to have a punchline (example 1, example 2), but most pages do, which is good. You keep up a plot and character development along with the jokes, which is also a plus.

The biggest problem I see with the writing is that it offers nothing truly new and innovative in its humor. There's nothing to give it that special voice that only Young Guns Loaded has. I suppose that this isn't a "must" for comics, but it's what separates decent writing from good and great writing. Because the strip is still relatively new, I would recommend trying to shake up the punchlines and gags and plot as much as you please, not only to make it more enjoyable for the reader, but more enjoyable for yourself.

Also, to avoid causing pacing problems when reading later, I would delete the sketchbook updates after you get around to another comic update; new readers can still see them in the sketchbook page, and current readers will still be informed of new sketchbook updates.

Overall, I would recommend Young Guns Loaded to anyone looking for some more humor comics, because it looks promising so far.

[erase]

Thank you so much!

I'd rather not do a lot of page mergers but I'll talk to my code monkey to see if we can improve the theme.

About the eye and hair color, it's more there because of side characters, because they might not appear on color comics. Also because I like writing tidbits like what characters dye their hair and stuff. It's silly but I like it.

I know I have a real issue with the stiffness and I already do quite a bit of anatomy studies, but I've been slacking off lately. But I am going to try and start doing it everyday like I was doing a few months back. The issue with the head and bust shots is that since this comic has a fixed format, I'm afraid to mess around with the zooming too much, because it starts losing details. It's something that's usually a lot better in my full page comics but I'll try to move the camera around a bit in this one.

Ugh, this is an issue...I just absolutely hate using tones and grayscale, not because I don't like doing it but because I seriously don't like the way it looks. I've been trying to portray light and shadows with my inking alone. Would crosshatching work for this? I'm afraid it'll make the pages cluttered.

Humor is one of those things that are really hard to study but I've been watching and reading things that make me laugh and taking notes to see the patterns and other things that make humor what it is.

I usually pull the sketchbook entries at the end of the month, but if it's bothersome I can do it every week instead.

Again, thank you so much, this is really helpful <3

[Wispus]

If you or your coding monkey need any help, I can try to answer questions about it, too. ^_^

If you don't like working in tones, then it's really your prerogative to not use them. I agree that cross-hatching would probably make the pages look cluttered... So in that case, maybe you could try just using more pitch-black shading to create definition? Or use thinner lines and little to no shading and a simple line style (I'd recommend this one because of the format issues-- it just generally works better for strip comics)? Right now it just feels like it's kind of stuck in the middle is all.

It's great that you're studying so much to improve your comics and I wish you the best. :3