It's called Malice Alice, and it's about a twisted girl and her surreal world. There are references to Alice In Wonderland, but it's more of an homage then coat tail riding. I publish a new one Mon-Fri (no weekends) and I'd love to get some feedback. It's on this site:

http://calamity-outfitters.weebly.com/

Thanks

Puts on admin hat complete with big feather:
Thread moved to User Subs

Puts on poster hat with an even bigger feather:
I hope you wanted honesty.

It's very hard to do a "twisted/crazy/spooky little girl/boy" comic and keep it fresh. IMO, there are only so many ways you can tell the same joke before it gets stale. (Which is why I've never been a huge fan of "Lenore" by Dirge. Love his writing; like his style; not a fan of the comic.) That being said, this was much better than I was expecting it to be.

As far as the creepy little girl comics go, this one has a lot working for it. Cute name, interesting character design, updating every weekday is an awesome idea, and the layouts were more sophisticated than I was anticipating. The character is ready made for "cute & creepy" Hot Topic-esqe merch*. These are all big pluses, and could lead to a lot of success.

That being said, ditch that Flickr (if it is Flickr) display you've got! Holy crap, is that thing fucking annoying. Most irritating is the fact that you can't see the entire comic unless you do some magic mouse hovering to get rid of all the little "toolbars" on the top and bottom of the frame. And the slide show option? It kills me. Yes, I know you can hit pause, but the one consistent bit of advice I've always received from cartoonists who post on the web is to make your site easy to navigate, and your comics a breeze to find. It doesn't matter how good you are, if you site is a pain in the ass, you will loose traffic. Right now, comic navigation is a pain in the ass. I don't know which comics I've already seen, and if I forget to click the pause button, it seems to shuffle them out-of-order.

The layout of your comics is your most pressing concern right now If you're no site designer, and don't know how else to post your work, I would check out the Comic Press options from Word Press. I've seen a lot of other web cartoonists use it, and the layout is nice, easy to navigate and clean.


~ LadyA, never ask her about comics

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* Before anyone winces at the dreaded HT word, I didn't mean it as an insult. That is a very specific demographic to hit, and can be a lucrative one if you've got the stomach for it.

Wow, thanx so much for the feedback! I changed the site lay out, and even though it's still not in a traditional comics viewer, it's much more user friendly now. I was told that some with differing browsers found the slideshow viewer difficult to navigate. At least the pictures can be easily loaded now, and folks can even comment on them if they want. Thanks a lot!

TDM,

First off, nice comic, and funny!

My thoughts with regards to the website layout is that you may want to kill the big lettering on the dates the "subscribe" message. The website appears to be a bit spaced out, meaning there is much white space between menus and the images and content.

Try to condense(push together) some of the content, like the menus. Too far apart and it causes the user to scroll. While this is not a bad thing, it can get annoying to just see the menus. This is a non-issue with larger monitors/resolutions.

Also, do you have a logo? If you do not have one, try to get something that one can identify with the website.

I took a look at your source code, and I noticed you do not have an RSS feed. I would suggest to create one, this will give your viewers a chance to know when you have updated your content without having to go to your website each time. Most modern browsers can view them.

I noticed also your meta tag description is small. You may want to give a better, perhaps a little longer, description of your website. This will give people who do searches on the topics you cover a better view of what your website is about.

I do think over all it is good, some small tweaks are in order.

Everyone else has covered the site design, which is not horrible but could do with a little more work, so I'm going to actually comment on the comics themselves.

Relax, I ain't going to tear you a new one. I like your stuff. Your artwork is clear and consistent, and while I can hazard a guess as to some of your influences (I get a Jhonen Vasqueze crossed with Bill Watterson vibe) your style is distinct and clearly your own. You know where to use finer detail and where to keep things cartoony without making them clash. My favourite one so far is "We want candy!". It appeals to my twisted sense of humour and I love the cheerleader's gormless expression.

The only real advice I can/would give is to touch up the finished comics in something like photoshop, especially to fill the coloured-in-with-pen bits a solid black and generally give the comics more definition. I'm sure there's other ways to do it that don't require an expensive-yet-easily-found-on-torrent-sites program (not that I'm encouraging piracy in anyway whatsoever), but I'm not an artist so I don't know. Maybe it involves black paper and glue, or special magic pens.

- trag

Just on trag's tangent of an inexpensive alternative to Photoshop, you can download something called GIMP which is often touted as the open source Photoshop.

Not that I would go so far as to call it that, but it is free and does the job well enough when you get used to the thing. Knowing PS as I do, I find it less intuitive, but again, it's free.

Thanks for the feedback guys! Here's the changes I made:

I attached an RSS feed to the comics page.

I shrank the font on the menu lettering a little.

I increased the words in the footer (though not by a lot).

I used photoshop to reinforce the inks on the Alice posters I'm selling before I had them created, and will keep using photoshop for any strip that has a lot of black ink.

I do have a logo, but I'm not incorporating it much just yet (though it is visible on the comic feed).

At the moment, that's all the changes I can think of that I made, though I did make quite a few more minor changes .

And to TragicClown, thanks for the kind comparisons man! And my art influences would be:

John K. (Ren And Stimpy)

Jhonen Vasquez (Invader Zim)

Bill Watterson (Calvin And Hobbes)

Akira Toriyama (Dragon Ball Z)

Chuck Jones (Looney Tunes)

and Joe Murray (Rocko's Modern Life).

Some of their influences are more subtle then others, but all helped shape my art.

Ha! I was so totally on the money with the Bill Watterson influence! Anyhow, I had a quick check of your site again and was really impressed by the babysitter poster. The solid black definitely gives it a much bigger impact.


- trag, impressed

Thanx hommie G! Yeah I was definitely trying to give the strip a bit more visual impact for the poster. It worked so well, that I'm using photoshop to darken the inks on every new daily now, starting with yesterdays.

I had no idea emphasizing the black of the ink could make such a night and day difference in the art. It's really cool.