Aaaand another minor character…. Jeez, when you have a festival everyone and their brother shows up!
Getting away from the socialite banter for a bit and let’s do some more elf-y like things. 
Glad I have Archmage to help me with the fancy dialogue. Sooo nice having someone to edit my comics… and take the blame for all of the typos. Win/win for me. 
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A storm is brewing…
On another note. I think saying: “Welcome to THIS YEAR’s…” is a bit wrong, since I remember the festival takes place only once in 5 years.
No, “this year’s” is fine.
I can talk about your hand, even though not all people have hands.
People say “this year’s Olympic champion,” not “this collection-of-four-years’ Olympic champion”
That’s kind of what I was going off of. Because it is every 5 years, I was trying to figure out how to refer to an event that happens ever 5 years. I could have gone with lustrum or quinquennial, but those would have made his sentence sound forced. So I just decided to have him say, “This year,” because we do the same thing for stuff like the Olympics or the Presidential Elections.
Olympics is a great example and here we say: “This Olympics” with no mention about “year”. But I guess it comes from the difference in languages and such.
Where is here for you?
Nice page…Hmmm nothing on top of my mind I need to say. Ohh I got something thing. Guess what!? Chicken Butt!
…WHY??
…
Chick Thigh.
mmmm… chick thigh…
Delicious in either context.
Hmm, the transition between panel 3 and four is poor. I mean, I clearly get that they are being interrupted, but it is such a hard transition.
It would have worked well as a page break; you could have condensed the third and fourth (maybe fifth) panels on the last page and moved the first three panels here onto that page. This would have given a lot more strength to that glare and cower, because they would have been the last things we see (and there was no real strength in the ending of the last page anyway.)
I cannot yet say if there are evens from page 16 that could have easily been moved to here so that we see more than two panels of introduction, but either way this page could be padded with formalities and reaction.
I get what you’re saying; it was something I considered while planning out this page. I could have stretched the conversation to end on the ‘glare’ for the stronger reaction but I was worried the scene was getting dragged out too long as is. A part of me just wanted to get on with it worried I was at risk of boring the readers.
This is a little tricky. On one hand I want to tell a story how I want to tell it; on the other I do have a bit of an audience now whose attention I need to take into account (how much is what’s currently up for debate). It’s another balance I have yet to master… but I am working on it!!
This is the biggest struggle for doing a Long form comic, originally I had pitched that she do 1 post a week but have multiple pages for the post. That would allow for us to do a more consistent storyline as far a page composition is concerned, because you’re not worried about giving the daily reader enough to hold them (which is why it reads better through the archives). However, the constant update schedule is more appealing to most webcomic veterans, you have your schedule and would like to keep it. In the end, it’s more important to stick with the schedule rather than how the pages read.
There are some things that might change once we have to consider publishing a hard copy of the book (beginning of Ch1), but for now we’re still battling Webcomic vs comic book format.
You said much better than I did.
This is why you’re my word monkey.
*eats a banana*
Picking up that balance is very hard, which is why I make suggestions where I can.
Even if it were being printed in a book, hanging that glare at the end of a page would work much better. IMO compressing the last page would have worked better than padding the conversation here, but I already said that.
Still, it is very important to arrange your pages so that they end at a good spot on each page. I read a comic that simply makes each page as long or as short as they need to be so they can end at the right point without having to expand/compress the content.
If you are worried about printing the comic, a trick you could use is to lay out all the panels so that they can cut off at page breaks. If one page (site) takes up the content of one-and-a-half pages (book) then you arrange the panels of the page (site) so there is a clean separation two-thirds down. Then when you set up the comic for printing you can easily move that bottom third to be the top of the next page.
It requires a bit of planning and foresight, (or at least some flexibility) as the next page (site) needs to have that clean break after half a page (book) of panels. Of course there is nothing wrong having pages in the book that only fill about 3/4 of the page to help you align the pages better for printing. In fact, in the page-and-a-half example I gave, you could have that one page (site) have a clean break exactly in the middle, and you arrange that whole page (site) across two pages (book) with some unnoticed blank space on the top/bottom edges. That way you could use larger panels to give better impact/focus.
As a webcomic you have unbridled freedom that printed comic could never have. You would be wise to use that to your advantage.
So for example; these three pages could be printed as they appear here, but could have been posted online in two updates like this:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/560/20110921ch2p14.png/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/560/20110926ch2p16.png/
The biggest factor in how patient your readers are with your update schedule is how satisfied they are with each update. If you gave more content that also flowed and ended better, people would accept a lesser update schedule. I love reader three pages each week, but if I got two better pages each week I would consider it an improvement.
Just food for thought.
Wow, it’s pretty cool to see the pages laid out like that. You’re forcing me to look at them as a whole work instead of individual pages and I’m liking the result.
I totally get what you’re saying; I probably could have squished the pages down from 3 to 2 (albeit with a different layout). What happened was I was just noticing the very panel heavy pages I had going. For a while there I had page after page of 6 panels or more; it was starting to feel cluttered and I was getting exhausted. I wanted some simplicity so I consciously made the decision to have some ‘panel-light’ pages… which I suppose ended up a tad ‘content-light’ in the process. This is something I need to consider in the future. Thanks for pointing it out, I’ll definitely work on it.
There’s a typo in the fourth panel. It says sheild. I assume it is shield..
I’m surprised Archmage still hasn’t fixed that…
HA! That Mage. He’s such a slacker.
He still hasn’t posted what Donny says in the last panel of chapter 1 page six. I’M WAITING MAGE!!!!!
Sorry, I’m going to do that eventually. I need to find the original Photoshot file that has that text layer so I can copy it.
Okay. Ignore my later nagging then. Hehe…
You know… I meant to comment on this on my first read through and just realized I never did…. That last panel just gives me a major “cult-leader” vibe…