🎨 Artcow Iconoclast / Jonathan Mack Sweet - The Chris-Chan of Arkansas

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DrChristianTroy said:
So @The_Iconoclast hates change and wants to go back "to the good old days." When exactly is this golden age of America? And for the love of god please don't say it's when you dated that broad that broke your heart. Don't come off as more pathetic.
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It's impossible for him to escape change. He's changing right now, if only getting older and possibly more mentally deranged.

And he wants to sue all these people and open a bookstore with the money, which is change too.
 
The_Iconoclast said:
I tried that. I said "specific criticisms...issue, page, panel". They ignored that and kept yammering on about vagaries the colors and the speech bubbles , or spouting insults like "himses work sucks" and "him is not can draw" and "hims is bad because hims is not think like we is do".
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That's because if you're serious about making a comic, those things are actually quite important, as minor as they may seem to you.

I'll say it again, if you want people to stop critically slamming your comic, no matter how harsh their criticism is, actually try to use it to improve your comic and don't just either stick your fingers in your ears and go "LA LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" or act like you're being insulted somehow.

If you actually want the negative reviews to stop, then listen to some of the critique you've gotten and improve your comic. That is literally the only thing that will stop your work from getting bad reviews. If you make the comic only to entertain yourself rather than an audience, then of course nobody is going to like it, and it's not the work of the EVIL LIBERALS OH NO if your comic is generally regarded as bad.

People are not going to start liking your comic any more unless you actually improve it. If you're just going to keep whining about how the bad reviews are making you lose money without making any improvements to your work, I have only this advice to give you.
 
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It was like, I just knew he was too stupid to understand evolution.
 
Pine Tar said:
I would say he needs to get laid, but I doubt that would fix his derangement. In fact, it might actually make it worse.
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What he needs is proffessional help, really, the quicker he gets it, the faster his life will improve for the best, but nope, because he's too stubborn, childish and egocentrical, that he rather embrace his misery and living in a dirthole instead of actually doing something about it.

THANKS OBAMA!
 
The_Iconoclast said:
Hard work, dicipline, and much patience. I write a script, I go through two or three drafts of storyboards, and then I pencil a finished page. I scan it, ink and color with MS Paint. It sounds simple but it can be agonizing when I'm not happy with the look of a panel or the joke falls flat or when a character insists on talking too much and the text takes up most of a panel. I credit a crew made up of anagrams of my own name to make it look like I have a staff, just for my own amusement. It was sort of a one-time joke that carried on for the next few years.

If the colors are too bright for some of you, I did a few issues in black and white. Here's one. Funny, I always thought colors were supposed to be bright, but then, remember, I had no formal art training.
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I think we found one of the roots of the problem in his art.

You still don't get it, whatever problems I have with your art has nothing to do with your opinions. How many times do I have to mention that?

Here are some of the reasons your comic is ass: Composition.

You can't just slap colors and speech bubbles onto a page because you feel like it; are you going to tell me the link up there is another ploy by the New Obama Order?
 
DrChristianTroy said:
I love the professionalism with the comic. MS Paint? Truly top of the line.
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Not to mention the fact that the main characters are a bunch of poorly drawn stick figures. How do you expect your comic to be viewed as art, let alone taken seriously, if you use stick figures, the laziest method of designing characters known to man?

The main issue with this stylistic choice is that it simply does not fit with how the rest of your comic looks.

You have these so-so drawn cartoonish humans and animals, which could easily be improved over time, and then in the next strip, or even later in the same strip, there's these stick figures that look like they were drawn by an 8 year old in Microsoft Paint. The speech balloons in your comic are also way too long, and boring to read as a result. This page is probably something you should take a look at.
 
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RetardBus said:
Not to mention the fact that the main characters are a bunch of poorly drawn stick figures. How do you expect your comic to be viewed as art, let alone taken seriously, if you use stick figures, the laziest method of designing characters known to man?
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xkcd is a stick figure web comic. It still looks better. But it's successful mostly because it's actually funny.
 
Holdek said:
xkcd is a stick figure web comic. It still looks better. But it's successful mostly because it's actually funny.
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Yep. Writing is the hardest part of comics to get right, but the good thing is, if writing is solid, readers are willing to overlook bad art. Munroe doesn't put any effort in drawing, but he damn well puts effort in writing. Same with Dinosaur Comics, which literally has exact same art in all strips - zero focus on art, 100% focus on writing, all awesome.
 
Holdek said:
xkcd is a stick figure web comic. It still looks better. But it's successful mostly because it's actually funny.
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WWWWolf said:
Yep. Writing is the hardest part of comics to get right, but the good thing is, if writing is solid, readers are willing to overlook bad art. Munroe doesn't put any effort in drawing, but he damn well puts effort in writing. Same with Dinosaur Comics, which literally has exact same art in all strips - zero focus on art, 100% focus on writing, all awesome.
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xkcd also doesn't cram in as many objects as possible making it more readable. As they say "less is more".
 
xkcd also employs and economy of style, stripped down to the bare essentials and then arranged in a clean and readable format.

Even the black & white comics @The_Iconoclast makes are nearly unreadable because he has a very jagged line that just gets worse when he scans it into his computer. The wall of text doesn't help either.
 
Holdek said:
xkcd is a stick figure web comic. It still looks better. But it's successful mostly because it's actually funny.
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xkcd also works visually because the stick figures are drawn against fairly simple backgrounds where they can't be confused for part of the scenery. One of the reasons I can't tell what in gay hell is supposed to be going on in Iconoclast's comics is because his characters and backgrounds all blend together in a big, garish, scribbly mess.

In fact, fuck it. Here.

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Panel 1: Stick bodies rendered in black blend into primarily dark brown background. Text runs partially out of speech bubble.
Panel 2: Nothing remarkably bad about this, except that the text box is fainter and grainier than all the other ones. It's also right on top of that block of unrelated text in the panel underneath, which is distracting. And wtf is that inside the Applecrumble store, a photo of a cat? Why?
Panel 3: Stick body blends into background so the character looks like a floating head with some grey blobs hovering next to him. The Po'Bunny sign overhead is so bright and eye-catching it looks like it's supposed to be relevent to what's going on in this panel when it actually isn't. This is a problem with most of the other signage in these two pages.
Panel 4: Perspective is fucked. Looks like the characters are in a room with blue/tan/mauve wallpaper while Yellow Muumuu Guy is flipping that table in rage. Text runs partially out of speech bubble.
Panel 5: It's a stick figure on a plain white background, so this is probably the only panel that doesn't have something grievously wrong with it, except for the text running out of the speech bubble.
Panel 6: Also looks fine except for the speech bubble in the panel above it hanging down.
Panel 7: Stick bodies blend into background. Pink speech bubble is faint and grainy compared to others. At first glance it's hard to tell what the hell the figure in the foreground is doing, or that it even is a figure and not just a vague flesh-colored blob in the middle of a flowering shrub.
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Panel 1: Stick figure on white background. This panel is serviceable.
Panel 2: Lack of any distinction (in intensity of color, weight of outlines, etc.) between character and background make this look like a surreal mishmash of random shapes and colors.
Panel 3: Sound effect, this is fine
Panel 4: Did sneezy guy blast himself backward into a cardboard cutout of a gorilla in a Fabio shirt? If so, how did his head wind up poking through the cardboard while the rest of his body is ostensibly behind it? Or is the gag that since the stickbodies are so hard to make out from the scenery that it just looks like sneezy guy's head atop Fabio Gorilla's body?
Panel 5: Looks fine except for the speech balloon hanging down.
Panel 6: The glaring difference in quality between the figures in the crowd and Yellow Muumuu Guy and friends looks terrible. The positions of the speech bubbles should be reversed so they flow better visually on the page. We read from the top down, so the first speech bubble should be on top.
Panels 7 & 8: The juxtaposition of actual photos with sketchy cartoon figures and text is jarring. The dogcatcher in panel 8 looks like a flat cardboard cutout because the stuff on him that should be moving while he runs (his net, hat, and huge gut) is just sitting there.
Panels 9 & 10: The arrangement of the speech bubbles is confusing. The store employee is clearly supposed to be making his announcement after the stick figure speaks in the previous panel, but your layout conveys the opposite.
Panel 11: How is Yellow Muumuu Guy holding that box? What happened to the line forming the bottom of his head?
 
Holdek said:
And how's your life now?
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Miserable and wrecked, thanks to the cancer of change. If it gets any worse, I may actually have to take my own bad joke seriously and move down to Mexico. I just hope I don't get shot for taking a leak on a public building. The laws are pretty strict down there. (And yes, I know the Alamo is in Texas, but the principle is the same.)

A-Stump said:
Sitting around transferring your dementia to paper is not a job.
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What does a lady wrestler from the eighties have to do with anything?
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But, seriously, Seth MacFarlane does it all the time, and he's showered with money and laurels. And he seems completely inconsistent. He's all for gay rights, but then he turns in an episode where Peter plans to marry his own some for an inheritance. So whats the point he's trying to make? "DOMA has destroyed traditional marriage! Loopholes! Yay! Victory for our side!" I guess only a big-time liberal can get away with such a muddled message.

A-Stump said:
there is no demand for [your work], and anyone who claims to like it is probably trying to troll you.
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Wrong and stupid, as usual. Real conservatives love and support my work. We're like a family that way.

Order of the Stick is also (obviously) a stick-figure webcomic, and it does well. In fact, it launched about the same time my website and comic did. The growing trend in animation is thin bodies and large heads, eps. with Canadian cartoons. I was actually well above the curve, having drawn the first comic back in 1992.

An occasional textwall is forgivable if you're imparting important information. If each comic script page represents a minute of screen-time, figure an approx. equal amount of dialogue-heavy to action scenes for balance.

I have not fundamentally changed in 15 years.
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If I were to, I' fear I'd lose my "magic". All I have to do is get back into shape, buy a hairpiece, and see a doctor about my laryngitis, then I could rent an apartment near campus and pass myself off as a University student tomorrow. Women would approach me freely just as they did back then. All things remaining equal, I could live just as well, if not better, than I was before. I refuse to accept my happiness was just some random anomoly. "Ashleigh" might not have worked out , sure, (I think her relationship with her dad was a little too unhealthy anyway), but who's to say the next girl won't be the one? "Susan" left me because the long-distance thing was too much of a strain on the relationship, though I also believe par of it was because she didn't like being the other woman. And I never liked putting her in that position. But that's what happens with change--stupid new rules get in and wreck everything.
 
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The_Iconoclast said:
Miserable and wrecked, thanks to the cancer of change....
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So, let's see: you refuse to move on with your life because you think "change" will make it worse, yet your life is "miserable and wrecked" now because change is happening anyway.

If change is inevitable, wouldn't it be best to make the most of it, with your own choices, rather than be passive and let it all happen to you by the will of others and nature?

Do you really want to just sit there and get old and complain about the cards you've been dealt? You're gonna die some day anyway. This is your fucking life, man!
 
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To be fair pissing on a public building is insanely douche and shouldn't be done in the first place. It's called common decency (unless you consider being a decent human a rule too).
 
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