ARR Issue 5 Page 17 live!

Let’s give this a shot! The latest page of my comic is live! Check it out!

1 Like

I have a looot of comic to update myself on before I can catch up, but it’s really intruiging and got the vibe of, like, rescue rangers noir.

1 Like

Anyone who hasn’t checked the comic out yet, it’s good!
Well, I like it, at least, as do a number of others. I don’t actually know of anyone who dislikes it, but presumably there are people out there to whose taste it isn’t.
…Anyway, though, if you, reader, are here, I’d suggest at least taking a look if you’ve not yet. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Oh I know a few who don’t like it :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

Oh, sorry. :smiley:
Well, to be expected, if the number of people who’ve seen it is larger enough.

1 Like

Looks interesting, but I may sadly not be able to get into it.

I have noticed that distinguishing faces, characters, etc is really hard for me in b&w comics. It’s just the darn bad eyes dont play along very well for that.

Still will give it a bit more try when less tired, though.

When I read it, I think of the marketing tagline from the original 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film:

Hey dude, this is no cartoon!

image

I ended up binge-reading it all in one night, it’s really good! I liked the character redesigns which are very different from the show, but still very recognizeable. A detail that stood out to me was how it adresses the inconsistent mixture of scavanged human-sized things and mouse-sized furniture that shows up a lot both in the show and in fanart. Dale walks into a scuffy bar and his reaction seeing all the spools and thimbles used as furniture is essentially “woah, retro!” I got the sense that it used to be more of a thing, but by now the rodents produce a lot of mouse-sized items themselves.

New conspiracy theory: no one is ACTUALLY into building miniatures, it’s all a ploy to trick human manifacturers into mass-producing rodent-sized things. anyone claiming to have a model railway at home is in the pocket of Big Mouse.

1 Like

I’m glad that stood out to you! I put a lot of thought into the world building for this comic and some of it is very subtle and it always makes me happy when someone picks up on it. :blush:

Also, now I’m wondering what led to that shift from primarily repurposing to primarily manufacturing (or at least sourcing from models, yeah)…

1 Like

AC Moore and Michael’s

[looks up]
Hm. Interesting. With a founding date of 1985, and presumably taking a bit to catch on, that seems like it could fit. Why those in particular, I wonder, though?

1 Like

Semi-jokingly :stuck_out_tongue: but those are the big stores I know of, and they aren’t alone in their mass production of small-scale furniture. The tech exists so there ya go

Oh. :smiley:
Thanks. :slight_smile:

1 Like

Think I saw this comic years ago. But spent some time catching up on it.

Your art is fantastic.
Except Zipper. Man. That alien thing is horrifying :D.

1 Like

Aw poor Zipper :c

Thanks so much! I’ve sometimes thought about going back and redrawing the older issues to give the comic a more consistent feel, but I like how it’s kind of a roadmap showing how my art has evolved and improved over time. …Maybe I’ll do a couple pages just for fun tho >.>

1 Like

Just be aware, redrawing comics is a cartoonist’s trap. It can easily kill the forward momentum of a comic. It’s not unusual for even professional comics to have a marketdly different style on the first and last page, and in webcomics, it’s pretty much expected. People often notice this shift much less than cartoonists think cus it happens so gradually, and often in tandem with the story subtly changing tone, so it feels rather natural.

Prolly the hardest thing as a cartoonist is learning to trust your previous self. It may not be how you’d draw it now, your past self may have had less experience, but they did their best and worked hard.

3 Likes

In actual seriousness, if there’s anything I’ve learned in life it’s that my past self was an idiot; I can pretty reliably gauge the wisdom of a decision by asking “is this something I would have done ten years ago” and if the answer is “yes” I should strongly reconsider what I’m doing.

That said, yeah, since I’ve kept the art style consistent per issue, my comic does have that sort of “a new artist did this issue” vibe; it also, however, leaves the bad taste of “And Ron Lim did the first two issues” in my mouth.

The distinct art style of my comic was borne from the fact that, when I started, I was unable to pull off a more “Disney-esque” aesthetic, and needed something dramatically different that wouldn’t draw comparison. Rather, I drew inspiration from the graphic novel “Blankets” and just sent it. It was unlike anything I’d done up to that point and it took just about the whole first issue to develop to a point where I was comfortable with it, so the first issue is particularly weak. In particular, my unwillingness to put significant effort into any kind of environment resulted in a lot of unfortunate results—as one example, I look pretty critically on the brick texture when the boys are outside the museum, which were literally just textures taken from Google Images and warped into place. I cut a lot of corners; it was fast, it was dirty, and, in my own opinion, it was often visually boring and/or just plain ugly. I could have and should have spent more time to get better results that I know I was capable of. So when you say “he did the best he could”, the simple fact is that I know he didn’t and I can clearly see that in those early issues.

Another factor in my sometimes thoughts of redrawing is the fact that I’ve always written this as a story that’s meant to be read as a whole and not as a serial. The story is written in full; I know where it’s going and how each moment plays into that whole—this is why sometimes the pacing may seem quite slow, as pages that are meant to be quick moments tend to be drawn out by the time between page releases. With that in mind, ideally the style would be consistent because taken as a single graphic novel it would be somewhat distracting to have the art style flip-flop from page to page.

My chief goal with this comic has always been to tell a story, and so long as the art is good enough to tell that story it’s acceptable, but looking back I can’t help but feel sometimes that it fell short of what I could do even at the time, with more consistent character execution and better environments overall, so from my perspective, it’s often disappointing. There are definitely some moments where I think I nailed it—character emotion, for example, has always been a strong suit of mine—but there could have been a lot more polish. But I suppose that developing a willingness to do more is part of the evolution process, so to that end there’s value in leaving it as is. I’m not going to redraw them, but regardless, that thought pops up from time time to time.

If I may offer my own feedback, I looked back on some of your earlier issues and I actually like that the style gradually changes because it unintentionally eases the reader into the more mature tone of your graphic novel.

At the start of it, the characters don’t look too different from how we remember them, but as the story progresses and as your style changes, we move further and further away from the children’s version of the Rangers and deeper into this darker, more mature world you’ve created. Eventually it becomes obvious that–as the TMNT poster I referenced above says–this is no cartoon.

2 Likes

Hooray unintentional visual storytelling! Yay!

1 Like