I sat across the table from Domina. Her turquoise feathers shimmered in the pale afternoon light. I spoke of my intellectual pursuits, and hope-filled desire to return home. She listened politely, nodded, and coyly preened her plumage.
A moment later, a servant set a plate before us. A practiced diplomacy stifled my gasp.
“It is the traditional offering for the rite of giving thanks,” She explained. “Although once wild, most are now grown on farms and bred for size. While there are some who frown on eating the flesh of beasts, the animals are barely sentient, and the tradition for our people has deep emotional roots.”
I stared at the small biped that lay trussed in front of me. The knees were tucked under it’s belly and the arms were tied behind it’s back. The creature was headless. It’s crisp skin basted and caramelized to a rich golden brown. Inside the cup of its curled black fingers, a small bowl held a single red segmented fruit.
“White meat or dark?” My host inquired.
well……this makes me wonder if you have been off your meds…….or perhaps on them too long……but then, I’m not a turkey..
These illustrations, and the text that goes with them, are absolutely marvellous.
This is nice work. I found it through Project Wonderful, in case you’re wondering. I did a webcomic for a while myself and alas did not stick with it, but I am still something of a cartoonist, writer, graphic designer and all around bon vivant, so if I may I would like to offer a couple of tips:
The art looks good and site looks good- I use comicpress myself. On my browser (Safari) the navigation menu is running over the bottom of your title banner a bit. I suspect it’s a CSS thing. The “Powered with WordPress” line at the bottom is also a little hard to read against the background graphic. A minor correction too is the fact that “Sponsor” is misspelled in your sidebar.
But to me the most serious issue is the fact that I find the text next to your illustrations rather hard to read, partly because the lettering is on the small side, but mostly because of the typeface. Tekton, I think? Whatever it is, a rule of thumb for design is that the “fancier” a typeface is, the less it should be used for long passages of text. (Which is why you have wisely reserved the even fancier typeface for your titles for that use only, whether you realized it or not.) I realize that you are aiming for a dark storybook kind of effect here, but if it’s hard to read, that could be an issue.
If it were me, I would either (1) choose a new typeface going forward (don’t punish yourself by going back and revising what’s already done) or even better, (2) devote the comic space solely to that gorgeous artwork and tell the story in the blog entry, where it is already being repeated. If a time comes when you collect this into a book, you’ll be separating out the artwork and text anyway.
Just my two cents. Keep up the good work, I am adding your feed to my Google Reader and will look forward to your updates.
Thanks everyone for reading.
@Scott: I am struggling with the CSS code across all browsers. It seems that there is not a universal solution? It could be I have created a conflict within the CSS style? I don’t know, but it is on my radar to fix along with the footer tag. Thanks for catching “Sponsor.” If I didn’t regularly spell so bad, that might have been embarrassing.
As for the lettering. I am using ITC Bradley Hand. It was (and is) a placeholder for a font yet undiscovered for which I am searching. I am trying to balance a handwritten style, a full ASCII Character set with font hinting, a larger x-height for readability, and an overall pleasing design. You are correct that this font falls short in a lot of these areas. Hopefully we will nail this down soon.
It is important for me to keep a (legible) handwritten story integrated with the comic for visual continuity. The book layout (if any emerges) will reflect a lot of the aspects of a non linear journal with an underlying story line that ties it all together. There are numerous details to nail down before (if) that happens. Thank you for correct and astute observations. I appreciate it.
BTW, the secondary “repeat” of the story, along with having the advantage of being easier to read, also kicks my SEO stats. Even if I find the perfect font which is ultimately built into the raster image, I don’t think I would remove it from the searchable text that appears below.
oh gross- but the perfect image to attract new followers I’m sure. When I was a kid my big brother used to have this creepy little comic book where people climbed out of their skin and such… I used to look at it over and over again… after 32 years I still remember that fun creepy feeling I’d get from those pages- this picture brings about that same feeling… fun-creepy-fun-creepy-fun!:-)
Well … it is good to push some boundaries. I have a similar comic experience. It fed my nightmares for years. I wish I could find that comic now …
Good stuff, man. Good stuff. (By the way: ITS back!!)
Thanks once again. Good to see your webcomic back up at running. I am currently working on a flash fiction entry for this months writing challenge at Scribophile.