Thanks, everyone.
Cyclist wrote Good drawing of a bicycle, they are tricky to draw sometimes to get the proportions right.
You ain't kiddin'! I wanted to do at least one semi-realistic shot of a bicycle before I spent the rest of the strip doing it shorthand. I even got my roommate to take pictures of me on a bike so I'd have something to refer to!
chaptal wrote Good work, are you influenced by Speigelman?
I wouldn't say influenced - I've read Maus like everyone else but nothing about his work in particular has had any kind of impact on my work. I went to art school, and I got into comics thinking you had to draw like the pros do in order to succeed. I soon realized that this was not necessarily the case, thanks to artists like Spiegelman. It wasn't until I changed my style from "generic superhero" to something more personal that I began to get noticed.
kitoba wrote I like your drawing style, but I find your layouts a bit too crowded. I'd also prefer a more horizontal layout because it would make it easier for me to read the whole thing without scrolling my screen.
My roommate made me aware of this too. The reason I work in this size is because I submit my cartoons to the Short North Gazette (the bicycle one is in this month's issue, in fact) and they demand a certain size. I'm not sure how to get around that without going horizontal - and then if I did that, I'd have to redraw it for the Gazette, and I don't wanna do that.
It feels a bit like the pictures and the text are telling the exact same story. It would be nice to have the illustrations provide more in the way of a counter-narrative, or to have a little more dialogue instead of so much "voiceover".
Yeah, I see that. Like I said, this format is a new one for me - not only am I used to doing traditional comics-type pages, but traditional comics-type narratives. I guess I feel more pressured to get the information across and maybe I'm not thinking as much about things like that. Thanks; that's something I will definitely work on.