Oh! You pretty things!

Webcomic: Tales Of The Traveling Gnome

Hah. This one is gonna be easy to read, it has around ten pages so far. Which actually makes it hard to review, I think that most of reviewers wouldn’t accept it for reviewing, but then again, I am not a reviewer.

It is a secret to me how writer, Netpoet, manages to find very good artists to work with him, when noone on the entire net doesn’t seem to manage it. In any case, I know that he has a serious approach to his writing, but I can’t really get an insight in it from 11 pages. In USA graphic novel format, 11 pages are usually just about enough for a narrated intro and half of the first battle. Intro doesn’t come as too aggressive; In general, I consider those nourish internal monologues aggressive and fake poetic. Here, luckily, that is not the case, narration is done through the retrospective of one character, which is, in my opinion, much smoother method. Then there is a battle, as good as any way to start the story; there isn’t a proper introduction of characters, but that’s ok if script later lets us get to know them through their actions rather than through the words. It’s bad when writers rely of a cast page or other secondary content, but I have a feeling that Netpoet doesn’t intend to. There isn’t anything particularly bad in writing so far but that doesn’t mean much.

Now, art, I can judge. Dragonmajik has some stunning colouring skills in Photoshop and her drawing is rather self-assured realistic drawing. I think she is at best with landscapes, medieval buildings and such, as there are some stunning scenes near the beginning (even if a bit eerie since no character appears in them at first). Other sights are drawn very well too. Of course, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t spot something to complain so here it is: The human figures come a bit stiff to me, mostly when they’re not in an action position. Of course, you have to draw a person sitting down or just standing straight, and that’s when they look a bit unnatural (take, for instance, the narrator’s figure in the first page). Related to that, there isn’t much expression on character’s face, they seem to wear similar expression all the time. Kinda reminds of old He-man cartoons, where He-man is always animated with the same sequence so we always wear the good-natured half-grin, no matter what he’s saying. Of course, now I’m exaggerating but I think that, given that they’re in an extreme situation, there isn’t much of extreme emotion on their faces. I think the problem might be in the pencil. There are artists who wheel free with their pencil and sketch the basics in a very short time, so no matter how much careful they work on the page later, it still has the same natural spontaniousness (take “The Jaded” for example). On the other hand, there are artists who labor over their sketches, who still aren’t used to sketching with wide and free hand moves. Dragonmajik seem to be the artist of the second sort to, even if the results are realistic art, there’s that problem with figures.

Now I noticed that I paid more attention and space to that one single bad thing. I don’t want to make impression that Dragonmajok’s art is flakey, I just wanted to point to her where, in my opinion, she has to improve. Other than that, as I said, well drawn and more then well coloured – or rather, painted – her art is very, very eye-pleasing.

Curiosity will make me come back to TTG. Really there wasn’t much of the story that would hook me. But I’ll be curious to see what these two particular people will come up with.

posted by Srdjan @ 4:19 AM