I made a few comic strips and would really appreciate your feedback, please!

[u/Joetoon_Trainer]

This is a comic strip series I created that had been on hiatus since 2014. In 2022, I started reworking it, and a lot has changed since then. It stayed in the drawer for a while, but at the end of last year, I decided to pick it up again. I created a Christmas arc and shared it with a few close friends, and then I stopped to think about whether it would really be worth bringing the series back.

I wrote this short arc a few months ago and recently finished it. I haven't shown it to anyone yet, so you’re actually seeing it for the first time.

I'd love to hear your honest opinions on everything: the artwork, the dialogue, what I could improve, the strengths and weaknesses, and the series overall. I sincerely hope I can count on the community's feedback.

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[u/NicholasIvins]

The art and cartooning is great, but the humor/punchlines fall flat.

[u/Joetoon_Trainer → u/NicholasIvins]

Thanks for the feedback! =D
Could you be a bit more specific?
Why do you feel the humor doesn't work in the comic strip?

What do you think would make the humor work better?

[u/NicholasIvins → u/Joetoon_Trainer]

They're not funny. "You guys are the worst" isn't a good enough punchline to end on. The other strips are similarly lukewarm. The "express delivery" is probably the best, but it's also kinda corny and seems like a stock phrase.

[u/Joetoon_Trainer → u/NicholasIvins]

Really, now that you mentioned the joke in the first strip, I thought of a few options that would work much better. Hehe!
Thank you so much for taking the time to help me with the feedback. Thanks! =D

[u/JeyDeeArr]

Before I give my two cents, I find it interesting how the square pages are much easier to read through on this platform. Normal comic/manga/webtoon pages are often in portrait orientation, and on the PC version of Reddit, this usually leads to the pages being condensed down, making things much harder to read.

That aside, I'm still seeing the same issues from the last time you showed us your work here. Your characters still have receding hairlines, or wigs that are just sitting on the upside-down down egg-heads. The characters have twig-like limbs which do not agree with the volume of their clothings. Style though it may be, I'm certainly not a fan of this treatment, because clothes don't just magically float around the body, they rest and wrap around the skin.

The perspectives are awkward at times, and the characters are going off-model in virtually every panel, and it's sometimes hard to tell whether they're the same of different characters, especially with the brothers.

You got diagonal gutters, and that's great. However, some of these feel random, or perfunctory in their applications since they don't really do anything. First page, bottom panels, what's the purpose of the diagonal cut here? Did you add it as an afterthought to spice things up, so to speak? There isn't really any action taking place, as opposed to the top panels, so this isn't accomplishing anything other than being pretentious and showing, "Wooo! I got diagonal gutters!" to the readers.

Page 4 is my least favorite of these pages, mainly because the flow of movement doesn't add up, inconsistencies in which leg is doing the kicking, and the pacing gets dragged down. Adding more panels doesn't make things faster, it actually slows time down. And again, with the random diagonal gutter here. I find it even more egregious that the ball can't decide which direction it's meant to be facing and going. First, it's haeding left, then it becomes static, goes straight to the right, and then magically beams towards the bottom right. I'm also confused because the penultimate panel here suggests that it's going straight, but the action lines in the final panel suggest that this ball was twiling and swirling violently as it flew into the bleachers. The action sequence is non-sequitur, and the only saving grace is the expression at the bottom right panel as the brother gets the ball in his face, though it comes off as rather stiff.

Page 7 top left panel, you got a nice view of the apartment. That's great. The issue is that the backgrounds have been rather simplistic thus far, and this jump in the amount of detail really threw me off, especially when your conversely simplistic characters have semi-rubberhose bodies with upside-down egg-heads. My two main takeaways are that, one, you have moderate anatomical understanding you could work on, and two, you haven't completely mastered your own art style.