Ninja and Pirate

The grizzly proceeded to maul the barkeep and all the patrons before disappearing into the night. I like to think that a detective bear with a fixation for lollipops showed up to the crime scene. I call him Kojiak.

So I made a huge mistake yesterday. Kris Straub is an extremely talented webcomic artist and his work is a personal benchmark of mine. His art is unique but clear and is capable of causing fear, which is something art work rarely does effectively. His writing is subtle and symbolic, extremely deep and involving. So I was critiquing one of his panels with a friend of mine on Twitter and I commented on how something he did broke one of the rules of comic making. Of course, I didn’t mean he was bad or did this without caring, but it easily could have come across that way. See, in comic making, you never want your word balloons to cover up one of your figures, especially not the eyes. In Kris’s AWESOME comic Broodhollow, which I’m pretty sure I’ve sung the praises of before, there was a panel where one character spoke a sentence and the balloon placement covered up another character’s eyes. Of course, this is a big no-no UNLESS you are doing it for symbolic or purposeful means, as Mr. Straub was because he’s brilliant. So I was commenting on how that’s supposed to be a taboo knowing that he would never see a tweet from an unknown webcomic artist like me but lo and behold, he found it and I was sitting there sucking on my foot. So, Kris, if you read this, I apologize in front of all twelve of my readers. I didn’t mean to speak negatively about your work which I absolutely adore, but it very well could of come off that way. Mind you, when Kris talked to me he was nothing but humble and cordial, which made my embarrassment all the more potent, of course. So please, as a penance, if you can people, visit Broodhollow on my behalf and learn what a good comic looks like. I really had no place critiquing work of which quality I will never achieve.