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I have absolutely no idea if the city is supposed to be impressive or disappointing.
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Jun 14, 2021 09:45
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This is defamation of character! EDIT: Also, the "whoa" bit is killing me. Who the gently caress would write an exclamation of awe like that? And that's not even getting into the fact that the first panel takes place on the ground, and the second is in the air, so they're non-sequential but we're expected to accept that the writing is sequential. Which means that snout wrote about how excited he is to go to the loving library, closed his book, got into the ink witch's ship, saw the city, opened his book again and wrote whoa There isn't even any loving context for it! It's not like "I just saw the city outside of the window and it's like...whoa...". Just "whoa" is so loving stupid. Just make it a loving thought bubble! Why is mookie so afraid to admit that snout has thoughts that aren't immediately written down? oriongates fucked around with this message at 10:21 on Jun 14, 2021 |
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Jun 14, 2021 10:15
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super sweet best pal posted:City with no surrounding structures or farmland outside the walls. Dumb and wrong but sadly common. With all else that Mookie does wrong calling him out on this is a bit petty.
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Jun 14, 2021 10:33
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super sweet best pal posted:City with no surrounding structures or farmland outside the walls.
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Jun 14, 2021 10:34
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:Dumb and wrong but sadly common. With all else that Mookie does wrong calling him out on this is a bit petty. Again, this strip came from someone who's been making a big deal about doing elaborate landscape sketches.
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Jun 14, 2021 10:37
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I thought it was on a lake with weirdly wavy roads/bridges going to it
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Jun 14, 2021 11:25
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Well, at least we bypassed two weeks of him walking there.
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Jun 14, 2021 11:29
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super sweet best pal posted:Again, this strip came from someone who's been making a big deal about doing elaborate landscape sketches. Ehh. People would say the LoTR movies have elaborate landscape shots and they do the same thing. It's a failure of worldbuilding to not include or realize that a city doesn't end at its walls and has a sprawling attendant complex of suburbs and farms, but it's not a failure of the art/drawing. Bismuth posted:I thought it was on a lake with weirdly wavy roads/bridges going to it I see it on a flat plain with either wavy roads or wavy rivers going into it. We won't know for sure until we see more of it because good art is vague and unclear and communicates next to nothing.
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Jun 14, 2021 11:30
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Yeah pretty much every depiction of faux-Medieval cities tends to forget they can't just ship in all their food via trucks. For reference, the movies used these wild meadows for the Pelennor Fields (around Minas Tirith), where the big battle happens in Return of the King.  Tolkien described them as basically just being a giant collection of farms.
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Jun 14, 2021 11:41
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oriongates posted:And that's not even getting into the fact that the first panel takes place on the ground, and the second is in the air, so they're non-sequential but we're expected to accept that the writing is sequential. Which means that snout wrote about how excited he is to go to the loving library, closed his book, got into the ink witch's ship, saw the city, opened his book again and wrote whoa This would have worked if the narration was all in captions, because captions can carry a thought or a thread across transitions. But no, Mookie has to have Snout writing in his drat journal all the time. What I really hate is that Snout's writing is of course more intelligent and communicative than his actions, because writing's easier to Mookie.
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Jun 14, 2021 12:15
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GrossMurpel posted:Yeah pretty much every depiction of faux-Medieval cities tends to forget they can't just ship in all their food via trucks.
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Jun 14, 2021 12:16
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Most fantasy settings have things existing at a vaguely medieval or renaissance level of technological and cultural development for literally thousands of years. The world has been medieval in both Tolkien's Legendarium and A Song of Ice and Fire for longer than actual Human civilization has existed IRL. I think it's still supposed to be the same faux-medieval nonsense we saw in the Deeganverse. I think I said it earlier in the thread, but like I feel part of what makes Deegan stand out as weird, and perhaps a better writer could do something more fun and interesting with this, is that while it feels like most anachronistic fantasy settings start with a (or rather the author's often poor understanding of) depiction of the European medieval period and then slap all sorts of modern moral and cultural sensibilities onto it, Mookie jut basically started with the modern world of the early 2000s and slapped a vague and lazy medieval aesthetic over it. It's not a medieval setting that inexplicably has modern moral and cultural mores. It's a modern setting that inexplicably has chosen to dress up as a medieval one. Except when it can't be bothered to even do that.
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Jun 14, 2021 12:22
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See things like Arudak's picture of his corpsewife sized to fit on his desk, and snout's library card with his face on it, both things that would basically require photography to make even the slightest bit of sense. And not just photography, but fairly modern photography and printing. Available in the wild edge to a library that does not stock walls. Part of it is that Mookie just does not even think the slightest bit about how anything actually works. He has Snout write in his journal of infinite pages using what appears to be a large calligraphy brush but the ink dries instantly and never drips or runs, just like a modern-day ballpoint pin. And Snout can write while walking because he has never once needed an actual source of ink, like an inkwell or something to clean his brush with and prevent it from drying into a rock-hard lump. Mookie can write in a journal, obviously anyone can.
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Jun 14, 2021 13:34
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LotR is a setting torn apart by war where armies of twisted, monstrous brutes roam the land and one of the great civilisations of Man is reduced to one fortress city beset on all sides by evil. Safe to say you're not seeing the world at its best.
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Jun 14, 2021 14:09
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super sweet best pal posted:City with no surrounding structures or farmland outside the walls. Or gates and doors.
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Jun 14, 2021 14:38
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There you have it: The reason why all scenes take place inside a featureless white void is because the entire city is in a featureless white void.
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Jun 14, 2021 14:43
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Maybe I’m wrong and it’s intentional and the gates are invisible as a form of defense. Otherwise I’ll be confounded that Mookie can remember to include details of individual buildings and structures in the city but not to add a few lines to represent a gate.
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Jun 14, 2021 15:08
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Given how vast mongrel town appeared to be, I don't see why that city is so impressive. Also unless the source of those rivers is in the centre of the city, I don't think it's possible to have rivers crisscross in an x shape like that.
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Jun 14, 2021 15:47
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Those aren't roads?
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Jun 14, 2021 16:10
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GrossMurpel posted:Those aren't roads? I can't tell. If they're roads, they're meandering a hell of a lot like rivers.
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Jun 14, 2021 16:21
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According to Mookie on Twitter, he's been spending a lot of time working on the coming city pages. Which means it'll probably be traced and we'll get maybe 2-3 pages of it before it permanently retreats back to white void.
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Jun 14, 2021 16:43
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I'm the perfectly circular, perfectly uniform, smooth, monolithic walls.
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Jun 14, 2021 16:55
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oriongates posted:See things like Arudak's picture of his corpsewife sized to fit on his desk, and snout's library card with his face on it, both things that would basically require photography to make even the slightest bit of sense. And not just photography, but fairly modern photography and printing. Available in the wild edge to a library that does not stock walls. It's just magic without any thought put into it. Like how zapping an acoustic guitar with lightning magic turns it into an electric guitar.
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Jun 14, 2021 16:58
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Whoa... it's a circle with some semicircles inside of it...
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Jun 14, 2021 17:17
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He was probably trying to do something on the scale and majesty of this only, you know, he's lazy and sucks
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Jun 14, 2021 17:23
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My guess its a "see guys now the orcs are the technologically advanced society" so the white savior stuff isn't offensive. right guys, right?
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Jun 14, 2021 17:48
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I once caught flak for comparing K6BD art to Strong Female Protagonist art, because it was really unfair to compare them - even though they'd been running for similar amounts of time and the artists were similarly young. Because Abaddon, to be fair, had probably had more practice or development, his art was clearly more developed. But the idea that Abaddon started making a webcomic some decades after Mookie did, and this is still how their art looks when placed next to each other... amazing. The most fair comparison possible, everything is stacked for Mookie and it's... this.
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Jun 14, 2021 19:12
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Eh, I think Molly Ostertag is a good artist, but she clearly wasn't putting her all into STP, especially near the end. And yeah, it's unfair to compare almost ANYONE to Abaddon. Not only is he really, really good, but he's improved like crazy over the years and he puts in WAY, way more time and effort into this comic than should be humanly possible. Mookie doesn't need to be on the level of Abaddon, art-wise - I read a lot of comics that aren't, and I enjoy them greatly. But he's either not putting in enough effort to make something decent, or if he is actually is slaving over this comic for long hours, he's bashing his head against the wall doing the wrong things instead of working on improving (or even establishing) his baseline art skills.
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Jun 14, 2021 19:55
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It's fine to make a comic that doesn't look like k6bd I think mookies art has improved since the original DD run, but he's also gotten much lazier in his page blocking
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Jun 14, 2021 23:35
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If the orc civilization has been flourishing and peaceful they shouldn't really be huddling behind walls as a defensive structure anyway. Like old walls would be still up but the city would just keep growing outside of them. And yeah the problem is Mookie is actively trying to draw something grand and impressive looking but no. The whole emphasis on big pages instead of a tiny strip is showing up the deficiencies he has as an artist that much more.
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Jun 15, 2021 01:02
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I don't think Mookie is nearly as bad an artist as many people think. Overall, I feel like too much emphasis is placed on the idea that in order to be good art must be complex and that it's important for art to visibly "level up" in obvious ways the longer you do it. Finding an art style that works for you and that you can deliver consistently is much more important, especially in a marathon medium like webcomics. Viewed objectively, Mookie is a perfectly competent artist and when it comes to figure drawing and gesture I would actually rate him higher than many professional comic artists. He's legitimately good at posing and motion, his anatomy is generally solid and it's extremely rare for characters to go significantly off-model. He has three major problems: First, he's got garbage aesthetic sensibilities. Like...he just does not seem to be able to view his art objectively and seems just blithely unaware of the way he'll just slam two clashing art styles together (see Snout's cartoony form contrasting horrifically with his attempt at a painterly landscape, which already looks terrible in his stark black and white art style). This also leads to his character designs being painfully bland (ink witch, Arudak) or plain unpleasant (snout, any given mongrelfolk), which isn't the same as badly drawn but they can look similar. He's managed to draw SSnout enough to refine his appearance to "largely inoffensive" but he's still stuck with a lot of his bad early decisions that just can't be smoothed off (snout's arm spikes or mid-back tail, for instance). The same goes for his environments, leading to "impressive" landscapes that look like they were slapped together in a few minutes. Second, he's been cutting so many corners that this comic is practically a circle. Ever since the mongreltown arc ended he's been using less and less backgrounds, fewer and fewer establishing shots and connective panels. He's been actively putting less effort into the comic, his storyboarding and design have gotten sloppier and he's making no effort to communicate action or scenery to his readers. He's also using more and more filler pages where literally nothing of importance happens. I don't feel comfortable being an armchair psychiatrist, but it's pretty clear that something is destroying his motivation to produce a quality product. Finally, he is a bad writer. Which is ironic, because I think he would describe himself as a writer first and artist second. But he's just poo poo at writing and, in fact, he's so poo poo that it's magnifying all the other flaws in his work. His characters are boring, stupid and unlikable. His plots go nowhere and storylines are just dropped as soon as they no longer interest him. He seems incapable of thinking about anything that isn't happening on the current page and has shown an active aversion to pre-planning or in-depth characterization. He forgot to give his second main character a name and then he tried to cover it up by pretending that was on purpose. This is made worse by the fact that he's trying to "challenge" himself by creating a dialogue-free comic, which is like challenging an infant to a fist-fight with a rabid chimp.
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Jun 15, 2021 03:57
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oriongates posted:He forgot to give his second main character a name and then he tried to cover it up by pretending that was on purpose.
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Jun 15, 2021 04:42
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The art in legacy is legitimately so much better than the art mookies did for that one arc of star power
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Jun 15, 2021 05:59
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His art is nowhere near as bad as his writing, to be sure. But I'm just not getting any sense of "yeah this city's really big and impressive." The perspective doesn't give us any good scale (how big are those hills?) and there's just nothing really eye-catching. But also having Snout just "say" "Whoa" means you're telling us to be impressed by this art and when you do that- you're really setting a bar for yourself. If that wasn't there the scene would play better.
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Jun 15, 2021 06:09
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Honestly the establishing shot of Mongreltown was much more impressive, if I'm remembering correctly
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Jun 15, 2021 06:20
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Yeah, that's the thing...he's certainly capable of drawing a modestly impressive-looking city...he's just putting in the absolute minimum effort on all of the latest pages. It's less a matter of skill and more a matter of motivation. EDIT: Heck, even this city doesn't represent a total lack of artistic ability. Even with a relative lack of detail, drawing all those buildings in a way that doesn't look like a bunch of scribbles is at least a little demanding. It's just a wasted effort because he choose to frame it in the least interesting way possible and the choice to put a wall around the city actually works against it, making the whole thing look more like a dish of caviar. If he had removed the wall and just made things a bit more sprawling it would probably look a lot nicer. But he just uncritically assumes that fantasy cities must have walls. And since he's incapable of creating anything resembling an actual culture, the walls are nothing but flat, white barriers: no statuary, no architecture, no nothing. oriongates fucked around with this message at 06:40 on Jun 15, 2021 |
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Jun 15, 2021 06:34
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Mongreltown was drawn from a lot of references. I think this orc city is drawn without reference
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Jun 15, 2021 06:37
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oriongates posted:Viewed objectively, Mookie is a perfectly competent artist and when it comes to figure drawing and gesture I would actually rate him higher than many professional comic artists. He's legitimately good at posing and motion, his anatomy is generally solid and it's extremely rare for characters to go significantly off-model. I don't want to sound like I'm tearing into you (or even Mookie) but I don't know how you can say any of these things. The part about rating him higher than professional artists sounds like trolling, but the rest of your post seems sincere so ??? Mookie is absolutely horrendous at figures, posing and motion. His anatomy is terrible and characters go off-model all the time. I don't think he actually has any figure drawing fundamentals or knowledge of anatomy at all, instead he's built up a very small library of shapes he can replicate (anime head viewed from side, arm viewed from side, rough approximation of a splayed hand) and then he frankensteins them together Tim Buckley style. When he's not just tracing them, his poses range from clunky and stiff to complete nonsense. He draws muscle definition randomly. He shades random parts of his drawings, with no consistency or defined light source. I'm almost certain he does these things because he knows that muscles exist and are often defined in drawings, and that shading is also something that happens in drawings, but he doesn't care to learn anything more. Again, I really don't like to be mean, but Mookie's art is awful even by amateur standards. He has not improved at all and that's because he's not actually trying to improve, he just wants to skip ahead to the part where he gets praised. That's the one thing that actually irritates me about all of this, and I would genuinely be very happy if he actually wanted to learn and improve. 
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Jun 15, 2021 07:02
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Libra posted:I don't want to sound like I'm tearing into you (or even Mookie) but I don't know how you can say any of these things. The part about rating him higher than professional artists sounds like trolling, but the rest of your post seems sincere so ??? I mean, I don't know how to tell you but you're just plain wrong. He's not amazing, by any standards. But he's a legitimately decent artist. His art is stylized in a cartoonish way that may not appeal to you, but it's got good bones. I'd challenge you to find an actual example of one of the Legacy characters actually being significantly off model or posed in a way that's actually awkward or anatomically impossible (the closest would probably be corpse's vine-vomit face, but that falls more under bad choices [see below]). He doesn't have the problem many artists do of getting his hands or feet hosed up or too big or small. His art is consistent, recognizable and (when he puts the effort to draw it) he can actually communicate movement quite well. When he uses perspective, he uses it correctly, if unimpressively. He is actually competent at art. He's not amazing and a lot of artists will make more mistakes than he does but will often be remembered more fondly because they do have things they do particularly well or they'll have a strong aesthetic or character design that makes up for the greater frequency of technical mistakes. Mookie's art is boring, because he doesn't have any of the other skills that would make it interesting and he never reaches the level of "impressive", but he's clearly capable of producing it reliably and without error, which is legitimately a difficult skill. The only area I would say Mookie is actually bad at is his recent obsession with playing with brushes and creating painterly landscapes which he does very poorly. As far as a lack of improvement...that's pretty provably wrong. The difference between early Deegan and later Deegan is obvious to any honest observer and likewise the difference between late Deegan and the Legacy or mongreltown chapters. He improves significantly in terms of technical skill...he just doesn't change his style significantly. And frankly, in a comic with actually good writing the art in the early parts of Legacy would be completely inoffensive. Unexceptional, but effective in a workhorse way, acting as an effective medium for the story, even if it never manages to elevate the story. Now, since mongreltown, the quality of the art has tanked as he continues to cut more and more corners and his storyboarding has gone through the bottom of the barrel is currently burrowing through the earth's crust. But I'm not talking about his willingness to deliver good work, I'm talking about his ability to and his ability to make consistent, decent art has already been proven. Now, all that said, what Mookie does do is make horrible artistic choices, which is different from actually being bad at drawing. Hence his repeated use of "The Look" between Snout and his not-parents and the absolutely goofy-as-gently caress faces that characters will sometimes pull. Not to mention his occasional forays into painterly art and (even worse) combining it with his regular simple style. But that is different from being bad at drawing...if Mookie were teamed up with an actually good writer and editor and was forced to actually listen to them, then he'd likely do very well. The problem is that he's in charge of himself and his decisions are terrible and he doesn't seem to realize or care enough to make better choices.
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Jun 15, 2021 07:56
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| # ? Apr 29, 2024 13:59 |
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You're wrong about Mookie improving. He posted filler art during the original DD run that was the same quality as Legacy. I think some of it has even been reposted in this thread. He chose to draw DD the way he did. As a stylistic choice. Because he liked it that way.
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Jun 15, 2021 08:02
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