awesome , lol “acquire” is always a good way of getting “things” illegaly fast

by the way , do you guys think this video have a similarity with this strip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12N5WfIgm6I ?

As a writer you might find this interesting. Even though it was made with gaming in mind, it still applies to comics.

http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/episode-07-pacing

The reason I’m bringing this up is because this page is a bit too slow.

I would fix that by (for example) showing them “acquiring” the vehicle

Hmm…depending on what they want, this means sniffing around the future equivalent of a ‘doughnut shop’, Jabba’s ‘garage’, or…

Unless there’s a ‘Maul-mart’ handy.

Drat, misclicked the submit button earlier, can I get a delete of the draft comment and this?

2Holly – if you really want to end this comic, can I recommend doing some sort of a short story in comic format? See if you can tell a story in 20-30 pages…

@Dasick So I assume you want action on every page? In comic book terms this pages is called an Establishing shot, you do it whenever you switch to a new location. This is a long form comic about characters, there are going to be scenes without action in them, all action would completely ruin what we are going for.

The penny arcade video you showed proved my point, we just came from action which would be at the peak of the graph and now we are going to a less tense scene which would be a dip in the graph. You need to look at the entire story not just one page, based on what you said the entire story would be a peak which isn’t good IMHO.

!!! Happy Feet !!!

Admittedly i’m no expert on comics and don’t read that many comics, but have started to read Terra on a weekly basis and wanted to put in my two cents on the issue. First of all Holly & Drew I love you work and think its been great so far. I personally think the pacing is spot on, I personally much prefer not to have action in every scene if it means I get to more story and a better feel for the characters. I read comics for the story, now wonderful art like your is defiantly a perk, but in my opinion good art but no story don’t make a comic worth reading. I have really enjoyed how you have told the story so far and you have told it well so far in my opinion and that’s the reason i continue to come back to continue to read Terra week after week. Am I sure you could find ways to cut out some panels, sure, but I don’t personally see the problem in a few more panels of dialog, you aren’t working on a tv show or movie here or even a commercial printed format (not saying I won’t be buying vol 1 as soon as I get back to my house from being deployed underway), but there is no set minutes and seconds or page count to the panel you have to meet. Plus everything seems two thousand times slower when you have to wait between 3 and 7 days for another page.
Anyways you no doubt already knew what I’ve said above, basically I wanted to say that I love your work so far, but do what you want to do, you are the authors and artists, tell your story how you want to not how us commenters think you should and I hope your wrist starts feeling better again soon because am I looking forward to many more updates in the future.

@Drew Got me there, and using my own references as well. How embarrassing :S /@

I guess my brain tells me there isn’t enough action since there are several real world days between, even though in comic time there has just been a crazy action filled peak.

With that being said, the theory is that to get good pacing you have to hit the curve on both the macro levels (the story arc) and the micro levels as well (for comics I guess that would be the individual panel flow). But thinking about it, I would have to sit down with chart paper to plot out excitement for a lot of things, to determine how well this page is paced. Reading the comments and reviewing the page again, if I had to eyeball it now, I would say the pacing here isn’t the problem. But…

I saw this page and I felt like something was wrong. My first instinct, off the top of my head, was “wah, make more stuff happen!” (in hindsight, pretty rude on my part. sorry :S ), and I linked to the pacing video because I thought that in this situation it would advocate more stuff happening.

I know that this is the Establishing Shot page, and it’s a nice one. I like the opening panel, and the backgrounds really sell the idea that this is the right place to ‘acquire’ a vehicle (no reason you cannot integrate this with a more action-y page though, but I digress). Still, the focus here are the characters, which is where I feel the tint of “wrongness” coming from.

They’re talking, and that is good. Through their speech they’re expressing their unique personalities, also good. They’re announcign their intentions, so that we as the readers can really look forward to the rescue scene, really great! And while they’re talking they’re walking then standing still, which… erm, maybe that’s where I’m getting the “wrongness” factor from.

If you’re used to a more literary style, then you might not hear the bells ringing, but this is a comic, not a novel. A novel is a conceptual work of art, just having words there is ok; in fact, if the author is interrupting the dialogue to bring you the latest news of how many millimetres the character moved since she last spoke, the general consensus is that the author should be fired (OutOfACannon[AndIntoTheSun]).

But comics are primarily a visual storytelling medium, pictures should be telling the story, with the words playing the support role. But from this page, I get the feeling that it’s the words that are the driving force behind this page, and the pictures are merely playing a support role.

That’s why I suggested they do something while they’re talking, and as examples go I just picked the most obvious one (and I do realise that the most obvious example isn’t always the best), and I just blamed it on pacing, because I didn’t think through my post.

Upon some reflection, I think that my problem with this page is that the charcters’ actions aren’t used to their fullest potential when expressing their state, emotions, intentions, themselves etc. That is, for the most part, they’re just standing and talking.

-Holly, I don’t know anything about Slamlander’s Word press, but it sounds useful so you might want to look into it.

That being said, some of the comics I’ve seen use facebook use it to send out update alerts on the main comic and as a fan discussion page. They post character profiles and background, or sneak previews or special images, like the halloween update you recently put up. Commissions info, samples of commissions, and other things of that nature could also be put up. I can post links to some of the comics I follow on Facebook if you would like to see what they do with it. The more people who add the page the better the publicity. If you like I can create the page for you and work with you on it until you get used to. Unless, of course, you would like me to stay on it so you don’t have to.