Another note before my 2nd review and 1st official ‘format run’ of this sub-blog within a blog:

I’m a writer, not an illustrator. However, being also a photographer, I can still see what looks good and what doesn’t. I can’t crit anatomy and art techniques, but I can say ‘this looks like trash’ and ‘your pacing/dialogue sucks.’

I have major beef with shitty attitudes and crap work ethic. If you update once a month and say you only update once a month, great. If you get 100 ‘update moar plz’ comments per strip, then bitch your fans out when the banner says ‘weekly,’ you’re a dickhead. I’m also not a fan of, “I don’t even like making this strip’ types, *glares at Gone With the Blastwave’ but I’ll take that as I see it. I pay special attention to webdesign, because this IS your medium, not the art, writing, or bonus goodies, but the actual presentation. Give me a site I can get around, or I’ll be annoyed. Don’t make you audience work, FEED them your story as easy as possible.

I WILL envy your speech bubbles. I’m at the point where I don’t even want advice how to make them, because it’s too fucking frustrating.

This is also a brand new keyboard. I killed my old one with 300,000 keystrokes, smokes, and beers. I blame any copy-edit errors accordingly. The keys are foreign. We’re still making friends.
That rant aside, here we go:

Armageddon @ Igraphicnovel.com

A baby, less than thirty strips old (though probably running way longer than mine)!

We are NOT greeted with the newest strip, even when we ‘click to enter,’ still not the newest strip, but the ‘front cover.’ IGN, be confident enough to throw me into the action and entice me to backtrack. Plus, this annoys your returning visitors.

First thought: X-Force / Exiles, complete with Chibi-Cable, Chibi-Deadpool, Chibi-Sunfire and Chibi-Morph.

But what appeared at a glance to be a marvel knock-off is actually an intriguing cross-world clusterfuck between a modern dystopian Earth and a sword-and-magic alternate dimension. The stakes? Armageddon! It’s a more exciting take on the concept than I’ve seen in a while.

One comic in, I was pleasantly surprised at the B/W art, font, and especially the fucking speech bubbles (rawr). All very intricate, very clean–not messy. The frames are vertical throughout, but the comic-book-style pacing is well-maintained. The dialogue waxes melodrama but doesn’t cross the line (though it comes damn close). It fits. The opening tension is immediate–a much stronger opening than I’m used to. No bullshit philosophy, just impending doom…then doom.

Then it all goes to shit after the prologue, the out-of-panel dialogue being the big offender. Oh well. I get the feeling they’re experimenting with what works and what doesn’t.

I’d love to see more web-functionality, as the site is pretty bare bones for having six people on their staff. There’s no backstory, gallery, cast, blog from what I could tell, especially not attached to the comic itself. This project could use a little boost. I hope someone steps up. Make the webdesign compliment the comic, not subvert it. There’s no clear update schedule, so I’ve no clue when or how often they update. That would be very useful as well.

To be perfectly honest, if this had pro format/production, I’d buy it. Hard sell, but the story and art make up for any minor flaws.

I faved it, but would drop it if it turns out to be ‘once a month.’