Life in Aggro Critique

[Bear]

So, I'm finally done with re-coding the site. I have a pretty good handle on CSS now and I feel a lot more confident that they site is in a good position to grow. One of the things that I've wanted to do for a while is to have other webcomic creators weigh in on our side and give some advice. Fei and I want to improve the comic and website as much as possible, so I would like to re-post their comments here for you all to look at.

Let us know what you think. Are they comments you would agree with? Disagree with? Have some critiques of your own to make the site better? Please let us know because I want to start making changes to the site and start putting the word out there to see if we can increase our readership. I would like to know if there are more gamers out there who like what we are putting out and hopefully start growing the community on our forums as well!


Cayen wrote:
Unfortunately I can see this as a nitpick post. I'll try not to be to hard on it. So let's start off at the top:
right off at the top you have your banner and the logo competing for attention, pick one or the other.
Also the website is lacking balance. I think it's the life in aggro and gift a lot green sail that is causing it for me. It just makes everything seem off. I think moving the Child's play banner down so it's next to the blog and keeping it away from the header of your comic will help.

Pick 1 color to be dominate, right now you have a bunch of different colors competing to be dominate so it's a little distracting. If you pick a primary and two or three secondaries the site will feel a little better. Try to go for contrasting colors.

there is something else that needs to be improved, however I'm having a hard time articulating it to myself. I know if I try I'll just wind up confusing myself and possibly others. I'm hoping someone else picks up on it better then I can.

Anyway I hope this helps.


Dayvi:
It took me a few sec to find your comic o_0
I thought the "Jan 28" banner was an advert, so I totally ignored it. After a member I noticed it was a link to the latest comic. This is called visual noise.

You could replace that "Updates Fridays" box with a "New Readers Start Here" img.

You have a deviantArt account, upload your comics to dA. dA loves comics and sends loads of new viewers to comic websites.


Drezz wrote:
I have a few opinions. Don't take any of them the wrong way - they're observations only, and I'm not trying to make you feel bad.

1) ANOTHER Gamer comic.
As soon as you mention 'gamer comic,' what do you think the first response will be from your audience? If your comic isn't Penny Arcade, VGCats, CAD or any other variation of the genre, you'll always be known as 'another gamer comic' and no matter how good your art and writing is, you'll instantly be dismissed, or compared to the guys who have been around longer.

I'd suggest looking at a different genre, since the webcomic about gamers/gaming/topical news has been done to death.

2) Site Navigation
Your comic should be the thing that appears first and foremost when you type in your web address. If you're not a heavyweight in the industry and people don't know you by name, no one will care about your blog posts. I had to dig around to find your comic because it wasn't blatantly obvious. Imagine someone with a short attention span that doesn't care - you've lost them forever without them giving your site a chance.

This is really important and should be changed immediately.

3) Finding a Niche that isn't saturated
- This is in relation to point 1. Challenge yourself by writing/drawing a comic that falls outside of your comfort zone a little bit. Sure it is best to write about what you know - but if what YOU know is common knowledge to most folks who are into the same genre, perhaps you need to find something else that will make you stand out.

An original story will do that. Or if you enjoy the topical strips, you need to focus on a genre that doesn't have many success stories (Penny Arcade, etc) and concentrate on being the best in that particular category.

Let's be realistic. PA and PvP and CAD have over 10 years worth of experience on you. I doubt there will be much that you can do to leapfrog them in terms of innovation. So your best bet is to channel your creative energy into something that will put you in a position to be a leader.

4) Maturity
You folks are young and exuberant and willing to be edgy. That's great - but you need to refine that raw attitude in your writing and make it work. I'm afraid that only comes with experience. If you're writing gag type humor, you may want to study successful comedians and their delivery, and also read books on how to writing for humor and how to properly formulate jokes. This will make your punchlines feel less forced and natural, your gags won't come off being corny (unless that is your intent) and you'll learn how to create a consistent brand of humor you can call your own.

Writing funnies is HARD. There's no way I could do it successfully because I don't have the background. I'm a witty and funny guy in person, but that doesn't translate into comics because there's a different formula to develop a good joke. A lot of times, the jokes sound funnier in your head, or you're left with a 'you had to be there' moment, and that's the worst type of joke to tell.

Your setups are decent - the delivery can be lacking at times. But with experience you'll get better.

4) The artwork
- Overall - its good and your characters are consistent. You may need to do a bit more development in order for people to form a bit of attachment. Right now, Bear and co. are just sort of "there." There needs to be a few strips where people can get invested in them as real characters - otherwise your strip is just a mish-mash of different characters that appear when its convenient. Its great visually, but in the long run, after people view your comic, they'll forget about it and wont give it a second thought -only because there's no hook to bring them back.

Compare this to PA, where every so often there is a story arc which entices the reader to come back for a number of days, helps to develop the characters, helps create more consistency in those bit characters, and allows them to refine their looks.

I know this is being overly-critical, but its just to help you avoid a lot of the huge pitfalls right off the bat. Both of you have talent - now is the time to put your skills together to form something original, because that garners more interest in the long term, than trying to ride on a formula that has been watered down by so many others.

Good luck!

[RollCasket]

I think I'm pretty easy to please as far as websites go...as long as it doesn't have anything flashy at me, loud colors, and loads decently fast I'm happy (well obviously it working is important too).

Kinda chiming in on wha the last guy said even though he was overly harsh and I don't quite agree with a lot of what he said...you guys should definitely get some arcs going. I'll be the first though to say that I do not like Penny Arcade very much...they have some good comics every now and then, and their arcs are usually my least favorite, but I DO like VGCats a lot. I think what Scott does there is pretty good, esp for me cause they're things I like. There's game comics, anime related ones, and then some random/normal ones with his cast of characters. So I have to also say that just because other people do gamer comics and have been around longer that should have nothing to do with what you guys do. It's important to work with what you have an interest in because if you don't you start to hate it and not want to do it.

As far as pointers from myself, I think more visual gags would be cool. Often times those are also in the comic along with jokes from the dialog, but you don't have to always tell the jokes that way. I think every now and then you guys should try and make a comic with no dialog (though if there is text on signs or something that doesn't really count) that is still funny. Not that you should do it all the time, or have a bunch of arcs as mentioned earlier, but I think it would help a lot to keep the comic rolling.

Doing more with Bear and Pie is always good too, as the last guy said getting the readers more invested in the characters always helps. It might be cheesy, but having a "mascot" type character can help a lot to transition between game type comics and "real world" type strips. Like that squirrel from the first comic making repeat appearances could work.

That's...about all I can think of at 2:43am =P

[Bear]

Thanks for the input Roll. I think the guy was a bit harsh as well, but for good reason. There are a lot of video game webcomics out there and a LOT of them are just terrible or mediocre at best. I think that a lot of people will see Penny Arcade's success and think "Hey, I kinda like games. I can draw. Maybe I can be a big success too!" And then they whip up something and it isn't really hitting. PA certainly set a high bar as far as readership levels and success goes and it is hard to walk in their shadow and not get diminished in some way.

But yeah - the critique was made with no knowledge on how deeply Fei and I are gamers, so I think it was just his way of saying watch out for blindly following in PAs footsteps. In actuality I think we have more in common with VGCats then Penny Arcade. When Fei and I first started we thought about the format a lot. When discussing it, I mentioned that I thought PA has some golden moments but many times its hard to find the humor in such a small strip (without having to read the post or being intimately familiar with the topic). It's sad because when Fei and I watch Penny Arcade: The Series (the reality show of theirs), they come across as being fun and funny and I thought, wow, it's really difficult to approach that in just 3 or 4 frames.

VGCats has its long-form comics with a lot of randomness thrown in and I think they hit their mark pretty often. The sad thing with VGCats is that their update schedule has gotten really slow. But ultimately I thought that it was easier to get the humor across when not being limited to just three frames, so we decided to stick with the long form instead. After working with it for so long, I have to say that I am pretty happy with the results. I like the idea that the comics can be mostly digested without reading our thoughts post and I'm hoping to keep improving at making the humor really shine.

As far as story arcs and other stuff...well time will tell how that goes. I think that the Manager Santa is kind of an arc and we haven't really had one since. I definitely like the idea of having more comics with visual gags instead of just text reliant. I thought the Shopping Strategems comic did really well with as little dialogue as it had and the DKCR comic was kind of a continuation into that more visual appeal.

Anyways, we will just have to keep working on it - I really hope that we can get more readers interested and get some people laughing at our stuff. Fei and I have really been wanting to work on Chromatic Shift lately too but we want to get Life in Aggro further off the ground before delving too far into that.

[Autolux]

I do have to agree in some instances. There are a lot of times where I do think delivery could be better. I was never quite sure how to word it, but I do think sometimes the jokes don't flow as well as they could. When I think of famous shows like Family Guy and The Simpsons, a group of writers would bounce a lot of ideas off one another, causing the joke to grow until even the original person who came up with the idea was suddenly laughing, as they too saw it in a new light. Now I'm not saying you should go higher a bunch of writers, but maybe try really delving into how you could improve the delivery, and really catch the reader off guard. I feel like the comic could use more diversity, but I also feel like this is something that will come along as the comic matures. I think the biggest way for webcomics to have any sort of exposure is to stay topical and new, and you guys definitely touch on recently made games, but I still feel like the aspect of games chosen is perhaps too narrow.

I didn't really notice it, but I do think Dayvi had a point when he said

"I thought the "Jan 28" banner was an advert, so I totally ignored it. After a member I noticed it was a link to the latest comic. This is called visual noise."

It might not be a bad idea to change up the lay up, perhaps having something larger and more front and center would attract the inattentive eye better.

I can kind of see the points made about "another video game comic" but I also think that most new video game comics are not that well done, 3 panel'd one liners. I think you guys have more potential than most, and I am a reader for life (in aggro lul). Despite the backing PA and VGCats and junk have, there is a quality about them that just gives them a staleness. Gabe and Tycho's humor is pretty recognizable, and in the long run, while long term readers will still remain fans, its not as easy to get new readers into it. Just because you are choosing a topic of interest that is been done before, doesn't mean that it can't be unique, you just have to really relate to gamers in a different way. I think you have the quality to be a fresh face, you just have to really put yourselves out there.

"You have a deviantArt account, upload your comics to dA. dA loves comics and sends loads of new viewers to comic websites."

I think this is the best advice I read.

"Doing more with Bear and Pie is always good too, as the last guy said getting the readers more invested in the characters always helps. It might be cheesy, but having a "mascot" type character can help a lot to transition between game type comics and "real world" type strips. Like that squirrel from the first comic making repeat appearances could work."

Who said Bear and Pie were going away ?!?!?!?!??

[Subaru]

Hi, here are some things I thought: (only the bad things, please don't take this too badly or think I only think bad things)

I think the blog posts and the comic should be on the same page. Cos each blog post is normally related to the comic you have posted. Like have the comic then after you read the comic you can read the posts about it under it.
It would also be nice to be able to comment on each comic, so having some sort of comment ability under the comics would be good as well. It could be hidden so it doesn't take up much space, and then expanded when clicked on.

I think it is quite weird that the home page goes straight to the blog posts, considering it is a comic site.

And lastly it is weird how the FT forums were used as the Aggro forums. It looks messy having all this rag talk everywhere, and confusing for new Aggro fans (consider that users have rag levels, and all the rag emotes as well). I know you probably did this because you want to preserve the FT forums, but maybe you could go through and hide all the rag posts with that archiving scheme you used to do with old posts.
Especially with the "post your photo" part. I suggest making a new thread for that. Because while some people might be happy to share their photos with their FT family, they might not want it to be open to the rest of the internet.

[Bear]

As far as the comic on the same page idea, that seems to be the common suggestion. There are two very popular webcomic sites that do the comic on it's own page too and it seems to work for them: and Over time I wanted to expand upon the thoughts section and update them more regularly but before I recoded the site, it was a MAJOR pain to add something as simple as an extra post. For LiA, I tried putting the comic on the front page, and I just didn't like it. I think that this is because the comic and thoughts posts are off center in the current design. When I looked at it, something just didn't look right so I decided not to do that for now.

That said, having the comic on the same page as the thoughts post is not something I am opposed to. A lot of comic sites do this and it works, but they typically use a back-end server application called (a blog software) with a mod installed called (sets it up in a comic style). The problem with comic press that I've seen is that a lot of the websites end up turning out looking very similar as far as what is featured and I wanted to stay away from something that could limit our freedom in site design in the future.

This resulted in me taking the long route and learning to code a website from scratch. The current design is something I whipped up in Dreamweaver using basic HTML tables; it's not too fancy or custom looking but it gets the job done. Now that I have re-coded everything in CSS and have a much firmer grasp on website coding, I feel like I can start to evolve the site design because I can basically tell any element in a page to be wherever I want it (this was impossible in the old HTML). Learning CSS was also important because the way the forums look is done in CSS and there are currently bugs in the current layout I couldn't figure out before (like in the FT design, the logo repeated length wise and in this one there are odd colored tabs and it is missing an "edit post" button completely).

As far as comments go - I absolutely refuse lol. Neraid suggested it too, but the logistics of running comments on a site is a nightmare. Comment sections get spammed a LOT with bots and trolls and take a lot of effort for the admins to basically police it. Hell, even our forums get hit pretty often and I've had to take measures like banning large ranges of Chinese IP addresses which is not even a solution - its a band-aid right now. That just isn't something I want to spend time on - especially when it could be spent making the comic, site or forums better.

Yeah, the forum topics SUCK right now lol. It needs a lot of TLC and I'll get to it here soon. I thought the pictures were in an FT only section, so I'll move that later when I fix the listings.

[Autolux]

I'd really like to know what you're feelings on the comments made by the other webbiers

[Bear]

Oh, well this is I wrote in response to them which should sum it up:

Thanks for taking the time to post all.

It seems like I may need to re-think how the top of my site is going. I was worried that the preview would get passed over as people interpret it as an ad, and that seems to be a common observation. As for the balance, I thought I did well with the colors sticking to blues, greens and a bit of yellow; I like things vibrant so perhaps if I had less hues? I’ll think about this one a bit more – I do want things to be simple enough but it certainly is hard to strike a balance between being bland and being garish.

Thanks for the advice about Deviant Art! We certainly want to and had planned on doing so but I felt reserved about getting the word out until we got a bit of an archive going and getting a critique here has been high on my to-do list for a long time.

Drezz, thanks for the brutally honest look; I certainly value the time you put into responding. It certainly is another video game comic and I’m sure that a lot of people who follow webcomics are tired of this topic haha. It helps to step back and see it from someone else’s perspective to keep us grounded and mindful of our delivery.

It just so happens we are both very long time gamers and are perusing this topic because it is a strong bond we have and something we are immensely passionate about. It’s hard to enter into this genre and not seem like you are trying to mimic the success that has already been established. It also certainly is a bit intimidating sharing the web with titans like Penny Arcade, but we will just have to make do and hope that readers who enjoy other big name gamer comics can also find something in ours to enjoy as well. I feel like if I were to be very passionate about a super hero comic I would fall into the same boat since there is already so many successful series already published.

Thanks again and if anyone else has comments about the site (or ads) I would love to hear them.

[Bear]

And these are the changes I made based on some of the critiques:

I did tweak the top of the LiA website by moving the logo down slightly. I also took focus off the "Start your weekend in Aggro!" image by removing the white border around it (so as to draw more attention to the preview). I then removed the white text above that image that read "Gift a Lot, Green Sail" which used to be "Eat a Gringo's Fillet" before putting the Child's Play banner and changed the text above the preview image from "Latest Life in Aggro" to "Latest Comic" to be more obvious. Finally I changed the "Home" button on the front page to read "Comic" to be extra sure that people could find it. This comic button will now appear on all archived thoughts posts and link directly to the comic that the entries were posted with. After changing all those and until I decide to change the layout I think that if people can't find the comic from the home page I can't help them - I don't think the navigation could be more simple.

I didn't take all the suggestions but made concessions in the design for now. I kind of miss the text above the comic preview and update image since both "Gift a Lot, Green Sail" and "Eat a Gringo's Fillet" were perfect anagrams of "Latest Life in Aggro". Gift a Lot, Green Sail of course being a reference to the hope that Child's Play would be successful again this year and Eat a Gringo's Fillet (minion) being a a sort of hope that people would partake (eat) of our (gringos) comic (fillet).

Though I'm probably the only one who cared about such things and it probably confused most people, I like the idea of having easter eggs in things so that fans who are attentive can get a little bit more out of sniffing out the small stuff (like how each archived thoughts page has a unique title if people bookmarked them).

[Subaru]