hi web-ed,web-ed wrote: Being rather socially conservative, Willjohn, I can't support a divorce under these circumstances. Therefore, by a process of elimination, it will simply have to be "a bare arsed spanking"!
excellent decision
.i always consider how much room will be taken up by the word balloons, usually when i am posing the pics, although sometimes i am more successful at this than othersweb-ed wrote:I got here rather late in the day I'm afraid, Phil, so everyone else has already covered the main points. As an expert on the comics medium, I will add my two cents' worth on the question of the "loquacious speech balloons," however. In general, it's very easy to overwrite comics, because depending on the size of the panel, there are two hazards to watch out for: (1) Writing so many lines that the art is obscured, or (2) Writing so many lines that the pace of the story, which is controlled largely by how fast the reader moves from panel to panel, is slowed down too much (of course the difference in subject matter between successive panels also controls the pacing) .
. it is never my intention to cover up the players in my toons, or even small portions of them if i can help it, although sometimes i am left with no choice but to cover bits of them if i have misjudged the amount of space required for the dialog. however, your second point about the pace of the story is something that i had completely missed. i had never even considered that 
. perhaps that is because i generally post them one pic at a time but your comment has caused me to pause and consider folks who are reading the whole toon at one sitting. the example that comes most strongly to mind is Sunflower. she is a relatively recent addition to our little family here and i know she went back and read many toons that were posted before she arrived. i'm glad you mentioned this and it is something that i'll be thinking about from now on.these are more interesting observations. one advantage i have over comic strips or books is that my pics are much larger..............which is a good thing for me since i can get away with being more wordyweb-ed wrote:The first of these shouldn't be a problem for the artist/writer, since he presumably will not cover up the best portion of his artwork with a lot of speech balloons! The second is more tricky - I have found that a rather "standard" sized panel in a comic book, say 1/6 to 1/4 of a page, really only has room for two or three rather short lines of dialogue. In fact, probably the greatest limitation of the comics medium is that it cannot sustain extended dialogue the way the stage play and the movie can (the play and the movie being closer to comics than prose or poetry are). Early comic strips really struggled with this, and featured tiny panels crowded with dialogue balloons because you had so little space on a newspaper page. [In the 1980's, Alan Moore showed that you could however sneak in extended monologues by switching to first-person narration and using captions instead of balloons. This has some pitfalls of its own we don't need to get into here.]
. i could correct part of this by moving the camera back and having the action smaller to leave more room for dialog and i do consider that when i am posing the pic. as a general rule, though, i like to be as close to the action as possible to give the viewer the best view, except in some cases where a wider view better depicts the action. also, i have noticed that if i crowd the players too much with word balloons, it sometimes detracts from the way the pic actually depicts the action. i am constantly trying to balance the 2.i don't know if the rules will ultimately be different for this kind of medium than it is for more traditional ones. i would like to find ways to get by with less dialog if possible, but the problem is that i have a certain story that i am trying to tell and the only good way to do that would be to do more pics and spread the words out and i don't really know if that would be better or not. i am open to suggestions if any of you have any. as far as these first 4 pics go, even though they are pretty crowded, i don't see it as a problem since this is all set up and there really isn't any action going on.web-ed wrote:Still, I think your crowded panels are defensible here for two reasons: first, they are largely expository, thus it's o.k. for the forward motion of the story to be slowed down a bit, and second, although this is surely the comics medium it's not exactly a comic book, and therefore perhaps the rules can be stretched a bit. Digital formatting provides both opportunities and limitations that I don't think anyone, even myself, has given enough serious thought to. Maybe the presentation on the computer is different enough to constitute a third branch of comics, along with the strip and the book - or maybe I'm making too much of this and eventually digital comics will come to be seen as no different than the strip or the graphic novel.
there will indeed be fewer words as we get into the spanking although Steve WILL be doing some lecturing as we go alongweb-ed wrote:Anyway, I'm sure the panels will be less crowded as the action begins to pick up and Tina learns the hard way the truths her mother tried to tell her.
. i have a question for everyone. i am currently using a font size of 18 to make sure everyone is able to read the dialog. sometimes i will use a 14 if i want to indicate that someone is speaking softly. do you think it would be a problem for folks to read if i used a 14 all the time? thanks, phil
what a struggle!i am planning to do some tests on this. not only am i gonna look at the pics after reducing the font but i have a friend who is gonna check them out too plus i plan on asking the members of my toon group for opinions about it too. it would be nice to be able to use the smaller font size to de-crowd my pics some but i do want folks to be able to see it. thanks for all the info.............i think 
. we will indeed see how fast a learner she is. however, as much as Steve is inexperienced as a spanker, that's how much Tina is inexperienced as a spankee so it might take her a while.............she'll catch on though 
. it's not fair though............all that testosterone running amuck in your system interferes with higher brain functions and causes the spanker to lose his concentration 
. i hope you enjoy the new pic. phil