Out Of Time - FREE Comic
Story: Lorenz Lammens
Art: Andrea Errico
Colors: Ylenia Di Napoli
Letters: Lorenz Lammens
Editor: Martin Silva
Chief Editor: Lorenz Lammens
Publisher: Octane Comics
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Out Of Time - FREE Comic
Reviewed by Unknown
on
5:16 PM
Rating:
Reviewed by Unknown
on
5:16 PM
Rating:
The art style itself is nice but the designs for everything are pretty derivative. The humans all look like they're from Star Trek and the aliens look exactly like the Chitauri from the Avengers.
ReplyDeleteThe overall plot was good. I like the way you handled the twist ending, but there are a few issues I have with the dialogue. You do that thing that comics do that bug me a whole lot where you force a really big social issue (here it's the safety of children) to justify a character's viewpoint. You could've easily just said "Hey, go back to the past so that you don't mess up the future" and not shoe-horn the whole children thing in there.
Then there's the woman's death, which bugged me a lot too. It seems like the aliens just kill her so that we can know how evil they are. For one thing, that seems pretty lazy and disrespectful to the audience. We can tell they're evil by the fact that they're fooling the time traveller and by the fact that they've destroyed everything and are blackmailing the humans. Secondly, women dying senselessly is already an issue in comics that needs to be corrected and there's no reason for your work to add to it.
Thanks, these are great insights. I am writing these comics just for this kind of feedback - I am new to the industry, and I hope to learn from you all how to get the details right when telling a story.
DeleteThe children were added to the dialogue as a plant/payoff device - to give the dialogue different meaning upon a second reading of the script, not so much as to justify Benoid's viewpoint. But I can see that that did not come across in the script. In fact, it was my intention to have Martia (the female) vocalise a different viewpoint: that the utter defeat of mankind should be why they tell the time traveller what has happened, sacrifice their timeline and lives in order to have give mankind a better chance. While Benoid in his submissiveness to the aliens thinks he is saving the children, the words of Martia haunt him in the last panel when he wonders if he perhaps doomed all of mankind.
I felt Martia had to die because she was a liability to the aliens - she was coming around to the viewpoint that she should sacrifice her timeline and inform time travellers that the future looks bleak unless mankind changes its ways. I do however see your point that that meant that I was killing the female in the story, from a cultural standpoint, we do this too often. I did not manage to communicate that I made the female the heroin of the story by making her the voice of reason. Rather than blindly obeying her new overlords as Benoid did, she wanted to question and was psychologically moving to a position where she would decide to revolt back. I thought the gender roles would play into a modern construct where men often to slavishly work through the existing hierarchy and women often intuitively feel that there is something wrong with this hierarchy, but don't always dare to challenge the man enough.
Anyway, there seems to be a gap between what I originally set out to do and how the story came across to you. All art is ultimately communication, and I take valuable lessons from your comments as to how to better communicate my setup and avoid the traps of cultural constructs. I'll focus on analyzing what cultural constructs my narratives bump into and then try to twist expectations in direct conflict with these constructs, rather than inadvertently seeming to play into them.
THANK YOU. Your insights helped a lot.
I liked it. The art is good. I feel like you used the word children too much though. Just a question. Why wouldn't the Timenaut ask them that if them time travelling didn't already destroy the timelines the first time, why would it happen if he did it this time? And also, what reason do they have to believe that them going into the future is n't the thing that saves them?
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your effort and dedication to your comic! Yeah, time travel can be tricky, but the answers I asked shouldn't be provided in the first chapter and would get answered along the way. I feel like you answered my questions. Thank you for asking your fellow comic book readers.
ReplyDelete