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When you realize you found the player-characters.
(comicpress.socksandpuppets.com)
This comic is part of an ongoing story that might make more sense with full context.
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I highly disagree. You can't expect every comic to be top shelf, especially if you're getting it for free. OP has been improving with every post - because they're gaining experience with practice. Hiring a writer (with what money?) would undermine their own growth. You're welcome to read more polished comics (like The Weekly Roll), but remember that people dont magically spring up with skill in art and writing right out of the gate. Not to mention that once someone starts making "professional level" work it's either paywalled or lower priority than paying work.
Constructive criticism also isn't "just stop doing that". You need to give actionable advice. For example, I always recommend new comic creators pick up the Understanding Comics/Making Comics/Reinventing Comics trilogy by Scott McCloud. They're textbooks that cover all sorts of writing and illustration techniques.
I like this story, and it's certainly better than something I could write or draw. The frequency of updates has been amazing. I'm excited to see where things go.
I own all three of these books, as well as about 20 other books about the comics medium. I've studied them!
Personally, I'd recommend skipping Reinventing Comics, unless you really want to own the entire trilogy... most of the content of it is reductive, or covered better in the other two, and much of it is talking about webcomics as a new phenomenon, and speculating about what the medium might accomplish with digital technology (most of this didn't come to pass, because the amount of effort involved in merging the comic format with programming is prohibitive - with some extremely notable exceptions to this.)
I'm a big fan of Scott McCloud's work in exploring the medium, so here's a little bonus for mentioning him. Other than his observations of the medium, explained to the casual reader in a phenomenally digestable fashion, the two things I know him best for are:
"24 hours comic day" - a challenge where comic creators try to create a 24 page comic book in a single day (or in the case of digital comics, 100 panels)
His advocacy for use of "the infinite canvas" in sequential art. The infinite canvas is something we're much more used to in the modern day with social media - but the idea is that you "read" the comic simply by scrolling down, and there's no page breaks, you just keep going. Basically it's doomscrolling for comics, but before "doomscrolling" was a thing.
So, I've done 24HCD a few times, and one time I even made a good one!
Here's a comic that I drew in 24 hours, using the infinite canvas.
Enjoy.