Eight: Common and/or Reviled Mistakes

This is partly review, but each and every one of the things listed below should never appear in a sprite comic. I know most, if not all, of these already appear in the Crash and Bass Ten Commandments, but it can't hurt to drive the point home a bit more here.

1. Self-Insertion/Author Cliche

What I have illustrated above is the horrible death of the fourth wall as seen in many beginner comics. (The fourth wall is the invisible barrier between the comic and the readers. It keeps the comic characters from realizing that they're in a comic and that there is a world outside that comic. Don't touch it.) I can see why people want to put themselves in their own comics. They want to give others the impression that they're 'cool.' They want to be able to directly boss around their characters. Or maybe they just read Bob and George and want to recreate it.

This is a very bad idea.

Author characters generally result in a general stiffness of character throughout the comic. The usual course of action is to force all the other characters in the comic to hate the author for little to no reason. This lessens the depth of the other characters (since giving them reasons to hate the author would be very revealing). But, in most author-centric comics, the author is the worst character. In writing the comic, the comic author is usually both protective of any character meant to represent himself, and eager to prove how awesome that character is. That means that the author character will get himself caught in one impossible situation after another, and miraculously escape every time, usually creating plotholes and leaving no room for any kind of characterization.

This isn't to say that you absolutely can't put yourself in your own comic. There are a few good comics that have their authors as characters with the same limitations as any other character in the comic. Look at Universal Voyage, the Karnak Hates Everything Show, or JnvReno's Here Is A Question comic. However, this still takes a lot of skill to pull off well. If you're just starting out, avoid self-insertion completely.

2. Manual Resizing

I can't believe I did that to myself. It looks painful, huh? This is what happens when you use MS Paint's rectangular select to select a sprite, then resize it by dragging the corners of the selection instead of using the stretch/skew dialog (right-click anywhere in the selection and pick 'Stretch/Skew...' in the context menu that pops up.).

Only resize sprites by multiples of 100%. For example, to make a sprite twice as large, enter 200 into both stretch values (both horizontal and vertical). For more information, check out the Bob and George Sprite Comic Guide, which covers how to use MS Paint properly.

3. First Comic Exposition

The fourth wall is broken again with the example above. There are two things wrong with this particular comic, but the worse one is how 'Epyon' is telling the readers everything they need to know about his character, and vaguely to boot. What 'things' does he hate, and why? Who's this princess? All this character information would be better off if it were shown during the course of the comic, instead of being force-fed to the reader at the beginning.

The other problem is the '*bricked*' at the end of his speech. It's not something people actually say. While the latter part of the speech does a decent job of showing how perverted 'Epyon' is, it would be far better if it were split into two panels, and if a brick actually hit him in the head in the second panel. Still, a perverted joke can't save this. It's like writing: show, don't tell.

4. Text Problems

First, Times New Roman is not a comic font. Neither is anything similar. When I see Times, I think of a newspaper or an essay. Obviously, a sprite comic is neither of these, so you want to avoid having your readers make that kind of association.

Second, the text should never touch the borders of the box, as seen in the second speech above. Carisa's line is harder to read than Rilana's is, and the only thing I changed between the two was the distance between the text and the borders of the textbox. Leave a pixel or two between your text and your textbox borders. It looks better and makes your comic easier to read.

5. Pretending to Suck

I'm not bothering with an image of my own for this one. Look here for an example of what I mean.

At first glance, that's the perfect example of how to get everything wrong. But if you read closer, you'll see that there are actually clever little clues interspersed in it that show the author is more talented there than he's making himself out to be in these comics. This is joke comic mocking newbies everywhere. It's not meant to be a real comic. So, why shouldn't you do it too?

The joke is dead. You might as well be copying BnG. It's not original, it's not funny, and it's not acceptable.

Besides, you don't want people to think you're an idiot, do you? If you try to pull that trick, that is what will happen.

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