Hooray! The comic's live!

[azurelunatic]

crossovercomic (coincidentally at http://www.crossovercomic.com) is live.

I am the Literary Consultant. My role in this is small, but I'm still immensely thrilled about the whole thing. Called Shawn and we talked about the comic quite a bit.

The comic is bandwidth-intensive: it takes a significant amount of time to load for me, and I have broadband. The title graphic takes 5 minutes to load for dial-up, Shawn says. (He had other commentary about dial-up, but I think I don't need to kick his ass in public.)

I am immensely amused that with <lj user="crossover"> taken, and presumably with crossover.com taken, both Shawn and I opted for "crossovercomic" -- without discussing it with each other. We do things like that. It would be more eerie if I weren't already used to it from high school.

As Literary Consultant, Shawn contacts me with his brilliant ideas, I go over them and help him fill them out and sharpen them up, we bounce ideas off each other, he does strange and mysterious things without contacting me for months on end, then he posts the finished comics.

I go over them with red pen and e-mail him corrections he needs to make that the spell-checker didn't catch, like swapping "they're" and "their" (to pick a perfectly random *coughprologuecough* example).

Comments

[wibbble]

Oww, my eyes. And my design sense. And whatever that bit of me that likes good UI is called is hurting too.

I think you might need to kick is arse in public, or at least make him look at other comics that are already successful and examine how their sites work. He's going to be driving away readers at the moment, which isn't a good way to start a new venture.

I could nit-pick about the tidally-locked planet, but I don't know how important the science is in this comic.

[azurelunatic]

This is probably the best way to get in touch with him currently. *smirk*

I'm not dreeeeeadfully sure about how important the science is; I know it's taking a bit of a beating, especially via magic.

Maybe he should ask the web designer to alternate seasons on pages rather than in one image, and have just one place where the image is animated.

[wibbble]

With a planet tidally locked to its sun, you'll have one side that's so hot you can't live on it (unless it's pretty far from the sun), and one side that's so cold you can't live on it (unless it's pretty close to the sun). You'll also have complete bastarding storms all around the terminator as the hot and cold air collide. No Earth-standard vegetation could survive on a planet like that, of course.

I would suggest that the menu graphic should only change in response to user actions - ie, selecting something. Changing the menu at all otherwise is just going to be annoying. Consistency is the key to good UI design ('don't kill the old lady', I believe is what you were taught?), even in 'arty' projects. http://www.poisonedminds.com/ normally has a brilliant menu system, done in Flash (at the moment it's a Christmas advent calendar instead), that looks good and works well. Most other web comics have very simple menus - the emphasis shouldn't be on your pretty navigation tools, it should be on your /comic/.

I feel qualified to give my opinion since I read just over two dozen webcomics every single day, and I've even bought stuff from a few of them (a tshirt and some original artwork - IIRC, I've made a few small donations, too). They're a mix of sci-fi and fantasy comics, mostly, so I suspect that I'm pretty much his target audience. At the moment I would not go back to see if it improves - ugly GIFs, badly configured software ('iStrip minimalist template' on the comic page title?), and the spelling errors on the prologue are enough to put me off putting it in my comics folder, and if it's not in there I'll hardly ever remember to check it (like I do with Sexy Losers).