Detective Tarson

[McClureComics]

My scale:
0: Worst score
2.5: Average Score
5: Best Score


“Detective Tarson” Review
http://www.detectivetarson.com/

First Impressions:
Comic Summary:

“It's the year 20XX. Why XX? They lost count.

The world's in danger. There are evil organizations trying to take over. They want to outlaw pudding and stuff, it kinda sucks.

Meet Detective Tarson.
Detective Tarson likes pudding.”

I am very picky when it comes to humor, but I found the short summary clever. It tells the reader that this is going to be a silly, “random humor” comic.

Banner: It’s not very attractive. It seems old; the artist seems to have improved a lot after making this banner.

First pages: These are probably what a reader will first see when they check out your comic, so they are very important. The first page starts the story off with a bang (literally). It’s a good hook.

This comic gives new readers a decent first impression.
2.75/5

Writing:
The plot is fairly simple: Detective Tarson is tracking the mysterious villan P-Guy. P-Guy is part of the League of Antagonists, who all have it in for Detective Tarson and his penguin buddy. The story is very straight forward; there were few times where the plot confused me. However, it’s been over 40 pages and the story still isn’t very interesting. This can be forgiven because this is a humor comic, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a more exciting plot.

The writing ranges from childish to fairly clever. It’s hard to judge humor, because it everyone has different tastes. However many of the gags and antics seemed unexciting (An example of this would be how the comic broke the 4th wall multiple times). None of the jokes were groaners; they were just bland.

This doesn’t apply to all of the humor in the comic, however. Many jokes fell flat, but some of them actually made me laugh out loud, which is really hard to do. Despite my complaints about the humor, I can honestly say that this is one of the most clever comics on Smackjeeves. It can be a bit dull at times, but Detective Tarson nails quite a few jokes. The comic's at its best when it's unpredictable. Here are my favorite pages:

http://www.detectivetarson.com/comics/732729/01-02/
http://www.detectivetarson.com/comics/741088/01-07/
http://www.detectivetarson.com/comics/760954/01-15/
http://www.detectivetarson.com/comics/784734/01-19/

Detective Tarson is fast-paced comic with a substantial amount of wit.
2.75/5


Art
The art is style for Detective Tarson is very simple. It’s supposed to be a cartoon, but a couple mistakes end up making the artwork look amateurish instead of just minimalistic.
For most of the comic, it doesn’t look like the artist made any attempt at drawing backgrounds in perspective. Example:
http://www.detectivetarson.com/comics/799737/02-02/

However, recent pages try to correct this. The perspective still isn’t perfect, but it’s much better than it used to be.
http://www.detectivetarson.com/comics/992272/03-01/

Proportions and body poses are poor at the beginning of the comic, but you can see improvement as the comic goes on.
Despite these flaws, the art doesn’t hurt the comic much. Character expressions are simple but effective. There are no confusing layouts or panels that you can’t tell what’s been drawn. Even though the line work is shaky, most pages are relatively clean. All the pages are colored (sometimes shaded) and make the comic easy on the eyes.

Though it’s not a work of art, Dective Tarson gets extra points for being colorful and easy to read.
2.5 /5

(For the record, the start of the new chapter is a much higher quality than the rest of the comic.
http://www.detectivetarson.com/comics/992272/03-01/
The shading is great and the line work is more controlled. If the future pages look like this one, this score would go up to a 2.75, maybe a 3.)

Consensus: Dectective Tarson is a fast-paced, reasonably funny comic . The artwork is simple, colorful and ever-improving.
2.75/5

[SushiGummy]

Hey, thanks for the review!

First Impressions
As you were able to see, the top banner is pretty old. I think I actually made it before the comic. The new banner is in the process though, and I can guarantee it's going to be a masterpiece. Czar Squid and I are also working to improve the website layout. If you don't mind, could you let me know what you thought about the regular banner? Not the top banner, the SJ banner.

Writing
An actual problem I made while writing the story was not making it clear enough that P-Guy isn't part of the League of Antagonists, but that he actually infiltrated them disguised as Paul, and was deceiving the two other 'antagonists' in the prologue. I plan to make this fact more obvious in the next few chapters to avoid confusion.
My major issue for not wanting to progress the story very quickly is that I'm afraid I'll end up rushing it. While it's very true that the story hasn't progressed much in a year, I like to think more about how long it will actually take for a person to read up to certain points in the comic, and I plan the layout that way. My love for long video games and comic books might have had something to do with it, admittedly.
As for those four pages, I'm glad you like them. Honestly, I don't think those pages got enough attention when compared to many other pages (except for the orderve one, everybody loves the orderve), and I think it's great that you enjoyed them. I've been trying to throw many types of humor into Detective Tarson, and I've found that different people like completely different jokes. Some people like subtle jokes, some people like jokes with the right timing, some people like the completely random jokes, some people like destructive jokes, etc. The last three pages in particular (not including the chapter 3 cover) have actually received a ton of positive feedback.
I know the story can frequently be confusing, and I've been trying to make it a bit easier to understand the main gist of the storyline. Of course, in the end, I'm aiming to make Detective Tarson a comic where you'll notice new things the second time you read it, including story points, jokes, and foreshadowing. Unfortunately, the comic isn't far enough into the story for most of these secrets to exist yet. Unless I were to reveal my plans to somebody, which I won't, there's really no way to know whether I'll be successful or not with my little secrets until the comic's far enough.
If I may ask, which parts of the comic have confused you so far? Some of the confusion you experienced might have been the result of questions which will be answered in the future, but I could very well be wrong.

Art
Let me tell you, I've been drawing for 12 years, and I'm still horrible at it. I blame my lack of being able to hold a pencil right and inability to draw shapes or straight lines the way I want to. Fortunately, I've improved significantly in the past year (Detective Tarson turned a year old two days ago). My art is something I'm constantly trying to improve, and I'm learning new tactics all the time, so hopefully I'll be able to draw my comics swiftly and beautifully one day.
Czar Squid helps with the special effects and shading, and recently decided to shade the comic from now on, so unless he decides to stop at any point, Detective Tarson will continue to look as nice and will constantly improve for the rest of eternity.

One more thing, could I have your opinion on the characters in the comic? My characters are very important to me and I'd like to know what you think.
(An extra little note, there is a reason the League of Antagonists officers only wear solid-colored shirts and pants, but it won't be explained for a few pages, so you can exclude them if you'd like.)

[Mangaka_Yuki]

I'd say it desereved a 3.3/5 at least

[McClureComics]

+I agree that there are a lot of different kinds of comedy that people enjoy. Everyone has different tastes in humor. The only way I can review this comic is to say what jokes worked for me and what didn’t. If you’re getting positive feedback for certain pages, keep doing that but try to improve on it. Personally though, pages like this http://www.detectivetarson.com/comics/926272/02-11/ didn’t work for me.

+The smack jeeves banner is a big improvement. It’s colorful and has some nice shading. I didn’t find it funny, but I don’t like EXTREMELY random humor that much, so take that with a grain of salt.

+The comic wasn’t very confusing at all. I think there might have been 1 or 2 pages that have the villains talking about people we haven’t met yet.
(Example: http://www.detectivetarson.com/comics/803158/02-04/ ) It isn't much of a problem though. Just keep in mind that even though you're referring to something that's going to happen in the future, none of your readers will remember a vague reference like that.

+I didn’t cover the characters because most of them haven’t had a chance to develop. We got a nice little back-story for Mr. Squidson and Peg, but everyone else (except Tarson of course) hasn’t been featured a lot.
You don’t really need a lot of information on characters for them to be effective in a comedy, though. Detective Tarson and Peg have good chemistry. Tarson destroys everything around him on his travels, and Peg acts as the very angry straight man who’s trying to keep things in control. I really like these 2 characters, as well as Mr. Squidson. The other characters have had so little dialog that I don’t enjoy them yet (though my bet is that MP is going to be very funny in the future comics).

+I could tell that the plot and art were about to pick up, but again, the score I gave is just of the comic pages done so far. I have no doubt that it’ll keep getting better and better!

Good luck with your comic, you’ve made me a reader.

[SushiGummy]

Thanks.

The whole villains discussing such-n-such is kinda what I was talking about with the 'read it a second time' bit. Did you notice that they mentioned Clockston Flinn in the conversation? Whatever the case, I'm going to try to be more subtle about these foreshadowings and such, and I plan to have crazy secrets hidden around the comic.

I'm glad you like Squidson, Peg, and Tarson. One thing I was kinda intending when I made the second chapter was to introduce a bunch of new characters, and build them up as time goes by. As of now, Eternal Watt is the only character we won't see again.

Thanks for reading and reviewing. I'll definitely work to improve the comic.

[McClureComics]

It's no problem, I had fun reading it. It was very entertaining

Wait, you mean Eternal Watt showed up and then just died?! But he made such a dramatic entrance

And yeah, I noticed Clockston Flinn when I reread it to find a link! I like subtle references like that, but it's kind of hard to pull off in webcomics.

[SushiGummy]

I like subtle references like that, but it's kind of hard to pull off in webcomics.

Yeah, it can be, most of the reason being that the story points you refer to in the future won't exist for a while.