Legend of the Toadrider: The Farmer's Wife: Part 2

[Andrzej]

Hello there, here is the script for the second part of the comic book project I am working on:

http://astepien.com/blog/download/Toadrider_2.pdf

Part one is here:

http://astepien.com/blog/download/Toadrider_1.pdf

It is an 18 page one shot, that I hope to expand into an ongoing series (baby steps!). Once again, I would really appreciate any feedback people can give me!

This is my first serious project as a comic book writer, and is turning out to be a real learning process, and very rewarding too. I found an artist through these forums, and the pages I have received so far are absolutely beautiful! One interesting thing is that, looking at the finished pages, I realise that the a lot of the panels tell the story well enough by themselves, so I may end up cutting quite a bit of the dialogue and captions... Goes to show that seeing the finished product really helps a writer to develop. What do you think?

[Shaun]

I tried reading part 2 and quickly realized I had no idea what was going on and needed to read part 1 first. Which might be a problem, you should try to start the second part with a little more of an intro on what's going on and who the characters are. That said part 1 (and I only got about five pages into it) reads more like a screenplay than a comic script. I know you already have pages done so there's nothing to be done about descriptions, which I felt were a little thin. I couldn't really tell if it was supposed to be taking place in the future or the old west and these were just some kind of superhumans. But the dialogue is way too heavy. If you haven't gotten into lettering yet you will soon see there is a finite amount of words you can fit onto the page. Also some of the dialogue just felt extraneous. As you already said you plan on cutting back, maybe you saw that. I didn't get far enough into the story to really critique plot but I was just a little too confused about what was going on to continue. However I was a little distracted at the time, so maybe I wasn't paying enough attention.

Good luck with the project. If the artist is okay with it you should post some of the pages somewhere. It's always fun to compare script to finished pencils.

[Andrzej]

Thanks for the feedback! I'll ask the artist about uploading some pencils...