Navigation
I don’t like not being able to find the navigation. Two things I want my eyes to focus on when I’m on your site, the comic and the navigation, I want to find those effortlessly. If the navigation is under all the comments, forget it. I’m not reading your comic no matter how good it is.

Content in sidebars
Content in sidebars. If it looks like a cluttered mess of images that advertisements that bounce around I wont care whats in them and consider the site ‘needs work’. This can be fixed by making it so that the images and graphics don’t look like jagged pieces of blocks, organize them so they flow down the sidebars. I like it when people have the content in sidebars within the content, that’s the ONLY place I consider centering is a good thing, otherwise don’t center anything.

Massive Headers
Scrolling down an entire screens width to find the comic, ugh .. hate that. I know you like your header being 600px high with full of the entire cast and some random message … and I’m glad you do, your not making the comic for me to read your doing it for you. .. I’m just saying I think it would be best if you kinda thought of someone besides yourself and made it so that people can get to the comic without having to scroll down too much, 80-120px high headers are pretty much all you need.

Centering in blog & comment areas
Are we back to centering again? Yeah I think we are. I WANT to read your blogposts after reading the daily update, I do, I enjoy it, but hell if I’m going to do it when the content area for your blogposts and comments are centered in anywhere, at all. Forget centering, knock it off, it’s lame, my learning to read is based off the left side of the page to the right. (if English site)

Embedded videos
*ANY Embedded video’s that have to ‘connect’ to someplace.’
i.e. livestream/ustream. I abhor waiting another 30 seconds for it to connect to load the index page. I’m not coming back to your site to deal with that.

Consistent Bad News
Lots of blog posts with bad news. I hate bad news, I come to read comics to escape from my already miserable life, the trouble is I’m empathetic to peoples problems and they drop on my shoulders as well. Don’t change your ways and stop doing this on my account but seriously, if I can help you with whatever going on that is a problem I want to. This is a personal issue of mine where I guess I want to redeem myself for all the bad things I’ve done but still. If you repeatedly do it over and over again on your site without any good news or happiness it sucks and I hate that and don’t want to come back to your site to read because it’s just too much emotional crap for me.

Hiatus
I hate it when people say they’re going on hiatus, hiatus means your not coming back; that has been the way it’s been for every site that says they’re going on hiatus. Use the word “break” instead. You’re going to take a 2 month break, mention something about a filler comic once in awhile, otherwise I’ll never return to your site to read it when it comes back.

Advertisement Extremists
I know you want to earn some money for having a comic on the net, you want to try to make a living for it sure ya do, but seriously, 30 advertisements making .05 cents each on a daily basis? uh .. no. You can earn much more money by having a clean site with the advertisements in better places and a huge reduction in them. If your comic is really worth it, people will pay good money to have an ad *next* to your comic, you don’t need so many.

Color Schemes
What the hell were you thinking with the color scheme? I don’t know about you but if the brightness of the outside area of the comic is brighter then the inside area of the comic I can just scream. It’s annoying to go to a website where the colors and graphics are so bad to look at that I can’t focus on the comic. You really should ask more people their opinions on the site design and do NOT be afraid of asking for help, people LIKE helping, its a human nature to help, it takes less effort to help then it would to be angry and more people would be happy.

Author Congeniality
Never responding to peoples comments, I dislike that. People are taking time to read your comic at least respect them enough to respond back publicly. Joe Author has just gained +1 faction with WebComic Readers.

What exactly makes comic art good?   That’s pretty much in the eyes of the beholder so to speak.  Art is very subjective, it all depends on what the reader likes.

Zorphbert and Fred uses a clean writing / font style, excellent perspectives and non-linear lines.  You know exactly what the frame is, who is in it and what the events are that are taking place.    The underlying principal of looking at comic art is whether or not you can understand the vision in which the artist is trying to portray in their scene to the audience.

Subjective or not there is always going to be some standards and considerations based on the genre of the comic itself.   With Zorphbert and Fred you know the comic is ‘cartoony’ in feel so you’re expecting the quality to have a solid base in that genre to work from.  In that case Dawn really does a great job in making the art work for the reader and story.

What exactly is it about the genre that compels us to read the comic?  In the example of No Need For Bushido;  The reader has no choice but to acknowledge the craftsmanship that Alex Kolesar and Joe Kovell put into their work.   The art itself draws you into the story by working exactly in the genre that it is.

Let’s change the thought for a second.   Art being subjective is a very loose term indeed, saying art is truly subjective means that there is not a ‘base’ in which to actually judge from.   There is, that which is the experience of reading all of the previous incarnations of art that came before it viewed by the reader.

Most of our past experiences of viewing comic art came from watching cartoons on the television and reading the sunday newspaper funnies, then after that, print comics.

It’s pretty safe to say that what we like in comic art is derived by their environment more so then by whether the art is actually good or not by a trained professional who studied.

So where does that leave us when trying to judge good art?   This question is what we really need to be asking.   Do we understand the comic art by someone who has the experience in the field or by the majority?

Consensus is the key.   What the majority feels about the comic art.   A single individual in the comic art community can be jaded by inbred thoughts from predecessors to what could be considered good or not.   What do you think, as an individual believe to be the break-through art that is best overall in its genre?   Would it be the break-through non-defined in a specific genre visuals or the ones that the general populace will acknowledge and be familiar with?

When we base a judgment on the consensus then we can conjecture that it would be what the majority of viewers considers to be good our own personal viewpoints would then be withheld for the majority.  There-in lies the problem which comes back to haunt the entirety of using consensus to judge the quality of the comic art.  Art will still be in your eyes what you personally like, not the consensus.

So what kind of conclusion can we really come to when trying to decide if the art of a comic is good?

Through our individual experiences and backgrounds by our own perceptions and viewpoints to what we by ourselves view to be good.   Your own subjective view.

So where do we draw the exact line on what would be good or not?   These are the guidelines to which I recommend using that can be drawn from the consensus of thinking of what good art is.

Is the art clean enough to be able to understand what the shapes and objects in the scene are?

Does the art denote depth, perspective and lighting to work with the scene either with b&w with shading or color?

Do characters faces denote the emotions and feeling of the scene to match the dialogue?

Are objects and characters proportionate?

Is the art *too busy* with a multitude of extra art that really doesn’t need to be there to carry the scene?

Does the color or black & white blend well and fit together?

Does it look like the artist put an effort in their work, if it looks cut and paste or not.

- Philip M. Hofer (Frumph)

http://danielspottswood.com/news/nix/nix-100324/

Thanks Dan!

I love being included, so if you feel up to it, put me in a cameo someplace =)