WaterFront chapter 1, page 18
Riley, Ella – Ella, Riley.
Eighteen pages in, and our day one protagonist is finally named! Meet Riley and Ella – we regret that it took us this long. Well, sort of; in all fairness we planned this way in advance. So… hey! Looks like we’re headed back inside, where it’s absolutely safe and nothing bad could possibly happen; I’m sure Donnie could not possibly escape to go on a horrifying rampage, those ropes look secure to me.
All of these pages still take place within the same timeframe – meaning that, in the past few real-time weeks, we’ve only been privy to the events of a single afternoon in the world of the Waterfront! It’s all part of the movie-magic, or to be more precise, webcomic-magic.
On a serious note: we’d very much like to know what you think about the pacing of both the updates and the comic itself. By all means, please let us know in the comment-section! Check back soon, we’ll perform an update for a live audience next friday at the Blokhuispoort in Leeuwarden. Feel free to drop by!
–Richard
Very well done! I really like the setting, the drawings are nice with just enough detail to keep it interesting for more then just the story 😀
As for the pacing.
It feels slow, though when I read back, there is only a few things that could increase the pacing and I am not sure they are worth it.
The page with the head of Lottie floating saying “wake up!” felt anti-climactic. The week before the murder was already revealed.
The page of Donnie sitting there, it tells me Donnie is an important person for the rest of the story, But that page alone did little to speed up the story itself.
The questions I have:
Why is the murder on some (probably talented) tittie-bar dancer such a grave matter on this ship? — Who was Lottie?
Who is Donnie and why is he being accused?
How is this ship being run? How would a crime normally be solved? There does seem to be some sort of police?
I think some more narrative about what life on the boat is like from Riley would help to portray the setting a bit more.
Hey Sahib, that’s some great feedback actually. Thanks a lot! I’ll leave this to Richard for a more in depth answer since he’s the guy of words, but we went out for a couple of drinks and I wouldn’t be surprised if he fell asleep already (I’ll give him some slack; he got in early)…
Anyway, what I’d like to say is that we’re both new to storytelling in this format. Feedback like yours is very helpful for us to improve on our style of telling the story that we want to tell and we hope you’ll stick around to see us grow in this. Your questions will certainly be answered if you do 😉
– Rudy
Thank you for your feedback!
For future updates we’d like to try to see if we can dip into our (modest) buffer to add splash-pages alongside regular updates. In doing so, we hope to keep the a regular flow!
As for your questions, in short so as to avoid spoilers – the boat is its own community, which might help to explain why Lottie’s death hit very hard, and it might also give you an insight as to how things are normally handled. The gendarmes are not necessarily a welcome sight.
Donnie, at the moment of writing this, was unable or unwilling to comment. Our apologies.