An attempt at a Brigh with more realistic burn scars as I'm not a huge fan of the "Bright red burn scars" trope... Cross referenced with real images of people with severe scarring, though I don't often draw burn scars so it's not the best.
Brigh's body is described as being "badly burned", enough for him to need prosthetics - likely due to his burn injuries. However the scarring and burns didn't seem to affect how Brigh moves about or things like his facial features, I wanted to show how his injuries would affect him more.
Here, Brigh has gotten the enucleation of his left eye, due to the damage, meaning his left socket's completely empty. He also has less hearing capabilities due to his left ear experiencing some severe contraction. He also has issues moving around easily due to the burning of his joints, with his arm experiencing contraction around his armpit and leg experiencing contraction around his inner thighs.
Also, a cartoony version to show it'd work within the style also!
yall mfs are trying to taint our name so bad by spamming leaks with retarded ass pedophilic names
just shows how much we've gotten into ur head LOL
keep crying, malding, and seething
Whooh boy. Hi everyone! Sorry, It's been a while. But I have quite the post for you all today, because we'll be talking about a webcomic I just finished! ... I will warn you all though, that I do not have the kindest of words to say about it.
You may be aware of this comic, as it has a considerable following, especially here on tumblr, the comic is called Sparklecare. It currently has 4 volumes and is on a short hiatus so the website can finish it's redesign, but the plot summary of the comic from the last available snapshot of the website is as follows:
The comic follows the story of a cat named Barry Ill and his experience of being admitted to the Sparklecare hospital. Despite its glamorous reputation, the hospital is actually a prison that tortures and kills its patients and drains their families of insurance by the corrupt hospital's owner, Dr. Cuddles. Cuddles is a greedy Capitalist scumbag who cares about nothing but money, and so far, everything is working out for him. Any patients who escape or try to speak out against the hospital aren't believed and are written off as crazy. The story follows Barry's journey into uncovering the truth about why this place really is the way it is, and why nobody's talking about it.
From the outside, the comic is very striking and intriguing! From it's prominent art style and art direction, to the concept itself, it sounds like a fun time! ...Right? Well that's where the comic gets you; see just like the in-universe hospital, Sparklecare isn't as inviting and pleasant once you really sink your teeth in. And I'm here to talk about why I think that is.
Before we begin, I'd like to clarify since I've become aware of the community's um... Questionable attitude towards critique, that if you enjoy Sparklecare, that's totally fine! I'm not gonna tell you what you can and can't read, I'm here to express my own thoughts on it.
Now, I won't torture you with this post if it ends up on your dash, so the full post will be under the cut! Please check the reblogs, I may add more there if I run out of space.
Also, CW for bright colours, blood and a whole heaping o' medical mispractice.
Before I get into some of the more serious issues with the comic, I wanna first start off with the thing you're going to first see trying to read it: The art. Here I would say the website, but since it's getting a redesign, I don't feel confident speaking on it. I'll leave one note on it though: it needs serious optimization...
Onto the art: I will say, I found the art quite charming, especially the art in the first 2 volumes. I think the comic has a way with setting mood and tone using it's palette, specifically in the dramatic "blue/red" scenes - I think those look gorgeous!
The style in volume 1 & 2 is also very pleasing to the eye, although it can look off at points. I think the style succeeds extremely well with it's tendency to give characters large, exaggerated expressions - it's very cartoony and I love it. The lineweight is also used very well in my opinion!
However... There's a few big elephants in the room that they are The designs, lettering & panel work.
I'll begin with how the series handles it's lettering, as it's one of the most important parts of a comic. Although it's unique, that does not mean it's good.
In volume 1, it starts off fine enough, it's a simple speech bubble with white/black text.
It sort of flip-flops between having a shadow/glow and not having one, which although confusing and hurts my eyes sometimes, not a deal breaker! The bubbles are all colour coded also so no matter the scene, you understand who is talking. That is very good! I like that! I wish the colours weren't as bright as the backgrounds, but I understand why they are.
Volume 2 introduces what I consider my favorite of the lettering styles, big bold outlines with bubbles that better surround the text!
It's easily the most recognizable lettering style of all the volumes, and it's very readable. It's simple, but lettering is at it's best when it's simple and understandable.
This volume's lettering also introduces colour coded words & different fonts.
Which, I think looks lovely! It adds personality, and since fonts carry different tones with them, it helps with emphasis and how people read the dialogue. However, this isn't to say I think this lettering is perfect.. I'm not a huge fan of the random dots & spots, I think they clutter up the page when there too many characters on screen speaking, which distracted me from focusing on the actual words they were saying.
It also changes mid-way through volume 2! Suddenly, we get character-coded dots & spots... Which, cool in theory, but in practice, as I mentioned, it clutters the page if there's too many characters speaking at once.
Plus, they're used on background characters who do not appear again after their introduction, which is such a waste... If you're going to introduce these character-specific details, they should be used on characters who are important, not character we'll never see again.
When we get to volume 3 & 4, the lettering style almost completely solidifies, the same big bold outlining from volume 2... But now instead of just having personalized dots, we get fully personalized speech bubbles. Which, again, cool in theory! But in practice it's just... So hard to read.
On lettering, I will applaud the use of a custom hand-written font. It looks great! It's fairly clear and adds a nice touch to the comic's overall appearance... But how they use the font is, in my opinion, awful. Characters talk way too much for how much page space there is, which means that there isn't enough space for the bubble to encompass the text, which means text needs to get smaller.
These pages are over 2000 pixels wide and tall, but there's no consideration for how the images & text will look when shrunk down to fit into a normal browser page, which means the text gets tiny and barely readable if there's too much of it - which there often is. I'll get into how I feel about the writing in a moment.
On the panel work, it's fine, it's not super jaw-dropping but it's serviceable. Where the panel work starts to fail though, is it's pacing. See, in comics, pacing is extremely important, good pacing means a better and clearer reading experience, bad pacing can leave the reader confused and force them to reread repeatedly to understand what's going on.
Sparklecare suffers from this heavily, I feel. Take a look to this page below, while not the worst example of it, I think demonstrates a bit what I mean.
There's a lot of text, similar looking shots, and... Very little background to help, well, ground where we are, which made me feel dizzy while reading. There's not a lot of proper flow, because speech bubbles float all over the place, often times out of order in which you are supposed to read them. You tend to dart your eyes all over the page to "properly" read it, which makes for a bad reading experience - the clearer the order is, the better the flow.
On backgrounds, I do not like the near-complete lack of them. Sparklecare gets around backgrounds by filling the colour voids of the panels with dots, specks, lines and patterns - but they don't do the job! It makes the pages feel more cluttered and difficult to look at and read.
Even when they do have backgrounds, they're also filled to the brim with patterning to take your mind off how often strange they look.
Being unable to see what's going on is a reoccurring issue with the comic, and it doesn't just end at the panel work or backgrounds...
The character designs in Sparklecare also contribute to the visual clutter, what with many of them having many small details or otherwise being unpleasant to look at due to their colour palette.
Here's a few examples of characters I think have too much going on or are just eyesores. And see, I get it, they're supposed to be sparkleanimals - designed like a kid on DeviantArt was making them in 2011, but you can get that look without making the designs hurt to look at. Sparklecare both tries to work within a limited palette and tries to have every colour possible on a character and it pulls neither off well. Not to mention, the multitude of small dots & details, adding more to the pile of small dots in the comic.
When a ton of characters are on screen, it tends to make things more confusing to look at - due in part also to the comic's continuity issue. Things or characters that are in one panel or page, will disappear the next, or swap places. Overall, small art issues pile up onto a mess of bright colours and rainbow.
Now here's where we get to the fun point, The writing. Oh boy! For the most part, or at least in volumes 1 & 2, the writing is completely fine. Complicated, a bit odd, but nothing to scream about... Until volumes 3 & 4, because that's when the issues in the writing really starts to show it's rainbow-speckled face.
I'll be direct, I don't like the writing in Sparklecare. The characters are typically unlikable or annoying, and when they do have something interesting going for them, it gets walked back on for plot reasons. Characters also seem to be unable to do wrong, unless they're deliberately out to be the bad one. Characters will do something bad, but get reassured that everything is fine and it isn't their fault even though they did something bad - which is weird the first time, but awful the next 40.
The writing does have it's good points (I liked most of the writing in volume 2, I thought Hemera's struggles with wanting to keep her friends safe was really interesting and I liked the chunklings), but there's prominent issues I can't shove aside.
I namely have issues with the humor, specifically it's uh... Sexual humor. Now, don't get me wrong, I love a good penis joke every now and then, but volume 4 has about 5x the sex jokes of any volume. It was genuinely horrible to sit through because I knew every serious moment would get a joke about stroking it a page or two afterwards.
(One note on that first image there, it happens right after Barry [the green guy] completely belittles and insults Uni [the purple one]...)
The meta humor also felt very, very forced.
It always came out of nowhere, and completely out of place every time it was used. I like meta humor also, but this is supposed to be a more serious comic, yes? I mean, it should be considering the topics at hand, so suddenly throwing in references to this being a comic feels weird to read.
I will say, I do like some of the jokes, specifically these ones:
Let me circle back to the character writing really quick, because there was characters I enjoyed! ... Just not the main ones.
I think, out of everyone, my favorite characters were:
Several background characters with no lines
Dr. Party
Cyn
Jean
Rem
I also really enjoyed how Cuddles was written in volume 1 & 2, he felt very threatening to me.
Outside of these characters though, I found little interest in the main cast and even found myself rooting for the downfall of a few of them due to their poor writing.
Specifically on Barry, there's a small arc in volume 2 where he realizes he needs to stop violently denying that Uni has magic (Which is a stupid plot in my opinion, by the way, considering the worldbuilding has a lot of magic in it. You'd think the smart guy character would know that?) after Uni's magic helps them in the dump. However, right afterwards, in volume 3 & 4, Barry goes right back to verbally assaulting Uni about how magic isn't real! It's not enjoyable to read, and makes no sense to me after what happened in volume 2.
One note, since I don't know where to put this but, I don't like doom. I really don't ... I think I'm supposed to feel bad for him? But I can't! I saw him in volume 1 take glee in having power over the patients, and as the site states:
Doom is not a normal nurse, because he takes on the role of a doctor by harming people alongside regular nurse duties.
He literally tortures people! I'm sorry, I cannot forgive that! No matter how bad he feels about it.
Some more notes on writing before I end this because it's getting too long.. The disability rep in Sparklecare is, questionable sometimes. For the most part I think it's perfectly fine, buuut there are moments I don't think of fondly.. Specifically this moment in volume 2:
Barry starts having a paranoid and panicky moment due to his contamination OCD (Because they're in a literal trash heap) and Uni decides to...
Call it cute??? Genuinely what the hell, who thought this was a good thing to put in here? I haven't read the spin-off AU comic, but I hear it treats it's character with OCD even weirder. Yuck!
On a related note, I hate the cutesy names for disorders. They don't even come up often in-universe, there's little purpose in having them, especially if most of them are just real life, actual disorders. I know it's about an abusive hospital but come on man! You don't have to use baby names for everything! You don't even follow the weird naming pattern for everything! Things like autism don't get a weird cutesy name, but OCD and depression get one? Have some consistency if you're gonna make a weird universe decision.
Alrighty.. This should be the end of it, I'm not sure how to end it because there's still more I want to talk about! I'm super-duper open to talking about anything I've said here or elaborating on why I feel certain ways. This is in no way meant to be a hit-piece of the creator of Sparklecare, I think there's a lot of protentional, and I simply adore some aspects of the comic (Specifically visually). I really do hope this comic will improve over time and that it sees a long life of success.
If you come to this post to disagree, I ask you read through what I say carefully and come at me respectfully, I have no interest in fighting with people over a webcomic about furries.
(Falls over and all this spills out my pockets) Oh dear! It appears all my rewrite au ideas have spilt conveniently into this tumblr post!
It's been a little while, but here's some stuff for a SCH rewrite I have come up with. I have some others, but I will put those in a separate post sometime.
INTRODUCING:
SPARKLECARE HOSPITAL: It gets better
Intended to be a way to explore some criticisms I've had of the comic and ideas to make it better. Because, people can talk all they want, but very few can actually do something with what they say. And I'd like to show that I know what I'm talking about!
This rewrite would place the comic into a much more serious and bleak setting... Barry Ill has just arrived at the hospital, and either has to comes to terms that he's stuck there, or die trying to escape. There is many structural changes in terms of plot, an example being Mood & Doom are now secondary antagonists to Cuddles; who controls the hospital and will do anything in his power to stop the truth about it from getting out.
