I like the Frog Pond, and I like material about teenagers. I don’t think material about teens must be just for teens. I did a whole book for teens and most of the readers were adults.

The Frog Pond has elements that remind me of my own teens, growing up in rural NY. That’s a big appeal.

On my comics, I do the writing and storyboarding, and my wife does the finished art. Consequently I am a huge advocate of storyboarding. It gives you a chance to take a proposed scene and review it for content and positioning, which we do together in pencil before it goes to final production. These additional editing opportunities improve the strip a lot.

Making the characters more distinguished from one another sounds good to me. As someone who has read the strip, I think it would help. There are a zillions things you can stick on a character to distinguish them. Watch out for hats, though. They can create new problems.

I like some color comics that are bright, like Best Band in the Universe, but I prefer washed out colors (see what I mean: lilnyet.com and scratchinpostcomics.com ). If you study real life, intense colors are reserved for safety signals, billboards and ski apparel. If you do color, take advantage of the Photoshop pallet to name and save your colors. We have colors saved down to the detail of how someone’s eyeglasses lens looks if you are looking through it at them, or it you are looking through it past them.

I think The Frog Pond has a lot of potential, and if Delos is willing to put his work out for scrutiny if says a lot about him as an artist. I have only done that once myself, and it helped a lot, thought I didn’t follow every suggestion.

I don’t know if a clean look is necessarily a product of the computer age. Peanuts, Popeye, Uncle Scrooge, and Bone are all relatively clean, with little of the cross-hatching that I mentioned. I mean, they were incredibly detailed drawings, but they didn’t overshade their characters unless they were running around in a bayou or a crypt or something.

However, now that I think of it, Maurice Sendak in his children’s books tended to use a lot of crosshatching. He also used a thinner lines, though, which kinda goes hand in hand with what Christopher is saying.

I stand fast by my point that the comic looks kinda like an alternative weekly, though.

Cleaner is not better. Clean art reflects the computer age and has a tendency to lose soul, if that makes any sense. I’d actually suggest going for grainier grays, if you’re going to use fills. Or washes. Washes would work.

Which I guess isn’t that surprising, since I’m working on a kid friendly comic that uses a hatchy style.

I’m very much at odds with what’s fashionable in comics these days, but I really do prefer a rougher look then the sort of smooth animation looking stuff that seems popular today. I like scribbley stuff like Akiko, Sardine in Outer Space, or even Sock Monkey.

I know those all have very different art styles.

I guess my point is, I’m not convinced that hatching is the problem here, although I do agree that sometimes The Frog Pond looks like a comic for cranky 20-somethings. I believe the reason is two-fold:

1. Too many spot blacks. For a comic strip about whimsical adventures, the Frog Pond is absolutely drowning in darkness. I feel like this is a much bigger problem then the cross-hatching.

2. The character outlines seem a bit too thick and angular to me, especially in the latter comics. In the most recent ones they kind of bring to mind somebody angrily stabbing at the paper with a sharpie, which is not the most relaxing thought.

I’d say either make the outlines thinner, or, alternatively, just go nuts and curve the hell out of them, ie instead of giving characters an elbow, just make their arm one unbroken curve, like a piece of macaroni.

Anyway, that’s how I feel about it, but I’m probably even less of an artist then El Santo. But “clean” is overrated! Overrated, I say!