A Comic for New Players

I liked it Really nice job well done.

Only thing now though is that i want to face a pumped up skulls boss too

I liked the first 16 pages. After that I found it devolved into a story about the lowbie missions.

I loved this exchange
FM: What's your weapon
GG: My Body
FM: *staring at GG* Yeah...

Sure, it was self aggrandizing, but it was also very fun and well put together. I loved the metagame humor, the spot-on render of Ms Liberty to her RL model, and (of course) the "knowing is half the battle" punchline

It had a charmingly cheesy Golden Age 'feel' that you just don't see much anymore. And you can never go wrong with "FREEEEM!"

Well done, GG.

I forgot to mention, I particularly liked the climactic battle image of Golden Girl executing a flying left cross to jack the jaw of the Supa Skull.

Heh, Ms. Liberty is such a hypocrite, talking about how lethal damage is bad despite the flame throwers that her Longbow underlings carry around.

Well done, GG!

I approve of this comic.

Wow this is so nice! Great job GG, this is very entertaining!

After reading the rest of it today, my initial impression still stands. Great job.

Furthermore, I think this issue stands up well as a finished work. I've seen some "needs more work" and "could use some tweaking" comments sprinkled throughout the thread, which can be helpful or poisonous for you, depending how you interpret them.

Most readers here are impressed and satisfied. But after reading these comments, if you feel like you could improve on your craft (can't we all), I'd suggest improving future projects or Golden Girl issues, rather than allowing the community to "send you back to work" on something entertaining that you gave us for free (and I'd love to see more adventures). In comics, very few first issues stand up to the quality of issues further down the line in a series. That's the nature of the art form.

Nice work, that for sure took a lot of time to finish.
I saw GG avatar in the I20 sneak peak and its very cool to see her 3D version looking so alike. She reminds me to Power Girl, you know why :P
The comic was fun to read, and makes me remember the old times running in Atlas City.
The game really changed a lot!

This is just a general post on gameplay vs story, and then I'll get down to answering individual posts

As I said in the opening post, I made the comic as an intro to the game world, rather than the gameplay - the two things obviously overlap a lot, but while gameplay must always come before story in the game, in a comic set in the game world, the story has to come first - things that seem logical and sensible in the game can have a strange impact on a story, even though they're all sharing the same game world.

Here are some of the things I didn't include in the comic:

Security levels/levelling up/XP - Not mentioned, but slightly implied by returning to Ms. Liberty after the final fight.

Enhancements - not mentioned, but slightly implied on page 5 by Ms. Liberty referencing upgrading and servicing for Flash-Man's wrist-blasters.
The major problem with enhancements is that they only really work story-wise for some origins, and not others - for example, a tech origin character could buy upgrades for their weapons/armor, and those are represented in the game by a lot of the tech enhancements - but things like natural or magic often have more symbolic enhancements - like "Dragon Strike/Leap/Defense" and so on.
If a tech character 6-slots an attack, that could be shown as them simply upgrading their weapon - like attaching a new scope and barrel to an assault rifle - but it's way harder to show a natural character 6-slotting an attack with martial art techniques.

Inspirations - not mentioned, or even implied. Flash-Man might have popped some yellows and reds for the knock-out shot in the last fight, or uses a wakie earlier on in the rave warehouse, but there was no colored glow around him at any time

Salvage/recipes/phat lewt - not mentioned, or even implied - although as a low level story, the probably weren't any drops anyway

Inf - not mentioned, or even implied.

Wentworths/crafting - not mentioned, or even implied.

Defeated enemies fading away - the devs have left that on purpose as something that's up to the players to interpret, so I went for the classic comicbook style of heroes catching criminals and then handing them over to the police.

Hospitals/mediporter - not mentioned, but slightly implied by me sending Flash-Man to the hospitla to get checked over.
The hospitals/mediporter thing is the single biggest example of the gameplay vs story problems I can think of - on a gameplay level, it's totally sensible and very welcome, and the game probably would have crashed and burned at launch without them.
But on a story level, it badly reduces the element of danger and risk, and undermines the concept of being a hero - if we're teleported to safety and healing anytime we're in trouble, then we're not really putting our lives on the line.
When playing the game, the hospitals/mediporters make us technically invincible - nothing that any enemy can do to us can stop us for more than a few moments - we can be stomped on by giant robots, shot in the face with rocket launchers, and struck by Incarnate lightning, and one click later we're fully healed and racing back to the mission door.
Story-wise, you'd need to keep coming up with various reaons why the mediporters weren't working to bring a proper level of danger to whatever threat was being fought, which would start to bog things down.

And the reason I avoided or only sligtly referenced all thse basic parts of gameplay was because I wanted to make a comic aboue the game world - the best gameplay comic would have been one telling the Outbreak story of the tutorial, because it's set up to be the gameplay intro.
But while it does a good job of showing players how the game functions, it doesn't really show much of the world they'll be functioning in - it's in a mini-zone that we can only ever access via Ouroboros, and we fight enemies we only ever see again in a level 40 PvP zone set in the future.
So as an intro to the game world, it doesn't really offer that much - while Atlas Park is the heart and soul of the game, and the perfect setting for that kind of intro - it's got Ms. Liberty, City Hall, the Atlas statue, the trumpet fanfare, heroes of all levels hanging out or zooming and flying around - it's the first real zone you see in the game, and the first real "wow" moment in the game, where you get an awesome superhero/comicbook vibe.

Just wanted to say how appreciative of the comic, as well as the post you did above me. It is really coming along and giving me a good run down of what to expect in the world of CoH.

Thank you Golden Girl.

GG,

Thanks for this. It's not just a great work of art and obviously a labor of love, it's also a testament to the passion and dedication that so many of you have to this Community and to CoH.

I remain humbled and in awe of you guys!

Thanks!

- Z

Thank you - I get a huge amount of fun form the game, so I like to try and share it around

I'm also trying to make the comic into a more user-friendly pdf, but I can't seem to get it under 100 MB, which most file hosting sites seem to have as the max file size.

EDIT: I'm working on a cover for it too, to make it more complete - I didn't actually think of making one when I started the comic, or think of a title for it either

.pdf would be awesome.

Read it on DA though, and very much enjoyed it. Thought the art was strong throughout, and I kept thinking "wow--look at the attention to detail" in capturing these well-known COH landmarks and environments.

Pretty dang cool. Nice work.

That's great work, GG. A little hard to focus on Golden Girl's words at times, for the distraction of the huge tracts of land, but a very good introduction comic.