>>3503599
After reading the Alice Otter strips posted thus far, here is my take on the comic...
The artwork is well constructed, the backgrounds and things like cars are drawn well and little details are sprinkled here and there that I can appreciate. The characters and settings complement each other very nicely. The character designs are simple, cute, and well put together. If I had to give the artwork one small negative, its that I think the size of the eyes on characters like Alice could have been made a little smaller. They are a glaring feature and they stand out, and I think in this case "less is more"...the designs would have worked better reducing the eye size.
The weakest things about Alice Otter are the dialogue, writing, and overall basis of the story. I know that Miguel wasn't a native English speaker, so some forgiveness is granted with regards to the speech of characters. But I find the strip to be very mediocre plot wise. For a guy who was in his early 30s at the time the comic started, native English speaker or not, I would have expected something a little bit stronger than a story about a little girl wanting to go to Hawaii. And the entire thing starts because she wants to upstage the rich snobby girl and it gets into a betting game. I would have expected a story like this from a much younger person, not an adult man. I know its going for that family friendly fun vibe and the comic is very light-hearted and innocent in its presentation. However, it doesn't excuse the fact that the story just isn't woven "tight" enough and overall its not written very well. Unlike his artwork, the story misses alot of details and doesn't flow very well. Character personalities are a tad shallow and their dialogue is at times choppy and like the story, doesn't flow very well. Many of the strips are lackluster in this regard. It's a newspaper styled comic strip without any of the comedic punch that a newspaper comic strip usually delivers. The last panel should be the "big payoff" where the joke (building in the previous panels) hits. I didn't find any of the strips particularly funny. I know a joke is there...somewhere, but its fumbled with bad pacing and/or bad writing and dialogue. The comic itself starts as if I've missed the first few strips. I feel as if me, the reader/viewer, arrived late and missed the first ten minutes of the story. The first comic plops right down in Alice's "slice of life" and you, the reader, better have read the "characters bio" page first, because some details are not told outright. The same goes with the characters themselves...no smooth transition, characters just appear splattered everywhere.
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