Well the title is intentionally a reference to Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics", which I'm reading these days. The book is an essay (in comic form) about comics, but from a very uncommon point of view. He talks about sequence, about the cognitive process involved when reading a comic, the difference between painting, literature and comics and much more I haven't read yet. Everything there is wonderfully illustrated with examples as he explores the different approaches authors take and all the great opportunities that this kind of media has.
But today I discovered what a webcomic is really good for: feedback!
Let me explain. I have the rare opportunity of actually talking to real 'readers' and ask them about the comic and I was interested about the last two pages, because a very important characteristic of the older Mr Mann is supposedly revealed there, and some key elements are introduced. But.. a suprisingly high percentage did not get the message I was trying to convey on those two pages. At all. It's not only the message, which can arguably be missed as it's only a couple of pages, but the actual sequence of events was unclear for almost everybody. That is, they didn't understand what happened.
My original intent was to stop that sequence there and go to a flashback introducing the character 'Ana', but I'll add another page to the therapy sequence, trying to further explain it because it's kind of important.
I believe there's two main issues there: the main character is at times difficult to recognize as I still need to improve drawing, and more importantly, when I tried to display the contradiction between what Mr Mann is telling the psychiatrist and what he was actually doing (and what he is remembering), well, essentially I failed.
I think I should have added something more obvious, like some kind of cloud separating thoughts or memories and inserting more shots of Mr Mann's face while explaining it. For your knowledge: the idea here is that Mr Mann lies to the psychiatrist, pretends the whole event was a very simple thing, and hides the fact that after that 'flip out' at the office he went and beat the crap out of that new character that appears (the junkie) in something which has to do with another character yet to appear (Ana).
So FAIL for me ;). I'll try to learn something from this. It's good to have this kind of feedback so early in this process, because I can react quickly.
And if by any chance you did understand it, do post. Maybe my user sample was biased :)