Paranatural

>the perfect plan... i can stall forever since she can't see if i blink through my sunglasses. why are you calling the police

Look at this fucking emss. This guy probably think that homestuck flashes are the epitome of storyboarding.

Don't fucking insult Homestuck flashes with this fucking garbage.

Somehow this action scene is dragging on now it feels like.

I'm not praising the lesbian date but this is literally the worst Paranatural has ever been. I've probably read thousands if not millions of comics over the past 20-25+ years and I have never, ever seen anyone fuck up panelling and structuring this badly.

The monkey's paw strikes again. Where are all the people who wanted action and faster pacing?

>I have never, ever seen anyone fuck up panelling and structuring this badly
Not even Diaz? I suppose he also doesn't try to do what Zack is falling on his face trying to do here.

Diaz comes pretty close but this feels way busier and messier to me and Diaz' panelling isn't even in the top 3 worst things about him anyway so it probably stands out less.

>I have never, ever seen anyone fuck up panelling and structuring this badly.
Nobody cares about your exagerated toddler rant, redddit.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Remember when Sup Forums ribbed on Dresden Codak for messy, counter-intuitive panel design that made the action hard to follow?

Dude, there's no comparison.

Diaz's paneling can be cluttered- even, at times, impossible to follow- but he's at least had the common sense to stick to one flowing setting per page. Maybe he would jump settings between them, but who doesn't?

This is four action scenes, in completely separate locations, going on at the same time. On the same page. in the same *panels.*

>it'saboldstrategycotton.jpg

A-At least we have one pannel with a bit of background r-right guys?

Don't type so many words at a time, Zack. Your wrist could break.

What would you say was the comic that broke your interest? I didn't care about any dumb Zack tweets or inclusion social whatever, but I'd say this comic was the first time I realized it wasn't as good as when it started.

And it sucks too, I remember first getting into it thanks to Sup Forums and wanting to see where this was going, but the lazy backgrounds, the spinning wheels plot and now this mess of an action montage is just too much. I keep comparing this to It Hurts! since I found both on here and have been following both for awhile. While Gob may not be a Picasso he has 3 traits I admire in any webcomic author:

1) Consistency
2) Effort put into their work
3) Clear plot arcs and development

Paranatural has several skipped updates (and went down from 3 a week to barely 1 per week on average with no buffer), his art has gotten progressively lazier (I understand he went all out on his earlier work but its basically pastel backgrounds for most of his panels) and the plot feels like a random assortment of scenes with no sense of urgency and I don't understand the relationships the characters even have with each other. Why do they even care about Hijack any more? What's going on with that cousinhood bs? Are they all stuck in Mayview forever? What's so important about Mayview? Etc.

>SHWING
Tumblr's gonna be on suicide watch. (Extent of panic may vary depending on wrist health)

After the train scene and the start of this "day". Too many plots going on at once, too many characters and the art has become really soulless compared to the original arcs.

Also they no longer act like kids, its like im reading a comic about adults that look like kids that desperately tried to be a parody of manga.

Hitball is when the problems really started to go from minor to very noticeable and by the end of hit ball is where the story has fallen into a pattern of circling the wagon and laziness. the fact we are STILL on chapter 5 is telling of how Zack has murdered his own pacing.

I just can't believe it became Bleach even faster than Bleach did.

Hell even Bleach has some plot progression, it's more of a case of moving goalposts and shonen-shit power levels going crazy. This is, I don't know, like moving lateral and even backwards from a stationary goalpost you know?

When I wanted action, I didn't mean for him to pack 3 fights and whatever the fuck Isabel is about to do into one. Couldn't be have done that with the disabled interracial lesbians, and the saloon?

Half of the reason I got into Paranatural is that it reminded me of early Bleach, when it was still a monster of the week manga about cool-looking spirits getting their shit kicked in. It makes me sad to see Zack mismanaging such a simple concept.

>that page
>mfw remembering what led up to it
If Max would've just shut up about the "agent" thing, this sappy middle school melodrama would've never have happened. I know he's trying to gather up clues about the fishy nature of the Consortium, but being this careless before a mate who's so desperate for the same information, and especially with Boss Leader watching over him...this is just stupid, man.

>What would you say was the comic that broke your interest?
In retrospect...I found my first red flag when Johnny got possessed, when we've barely knew him and his mischief for like several chapters. But I didn't wanna give up at first because I thought that due to Johnny's normie background, his spectral senses wouldn't kick in until VERY MUCH LATER (maybe weeks or months later) as Forge tries to use Johnny as a human vehicle to get around Mayview; then we could see more of Johnny and his gang run their schemes around the school.

But nope, Johnny sees shades just about one goddamn day later! And he then gets I N T R O S P E C T I V E about fighting!

My final straw for taking this comic seriously came at this chapter, page 146. God, how I hated that page for its obnoxiousness, especially as it's right after a big mythology dump just went on it. Plus, the page count feels too overloaded for me to handle at this point, especially for such an early stage of the whole big story.

Underrated post.

I just realised that the end of this month marks two and a half years since Chapter 5 started.
God help us all.

Holy Shit, this chapter is 202 pages? To but this into perspective, that's 2/3 of Poppy's total length of all its chapters+side chapters put together.

If your chapter is this long, you must have too many characters, too many sideplots, and a horrendous sense of pacing.

Is this chapter at least showing signs of ending? Or is it gonna continue to 300 pages or so?

Every week, I read Unsounded and just have to shake my head at how much better Ashley Cope is at pacing, page layout, art, and sticking to her update schedule than literally every other narrative-based webcomic creator.

>If your chapter is this long, you must have too many characters, too many sideplots, and a horrendous sense of pacing.
Spot on.

>1 panel with a proper background

Wow, we are really getting a treat this time.

You should stop posting theses they're becoming quite boring

God dammit I can't follow any of this shit. The last couple pages have been a clusterfuck. I have no idea what's going on anymore.

This reads like Youngblood.
Not even ribbing, this is early 90's MacFarlane wannabe tier panelling, right down to shoving a dude in a bad action pose into the middle of the page to hide that the panel to panel motion is slow and stiff.

I will honestly be surprised if any of the teachers are hijacked at this point. All this build up is just screaming to have Zack "subvert expectations" and have all this be a colossal waste of time.

kek

This is the page that started the disappointment for me. This scene made me see the next few scenes with Eightfold coming from a mile away, and what’s worse is that the later scenes were meant to be touching, but I couldn’t get into it because it came too quickly.

There wasn’t an overarching development over Isabel and Eightfold throughout the comic, she was “just a book” before and only truly appears in Chapter 5, before she’s killed off. Literally at the beginning of Chapter 5, you see Isabel being scolded for overusing the book, so her losing the book or being put into a challenging situation where she doesn’t have access to it was expected, but I didn’t expect it THAT soon. It just felt like such a wasted opportunity for something truly great.

As much as I like Forge his rant during that scene was way too fucking incoherent for someone who's meant to be all wordy and eloquent. And it lasted a few pages too.

Why are you guys still following this?

I'm just following it for Johnny.

>Why are you guys still following this?
Because I'm enjoying my anger.

I was hoping to see the build-up to this power combo the moment we learn of the characters' /very interesting/ dynamic and chemistry at Chapter 3...I was also very hopeful at that time.

I actually fine with it.
Call it shit taste, I just don't dislike it.

this, but in all honesty i haven't been able to follow whatever the fuck's happening in this comic for like 3 years now

the characters are dropping all of this plot shit in huge doses every 30 pages or so but they manage to be just vague enough to make the reader not understand what they're even talking about

To be fair, I never actually go to the website anymore.
I just read it out of morbid curiosity whenever it gets posted here.

When the comic stopped being a comfy comic version FLCL/Bleach. So by the end of the train I was over it.
Doesn't surprise me that it's gotten progressively worse

Diaz pls go

This is busy but barring the ed smacked onto the center it's still read right-to-left and top-to-bottom like a normal fucking comic. If every scene didn't have the same eye-searing yellow-green color palette it wouldn't even be bad.

>the first page of chapter 5 was posted December 30th 2014

Which means since the comic only began in April 2011, chapter 5 will likely end up being about 50% of the entire comic, if not more.

The worst part is I was actually getting excited for the past few pages. We were getting some payoff to all this dumb bullshit and I thought the scene transitions were pretty clever, if a little forced. But that's gone on for 6 pages now, no one's landed a hit, and we're still doing the cut-between-four-scenes gimmick even though it's long been clear that only one of them has any narrative weight. Thanks, Zack, you took a good thing and ruined it.

>Thanks, Zack, you took a good thing and ruined it.
That should be the subtitle of the comic.

Hitball.

when they spent like 2 pages (aka an entire week in real time) explaining what a nonbinary person was

A small part of me keeps hoping that the comic might turn back to its former glory. How much longer can Zack drag this shit?

>keep hoping the comic will return to its former glory

I bet you still follow Sinfest and Unsounded, thinking it can't get any worse, but it always does.

>the perfect plan... i can stall forever
Is he telling us something?

Why are all the girls androgynous now? They used to be visibly female. I hate SJWs and I hate tumblr.

Haven't read either of those, and from the sound of it I'm glad I haven't

We were able to whizz pass a few chapters within one year back then...

ONE SINGLE YEAR.

Has any other webcomic in the history of Sup Forums go from universally loved to utterly disappointing like Paranatural did?

Holy shit I forgot this was still going.

Chapter 4 is where it started going off the rails. But shit didn't hit the fan until a bit into chapter 5. Zack first gave up on drawing backgrounds, and shortly after that on story and pacing.

Reveal of R.J's Past was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. That's the point where I moved from "following with almost no interest" to "Yeah I'm done here".

WHERE ARE THE BACKGROUNDS

They phased out of existence somewhere around page 20 of chapter 5 (which we are still in), more that two fucking years ago, due to Zack's chronic wrist pain due to chronic masturbation.

What's your problem with Unsounded?

Unsounded is unironically one of the best webcomics on the internet, what the fuck is wrong with you

>Hating Unsounded
>EVEN IMPLYING THAT IT IS ON THE SAME LEVEL AS SINFEST.
You fucking WHAT m8? Are you retarded?

I get that Sup Forums loves shitposting but I honestly can't come up with what would even be the pretend trolling reason to hate Unsounded

>Unsounded
>bad

>People are already forgetting there was a point in time where nobody shat on Homestuck.

Sinfest, probably. Can't think of another.

i just checked it out and it's really nothing special. did i go to the wrong website or something?

While I like the idea of the action scenes melding with each other, he should space things apart. Do transitions just once per page.

habit, when i run out of my queue of other webcomics to check up on i hit up paranatural, that or when i run out of threads on Sup Forums thats interest me

I honestly think the problem is that Zack wants to do so much stuff, but since he works so slowly, he doesn't want to wait to give characters the spotlight they deserve.

He just wants to shove everything in the minute he thinks of it

You can't possibly be serious.

Comparing even the worst of Diaz's work to this is to compare a game of 52-pickup to someone actively mulching a deck in a blender.

What's the unholy trinity of fallen grace webcomics?

Homestuck, paranatural, and what else? Cucumber quest? It was never high enough to fall too hard. Sinfest? Aesthetically it's still very good but just has a shitty subject matter now. Prequel? Its just not existed for longer than it has, the quality is still about the same.

There needs to be another webcomic that pulls off that unspeakable combination of mistakes where it starts off fantastic, then falls really steeply into shitty storytelling, the artstyle devolves utterly, and the update schedule implodes into bad pacing.

I bet he thought he was being real clever with that second panel instead of disorienting

can't say I care about this comic anymore

Sinfest. The fact that art is okay doesn't matter, it's a pretty skin being worn by a demon made of rot and hate now.

Prequel is the third, because all its virtues are blotted out by the universe-eating vice of it NEVER COMING OUT. Plus it shares with Homestuck and Paranatural the status of once being one of Sup Forums's darlings, which Sinfest never really did.

Probably Sinfest or Spinerette. I can't think of many webcomics that started out really good and then went right to hell.

>snowboard crap greatly ruining the reaction image potential of the bottom row

Are there any webcomics similar to early Paranatural?

Spinnerette was always a shitty webcomic getting by on high-quality cheesecake art. Then the cheesecake vanished, and all we were left with was a shitty webcomic.

Yeah. I knew it was a stretch but didn't want to admit it.
I just can't think of any webcomics that really started out strong an then dropped the lead at all.

Maybe we don't need a trinity of failure. Maybe it's enough that Paranatural is a singular, unique waste of talent and premise.

If you didn't like it, that's fine, but it is widely regarded as one of the best webcomics currently running.