Paranatural Duckpond - Shonenshit Edition

>it's called hitball you cyclops piece of

>Hijack Believes

Other urls found in this thread:

paranatural.net/comic/chapter-5-page-210
paranatural.net/comic/chapter-3-page-39
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

How long has this chapter been going on, again?

I feel like Hijack's confidence is misplaced, given how much trouble two pixeldogs gave Max and Isabel the night before and oh god that literally just happened the previous night.

I'm afraid it's been… 3 years

I can't believe Max, Isabel and Johnny are the main characters.

>Ed on suicide watch

In all fairness, Hijack only really has hitball and the time he spent impersonating Spender to base his judgments on, and this really wasn't Ed's day.

>when the bad guys try to take them on, they'll work together, protect each other

BULLSHIT. WHEN did we see that? We've never seen how things rolled around before Max came along yet it's just easily IMPLIED that the Club's internal affairs are dysfunctional. The moment I read on Isaac complaining about his problems to Max in chapter 3, I thought we'll eventually get a picture of the magnitude through their interactions - maybe flashbacks before Max showed up - so we could see more weight would be put on to overcome those differences towards "getting the Club back together". But no, there weren't any.

...I just don't care anymore, man. Can't believe I have muscle memory to still give a hoot about this cartoon soap opera that just goes on and on without any satisfying payoff.

It's more a criticism of the way this chapter was plotted than on Hijack. We've gotten a lot of screen time for Isabel and Isaac and Max, but Ed has to share his introspections with Johnny fucking stuff up, both Isaac and Isabels and Spenders bullshit, and needing to be a drip for the conflict. And instead of expanding upon his already established personality and background, such as being kind of a crazy joker and living with Isabel for some reason, his major character thing this arc is "needs to make up with his friend for being a coward but learns you don't make up you just give them time to get over it." Lame. The only good thing with him this chapter were the scenes with Muse, which hardly added much aside from being hilarious.

The better route would've been to have Ed make some stupid joke about one of the billion problems Isabel is dealing with and piss her off, leading to him needing to be serious for once, something Muse could also easily school him in. That and trim the fucking fat. Like the fucking pointless fucking lesbian date and the whole thing with Johnny and his bud and the agender concert thing. Both were amusing, but ultimately took valuable time away from what this chapter should've been. And of course, not spending so much time on hitball Namek.

He's grown impatient with his own slowness, I believe, and now can't help but throw everything in at once, not comprehending how much this adds to the slowness of everything.

It's best you look now and... understand your situation.

>Both were amusing
I beg to differ.

The writing's gone to shit, my goodness. It all started with dodgeball, didn't it?

I remember how this comic started as a shonen parody.
Stare into the abyss...

Yeah I feel like he doesn't get that only one or two important things really need to happen in one day.

The chapter's been going on for too long, that I think we better switch from wrists to these instead.
>AAAARRRGGGHHHHH -average Paranatural reader, 2018

The concert bit was okay and more importantly brief but the fucking date scene must have lasted for 15 pages and was nothing but Mina stuttering for whatever reason and then just leaving and it just sorta...ends. A better bit would have Agent Blindy visit Mina at her home for an outwardly friendly but subtle interrogation and have it last 4 pages max before Mina had to jet.

Also the angsty Issac pages and Starchman chase scenes were a little over-done. I'd have cut out some of the secret kid bar stuff too and just have Max talk with the kids in the locker room immediately after the game or in the hall when he snuck out of the infirmary.

Zach wanted too much with this chapter, he wanted a mystery whoisit featuring a mind-taker, a jovially serious dodgeball match, a reason to bind wounds opened in the last chapter, a start to Johnny rethinking his ways, looking in at characters who are tertiary at best AND trying to emphasize the danger of the BBEG in Mayview.

Simply too much, should have broken it into a few chapters, shouldn't have as much shit going on simultaneously.

AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH

>copied and pasted old panels, for the second time this chapter
bravo

I'll take sunday comic bullshit from zach, but I will not take seven hundred pages long 5 years-in-the-making garbage like this

I don't remember guys. Are we still on hitball namek or is this the 50000 forms saga?

It has been almost three years since my divorce, this plot started before it with hijack controlling the weiner dog before it at the start of this day.

Get to things actually happening again Zack! Your pacing is fucked! I swear to fuck at this rate I’ll be over my anxiety toward emotional intimacy and be dating again or married again by the time this comic moves on.

Super Buu Arc.

I cannot believe this page is real. Zack's been lifting dialogues and tropes straight outta anime for years now, but this is a new low in laziness and bad writing. Is his master plan to milk Patreon as much as he can with a never ending chapter, or at least until he has exploited every trick in the Book of Shonen Clichés to the rope?
Paranatural is supposed to be about kids, not written by one.

>a start to Johnny rethinking his ways
Zack's a doof for doing this to Johnny, when Johnny was already made up as an dangerous (normie) antagonist to Max. Like, pic related - threatening to hurt Isaac if Max wouldn't tell him their secrets. It would be hella great showing off what can the strongest muggles (Johnny and his gang) do with their own strengths against the "gatekeepers" to the Club's secrecy (and in a way would prove the relationship between Max and Isaac when they deal with the real problems™)...but then he had to get OP-d and "introspective" and stuff like that - that's awfully cheap. Kinda lost some of my trust because of that.

Wow, this is such a good page.

I'M NUUUUCLEAAARRRRRGH

>noses
Oh yeah they used to have those.

LITERALLY YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARSSSSSSSS

You always find new ways to make me laugh.

>tfw half of Buu is like two volumes in the comic.
>Vegito is just one chapter.
Watching Dragon Ball is just stupid.

>The concert bit was okay
Can't say I agree. Everybody knew RJ was supposed to be gender neutral or agender or whatever from the character page on the website, there was absolutely no reason to dedicate an entire page to it when the pacing was already completely fucked. It wasn't even a funny page, just cringeworthy.

These threads are the only good thing to come out of this webcomic in the past three years

Agreed, too bad they die so quickly now because there's barely anything to talk about.

Don't mind me I'm just here for the wrist posting

Am I just too cynical to enjoy it anymore or does this whole scene come across just... completely shallow and soulless? Like he's just going through the motions of what he thinks should happen in a conversation between these two without actually thinking about how to make it impactful?

The complete wash of pale colors and atrocious linework don't really help. There's no motion or drama in either of their poses, none of the dialogue bubbles, no variation in line thickness for emphasis... it just comes across so fucking bland and boring.

I really hope that Hijack aims to prove that they can work together by sacrificing himself, like throwing himself out there to be destroyed by them all at the same time. But I'm worried he'll escape and the whole fucking chapter will be as utterly pointless in the end as it's felt.

Keep in mind Hijack is fucking 3 years old.

Oh my god who careeees

That visual gag with the eagle spirit is great.

I really don't see how suicide on Hijack's part will be remotely helpful.

No, it's ham-fisted as all fuck. This sort of moral/emotional/philosophical debate makes sense and works for characters like Lucifer/Forge/Spender because their situations warrant it and we've got to know them for a moderate amount of time, but Hijack? Really? Do we really need this guy's input on the nature of good and evil?

Also glad a paranatural thread is up while I'm on Sup Forums so I can get my chance to make fun of Zack's "they/them" in his twitter bio ahahaha.

It's not just you user. This is what happens when you give a character extremely little time to develop (despite having THREE ACTUAL REAL LIFE YEARS) and then suddenly try to force the reader to care about them. No one but Zack's hugbox crowd is buying any of this, mostly because everyone just wants this fucking chapter to end already. I've stopped going to the site entirely, I used to get out of bed to check for updates like 4-5 years ago, now I literally only get excited for the threads about them. There's nothing else worth being interested in. One of Zack's worst writing problems is that he keeps trying to foreshadow cool future stuff but, in true shonen fashion, is probably never going to deliver on any of it in for at least another decade. At some point he's going to realize that with his gigantic cast he has way too many loose ends to tie up, goes through a mental breakdown and then just cans the comic with one final "Thanks for understanding!"
>Also glad a paranatural thread is up while I'm on Sup Forums so I can get my chance to make fun of Zack's "they/them" in his twitter bio ahahaha.
You know his comic's doing great when the Twitter fanfare for the they/them thing at the start of the year was greater than any response to his comic in the past year whatsoever.

...

That bottom panel is super anime, but it feels much more subdued than the garbage in OP. What the fuck happened over the years?

He got simultaneously lazy and over-ambitious for the amount of work he was willing to put in. This comic is like an amalgamation of like 5 separate comic ideas all smooshed into one with the end result being a juggling act with bland gruel rather than something cool like chainsaws.

Nearly every page, especially ones with Max and Johnny, were filled to the brim with fun wordplay and clever jokes. Christ.

WWWWWWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRRRRDDDDSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Zack's been reading HxH.

What did he mean by this?

101 pages more than the Zack Morrison proclaimed "what will most likely be Paranatural's longest chapter. "

What really bothers me about the decline in Paranatural's art quality is the use of color, which really shouldn't be an issue of laziness. Even if you're not going to have backgrounds, you can at least have the background colors and lighting match up between panels in a way that conveys the tone of the scene.
With a lot of newer pages it's just a clusterfuck of pastel bullshit.

Based purely on color, what am I supposed to be feeling when I look at this page?
paranatural.net/comic/chapter-5-page-210

Now compare that to this
paranatural.net/comic/chapter-3-page-39

He only needs 52 pages and its half the comic.

52 pages? I dunno if I can wait 2 more years.

At least that comic is interesting.

>ever basing the quality of your work by how well speed-readers will notice a flaw

I've only just realized how bad he is. At 8 updates a month, making 96 a year had he had no breaks. My insomniac pidgin math works out he should be on page 302 today. He's missed 50 updates this chapter due to wrists and cons.

I think in a previous thread (3 year anniversary one, maybe) I counted around 69 missed updates. I was either completely wrong or it's actually way worse than you thought.