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Zoophobia


Käpt'n
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http://zoophobiacomic.com

I'm surprised no one has made a thread about it yet considering how popular it was on the old forums.

At the moment I am a little disappointed by it though to be totally honest with you. The comic started out great. A lot of great and diverse characters, we had some fighting going on, Fabian was staring at Cameron's tits... But at the moment the whole comic has kind of turned into highschool drama, which is incredibly boring if you ask me.

The chapter about Jack was pretty neat but what's going on right now doesn't interest me at all.

I mean, I get it. According to his old character sheet Addi is some kind of lab experiment which explains why he doesn't like being touched... But I am just not a huge fan of him in general.

I just hope we get to the point soon when Fabian bones has tea with Cameron. 

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I want to love this. When I first caught wind a month or so ago I was able to shotgun through the archives in an hour or less, because there was some interesting backstory being built and some action to keep me hooked. There's a few problems I'm having at this point, though.

  1. What's killing me the most now that I am caught up to real time is the comic pacing being unbearably slow. We wait patiently for each page and things go... nowhere.
  2. The overly swoopy art style starting to wear on me a little as well but I could probably get past that if the narrative would get some gusto again.
  3. There's almost too many characters, you'll go half a chapter or more without seeing somebody and suddenly they're back in the mix. As the reader I'm left thinking to myself, "Wait, who?"

I'm not jumping ship yet, but I'm hoping some of the above gets rectified soon. 

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She used to update three times a week, at that point the pace was pretty good. But there was more stuff happening, too... But right now? Yeah, slow pace plus slow updates. It really is dragging a little right now.

Viv wants to publish it as a book in the future. I suppose the current pace wouldn't be so bad if you could just flip from page to page, but since it's a webcomic it feels like we need a week to turn the page...

I don't really have much of an issue with the artstyle. It's bright and vivid, the big advantage of that is that the characters stand out more. So even though I am not that much of a fan of the design at least the design still works.

I am starting to get that problem with the characters as well. I see people on her blog mentioning different characters and I'm just like "wait... Who?" because it is a pretty overwhelming cast.

Right now I am just keeping an eye on it to see where the current story goes. I go to the page on Friday, "Yup, more teeny drama bullshit and no Fabian!" and close it again.

Poppy is much more interesting to read right now in my opinion. It's more consistently paced, too.

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I read most of it awhile back and really liked what was there, but given the story it is and the speed that it's put out, I just kinda stopped. Like someone else said, it will work as a big ol book that you can flip through at your leisure, but waiting so long for ONE page kinda hurts.

I still manage to watch her animation to Kesha's "Die Young" on like a weekly basis though. God that thing makes me stupid happy.

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And then Friday comes and you see that new page and it just further developes the boring high school drama plot.

I just want it to go back to the cool characters! I don't care about the snobby snake asshole or the angsty gay bioweapon/evil lab experiment or what ever he is! I wanna see Damian be an asshole, I wanna see Jack get grinded to a pulp so I can feel sorry for him, I wanna see Fabian stare at Cameron's freaking tits! Is that so much to ask?!

I also want Zechs old design back. His new design gives me the creeps. He used to look like an actual cat, not like some freakish cross between a cheetah and... Morgan Freeman.

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You know, I'd never read any of this before. So I had a peek at maybe the first 20 pages.

Wow, this is really good.
Trouble is, I always end up feeling guilty when I get into the habit of not doing work, which makes it hard for me to follow webcomics.

EDIT- Okay, that must have been a lie. I'm at Chapter Four now. This is so fucking good. I was burning with stress at the start of today, but after sitting and reading for a while, I feel a little more relaxed.

Edited by DrDingo
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Chapter four IS good because it's about interesting characters :P Chapter five is where things are kind of falling apart for me right now. I hope the following chapters will be more interesting...

Heh, I got up to Chapter 5 yesterday and I stopped reading. So far, it's great.

Man, I feel sorry for Jack though. He's such a nice character, but so hard done by and desperate for someone to keep him company. I think we can all relate to him on some level.

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Heh, I got up to Chapter 5 yesterday and I stopped reading. So far, it's great.

So far chapter 5 is about characters I just don't care about, except for Damian and Rusty.

This comic is great! Last time I checked in, it wasn't updated in forever though. Looks like I got some catching up to do now ~

There was a big gap between updates but now she regularly uploads a new page every Friday.

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Oh hey, I reached the end.

I didn't realise that the comic only started in August this year. That's one hell of a lot of pages for such a young comic. 282 pages were put forward in the initial monthload, which must have taken forever to prepare. 

But I see what you mean about the releases being slow from then on. I'm itching for more. I might be tempted to catch up on all of it again in a while.

Poor Jackson, getting tied up in a locker for an entire week and being set on fire. I'd be his friend ;c

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I used to like this comic but after the long wait for a working website and the weeklong updates, its getting difficult to enjoy. The art, while technically more impressive, seems uglier to me than the comic's early art, and nothing is happening. I don't know who any of these characters are or why I should care about them either. I want to get back to the main character or Damian or Jack.

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Oh hey, I reached the end.

I didn't realise that the comic only started in August this year. That's one hell of a lot of pages for such a young comic. 282 pages were put forward in the initial monthload, which must have taken forever to prepare. 

But I see what you mean about the releases being slow from then on. I'm itching for more. I might be tempted to catch up on all of it again in a while.

Hidden Content

It's actually not that young at all. There was just a big break and she recently switched to a Tumblr site because hosting the site somewhere else was just too expensive. She kept running out of bandwidth very quickly so the site was actually down most of the time.

 

I used to like this comic but after the long wait for a working website and the weeklong updates, its getting difficult to enjoy. The art, while technically more impressive, seems uglier to me than the comic's early art, and nothing is happening. I don't know who any of these characters are or why I should care about them either. I want to get back to the main character or Damian or Jack.

The art seems overdone to me. It used to be simple, now it's much more abstract.

We just had a chapter just about Jack, I hope the next one will be more interesting. 

Its a nice comic, but tbh its overrated. I follow comics with more regular updates and smooth sailing story.

I'll love it more when it makes more sense and starts to pick up.

But meanwhile, why no slightly damned love guys? Great comic, great artist, regular updates!

Right now I can definitely see why you would say it's overrated. Because I'd actually agree with you!

I'm also reading Poppy O'Possum right now which updates twice a week (mostly) and the pace is so much better. There is actually stuff happening in it and the characters are just as great. There also aren't like 500 of them, so you actually know who which character is :V

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In my mind this comic is now officially up against Freefall for the title of "comic that takes the most amount of time to advance the story the least."

Freefall has been around for ages though so I assume the author is just being lackadaisical with that comic (I've never read it, really)

 

Twokinds had been getting to that point for awhile due to trying to work the relationship between characters rather than progressing the story but I think things are getting back into focus as far as plot advancement. Hopefully.

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Hmm...last I left off was Jack seeing Cameron for counseling, I should catch up on recent pages (even though they aren't going much of anywhere, it seems)

I hope the comic's decline is mostly due to some other reason and not artist's lack of interest. It'd be a shame to see a comic stop halfway through, especially one with such a gripping beginning and engaging character designs.

Edited by WolfNightV4X1
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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...
On 11/15/2015 at 5:12 PM, Käpt'n said:

Right now I can definitely see why you would say it's overrated. Because I'd actually agree with you!

I'm also reading Poppy O'Possum right now which updates twice a week (mostly) and the pace is so much better. There is actually stuff happening in it and the characters are just as great. There also aren't like 500 of them, so you actually know who which character is :V

I started reading this because of this post and it's a really good comic so i thank you for posting it.

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6 hours ago, AlastairSnowpaw said:

I started reading this because of this post and it's a really good comic so i thank you for posting it.

You are welcome! 

As for ZP, still more high school drama. Yay... 

Edited by Käpt'n
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6 hours ago, DrDingo said:

The last five pages of this comic..
Could have just as easily been done on a single page.

Like, what was the point of that? So long was spent covering the span of a brief few moments. And even then, nothing really happened.

Exactly. It's just vapid, drawn out high school drama. I've been feeling like this for the entire chapter, so like since August. If the next chapter(s) are gonna be about the same crap I might actually lose interest and just check the updeates purely to see if characters that I enjoy are popping up again. This chapter started promising because of Damian, but a few pages in it just completely went to shit.

I want more Fabian staring at Cam's tits and more Jack! Is that so much to ask? :c I guess that is the problem with a comic that has so many freaking characters. There's gonna be chapters that suck because the charcters are boring. I suppose that is the reason why you usually don't have such a large cast in stories. It is way too hard to make every character interesting.

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On 11/11/2015 at 3:46 AM, Conker said:

I read most of it awhile back and really liked what was there, but given the story it is and the speed that it's put out, I just kinda stopped. Like someone else said, it will work as a big ol book that you can flip through at your leisure, but waiting so long for ONE page kinda hurts.

I still manage to watch her animation to Kesha's "Die Young" on like a weekly basis though. God that thing makes me stupid happy.

Daily reminder that im in it :V

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I came here to check to see if there have been any interesting developments and I'm sad to hear that its still moving as slowly as ever.

I initially liked that it took time to develop the characters but now I can't help but feel upset that it keeps spending time on all this instead of actually doing something with the characters. Characterization can also be told through action as well. Why has it been so slow? The beginning of this webcomic was so much better.

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14 hours ago, Battlechili said:

I came here to check to see if there have been any interesting developments and I'm sad to hear that its still moving as slowly as ever.

I initially liked that it took time to develop the characters but now I can't help but feel upset that it keeps spending time on all this instead of actually doing something with the characters. Characterization can also be told through action as well. Why has it been so slow? The beginning of this webcomic was so much better.

I'm starting to think that she might just not be a very good writer afterall...
Also, the comic is starting to become very... I don't know how to say it... Tumblr-ish?

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And even more high school drama.

My prediction for next week: More of the same.

I get it. Her pages are pretty elaborate, so she is forced to go with one page per week. I also understand that she wants to get it published in the future. This whole thing with Addy has been going on since freaking September and nothing has happened! D: If it was a book you could just go through this part in 5 minutes or even skip it entirely, but right now it's a webcomic with one update per week and nothing has happened in the last four months O_o

The previous chapter was great because the characters weren't total bellends. I was actually looking forward to the update each week because Jack and Jill Zill are great! But the characters we are dealing with right now are either unlikeable, pansies or assholes (except for Damian and Totally-Not-Afkinz).

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5 hours ago, Battlechili said:

The art actually has successfully traversed from "I adore it" to "this makes me cringe".

And the story is still not going anywhere. Cool. 

569e7050187af_angryfennekin.gif.78d95869

I think her style has simply mutated into something way too complicated for a webcomic.
As for the story, let's just hope the next chapters will be better...

Oh also:
"So I know a lot of you guys love to go waaaaay far back in my tumblr or DA to find stuff about characters or old art I did, and I think that’s rad. But sadly a LOT has changed since back then, so I hope you guys know that lots of characters have changed, relationships have been shifted and just -anything that doesn’t happen IN the comic just isn’t canon anymore.That isn’t to say a lot of things aren’t still the same, I just get a lot of questions about things I drew years back, i’m just giving a heads up now, everything done nomatter how far back is just developmental, nothing is canon but what happens in the story!"
From her blog.

So in other words, all the stuff we liked from the ref sheets and older drawings might not be canon anymore because she changed it. That could really suck because most of that was really good.
She used to be very upset about spoilers and people copying her characters which made her close down her blog for character ref sheets from the comic. She also had to remake characters she designed with former friends, which is why Afkinz is now dead and was "replaced with" Mackenzie.
I really really hope that she didn't make changes just for the sake of eliminating spoilers and other details that people already knew. Because if she did that the comic really is gonna turn into a shitshow.

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...
On January 19, 2016 at 11:20 AM, Battlechili said:

The art actually has successfully traversed from "I adore it" to "this makes me cringe".

I'm kinda starting to agree with you on that. The art just looks plastic-ey now. I mean, it's not bad by any means, but it doesn't have that organic, visceral feel that the earlier pages did. 

But who knows, maybe it's just cuz she's been too busy to take a lot of time to draw them...

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On 4.3.2016 at 11:45 PM, Endless/Nameless said:

I'm kinda starting to agree with you on that. The art just looks plastic-ey now. I mean, it's not bad by any means, but it doesn't have that organic, visceral feel that the earlier pages did. 

But who knows, maybe it's just cuz she's been too busy to take a lot of time to draw them...

It also looks like the pages are colored by someone else now. It says "flat colors by @faustisse" under every new page. But that person might as well be called "Viv Mk. II", the style is pretty much identical.

As for the style, I prefer the old pages as well.

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9 minutes ago, Mr. Fox said:

Never heard of it but going by the first page, it looks like shit.

The first 2/3 are really awesome actually; but it's kinda lost steam lately, along with the author's ambition. (I personally think it's cuz we've been stuck in such a boring character arc for so goddamn long)

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5 minutes ago, Endless/Nameless said:

The first 2/3 are really awesome actually; but it's kinda lost steam lately, along with the author's ambition. (I personally think it's cuz we've been stuck in such a boring character arc for so goddamn long)

I'll stick to my CoyoteVille thank you very much (by that way, what happened to that guy?)

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Read it, it has a cool world but the way the story is told is pretty jumbled. I feel like one way to fix it would be just by having the story be told by all the kids having consoling sessions with Cameron and have the events unfold through that, this would at least give the story some unity and make more sense as it goes from character to character.

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16 hours ago, AlastairSnowpaw said:

Read it, it has a cool world but the way the story is told is pretty jumbled. I feel like one way to fix it would be just by having the story be told by all the kids having consoling sessions with Cameron and have the events unfold through that, this would at least give the story some unity and make more sense as it goes from character to character.

Apparently the story is supposed to be told over multiple books. According to Viv the first two books are supposed to be just exposition to explain the world and all the characters. Two books! And then the rest of the story is supposed to have a deeper plot and even a few casualties. Last year she wrote on her Tumblr blog that the story is supposed to be kind of brutal.
I just don't see how this is gonna work out... I'm getting the feeling that the whole thing might become a complete clusterfuck.
Also, Viv is apparently kind of resistant to critique and doesn't take it very well. That is not a good sign as well.

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5 hours ago, Käpt'n said:

Apparently the story is supposed to be told over multiple books. According to Viv the first two books are supposed to be just exposition to explain the world and all the characters. Two books! And then the rest of the story is supposed to have a deeper plot and even a few casualties. Last year she wrote on her Tumblr blog that the story is supposed to be kind of brutal.
I just don't see how this is gonna work out... I'm getting the feeling that the whole thing might become a complete clusterfuck.
Also, Viv is apparently kind of resistant to critique and doesn't take it very well. That is not a good sign as well.

ah, well it's fine to have those ideas, but with such a slow update speed  it's kind of hard to keep it together. and even then there should be a format to introduction of characters.

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