Mostly as I went through, I approached the art. I was critiquing as an artist, mostly looking for places where you could improve what you’d already drawn. Now at the end, though, I have to look back at the story as a whole and agree with the previous commenter. She didn’t move or shape her world at all. She was dragged along with it. With your approach to the writing, we didn’t see it through her eyes as well as we ought to have for the content of the story. I think it might be better if you worked an internal narrative through it, using narrator boxes to show her thoughts and hers alone to show how the story shapes her.

I enjoyed it. I’m not a big romance fan, but I especially found the first half of the story charming. Very cute, a wonderful couple. And I don’t read a lot of romance so I’m not sure entirely how to approach it…

But like wswears said. She felt like a warm, fuzzy object. Now, I understand that the conflict was that she needed to get over her former husband and break out of the fear of losing the Prince, of being lost in a world that was so very different from her own world–and that ought to have been the climax. Yet, you displayed the climax in a series of pages where we saw nothing of her internal battle. You didn’t show her struggle, her fight with her own emotions to get past the fact that she was holding back her own life. There were a few glimpses of these feelings from her but mostly she was just swept along. If you punctuated this more, and brought out the internal conflict it would improve her as a protagnist.

The story works as a snapshot but it’s not as gripping as it could be if you allowed her thoughts, feelings, internal conflict and inner demons to shine through and add a little bit of darkness and climatic drama to the story. We know they’re there, or she wouldn’t be worried. You just need to let them shine through a bit in the writing.

As the story is right now, you’ll have to have some pretty incredible art because that’s the major appeal of the story.

Now, I liked the ending lines. It worked well as a fade-out. I just feel there wasn’t quite enough of a climax to make it a gripping ending.

Spring is good. It’s not flooring, but it’s good. The art’s pretty enough and the colored pencils should really sweep it away since the major appeal, I felt, was the visuals and the settings. You made them stand out in the pencils, and I can only hope that colored, the setting stands out equally well.

In a sense, I see Spring as a story about a garden that just so happened to observe a romance. I think if you worked an internal dialogue through the story you might be able to bring us to a closer relationship with your protagnist and show a bit of the conflict that led to the ultimate happy ending, and add more of a problem and a conflict–even if it’s primarily in her mind. Hey, that generally seems to be how romance novels work? They fall in love, something happens that split them apart, but in the end it was all a misunderstanding/they end up together anyway and make up, and live happily ever after.

Overall, it was good. Pretty, easy to read, and a nice story with a fairly smooth ending. It just seemed to be a bit lacking in the climax deparment. I think it’ll look good once it’s done. Whether you want to try push the writing a bit more is up to you. It’s good as it is but it could benefit from maybe the addition of a couple more scenes or a narrative to add more sense of conflict and change.

Beta reading this was a great experience and I’m glad to have been allowed the chance to read it well before the launch!

I think it’s funny that he lets the kid play with it, though.

She looks much too excited in the next panel (though it’s a great expression) and I think his hands ought to be open there, not fists since he’s being all dramatic and punctuating what he’s saying.