Oculama

Goodness! Another rock-solid piece of work for the final round. Pristinely written and beautifully illustrated @_@

Really strong job here building on Plaid and Sleepy's comics to actualize your version of Newton. While he goes out pretty unceremoniously in the end, you've succeeded handily in spinning him as a love-to-hate character who presents a convincing threat, both in his low intentions for the other characters, and the power he demonstrates while handily dealing with Corb and Val.

Visually, I *do* wish Newton's design was a touch more distinct; his personality is a delightfully rotten standout already, and it'd be cool if he had some flourish that made his appearance do the same. It took me a beat to recognize him on the stage once the fight gets split into two parts, and though it never really critically breaks flow, it did give me the briefest pause.

Newton's relationship with Corb is an understated but really fascinating part of this comic that I felt like I got more out of each time I read through. There's like...enough of a distance there that Corb seems to be fully aware of his shortcomings as a parent and a human being, but also enough that Corb seems to genuinely want the wedding to go well, and has at least some interest in a cordial relationship with her father (the introduction of Mietta as her girlfriend was sosososososo cute) before he proves himself to be absolutely beyond the pale.

Merc and Val feel decently well-used here. Nothing gob-smacking, but you write the tenderness between them convincingly, and they fit very nicely into the larger world Mietta and Corb inhabit.

Satraxia is a bit better-used here, imho. the flashbacks to Jade (more on that below) are gutting, and you paint this really tragic yet still dangerous portrait of an animal letting herself be caged out of a mixture of resignation, inertia, and grief.

I'm a bit torn on the use of Jade. In a vacuum, I think it's a really brilliant way to keep the action from getting over-stuffed, and emotionally, it's absolutely devastating in the best way, especially where you give us the parallel panels where Satraxia's poses echo her poses during Jade's death sequence. I think if Jade weren't one of your fellow artist's characters this wouldn't especially bother me, but it does feel like she gets slightly shafted here. That said, I'm hard-pressed to hold it against you, because the use feels fully true to her character, and goes a long way in lending a lot more emotional weight to Satraxia's place in the story - both in highlighting the emptiness of the marriage to Newton, and in making the tragedy of her end all the more poignant.

(And to both of your credits, I think use of the opponent's OCs round after round has been a strength of yours, even among the many outstanding comics that have been made for the DBD. I always get the sense of a much large and rich world happening just out of sight, which is not a trivial thing to accomplish.)

What humor is here is mostly masterfully grounded in the larger flow of events, and the one or two bits that feel like asides are easily amusing enough that they serve the comic as a strength (public morals committee Mietta is just terrific).

There's a few spots up front where the pacing doesn't quite gel as well as it might. The amount of car dialogue between Newton's lines on page 3 and 4 runs just a *little* too long such that is disrupt the continuity in his introduction of Corb. On a similar but not exactly identical note, the conversation between Corb and Satraxia doesn't quite flow cleanly from page 6 to 7; it almost feels like there's a few lines of dialogue that got cut that was meant to glue the two ends together (whether this was the case or not).

The standout portion of the comic for me are the pages leading up to and following the timeskip. Corb and Mietta's whirlwind and flirtation through the fights of the first two rounds have been utterly charming, but to see the painstaking care, and literal years of work and study Corb put into bringing Mietta back to full capacity, really hammers home the genuine, unshakeable love there, and I honestly can't think of a more meaningful send-off for the two of them.

(Also I know it's not *critical* to the wind-down of the story, but I am left a bit curious about what happened to Val after the events of the wedding? I'm not sure if I'm missing clues to that effect, but her tombstone at the end, and the golden apple leave with a few questions that, to your credit, leave me waning more without reducing my enjoyment of what is present.)

Art-wise, y'all continue to display a keen sense of exactly the level of detail needed to best keep the story rolling, and a sense of how to make those details the most visually interesting. There's some delicious expressions going on here (Newton's many shit-eating faces, Mietta's little moment of being introduced as the girlfriend, Satraxia's varied looks of anguish and rage), all accomplished with an economy of detail I can only hope to be capable of in my own art. Your backdrops are applied with just the right frequency, and used especially well in choice action shots (Satraxia doing her horizontal leap at the top of page 12 is a favorite of mine from this round.

(on that note, I enjoyed the proliferation of background detail in the first few pages after the timeskip - I felt it conveyed not only the dedication and attention to detail Corb dedicated to Mietta in that time, but also signals a more peaceful existence, post bounty hunting and father)

Awesome work, here and consistently, round-to-round, this whole tournament, you two have tremendous skill not only in the fundamentals of the comic craft, but in imbuing your stories with real, palpable heart.

Each of these final-round comics is a delicious meal, but you two have cooked up a whole three-course FEAST, and I'm savoring every bite.

First off, I love the partitioning of your styles in different ways throughout the acts. They mesh just well enough to set the indoor/ outdoor portions of part one apart w/o making them too dissonant. The division in act 2 similarly does a nice job of punctuating the separation between Merc and Val, while still remaining similar enough that immersion is largely unaffected.

The box motif really adds something special to the comic. They definitely weren't critical, but were a nice point of illustrative continuity that kept the time passing pages, and some of the quieter panels elsewhere, as visually interesting as the more frantic combat scenes.

I like too how the boxes find a subtle echo in the full-page compositions, most strikingly (imo) the page from Val's POV where she finally comes to confront/ return to Merc.

I found the thickness of the speech bubbles a *tiny* bit distracting, especially through the comic's third act. I think the closeness in the line width to the boxes and the panel dividers made them feel too heavy. Not sure that the comic suffers in any overbearing way from it, but maybe play around with some thinner lines in future comics?

You've written multiple stories into this larger comic, any one of which would have been fun on their own, but that come together to form something really special. On both the macro and micro level you've knocked it out of the park, and this is, if you'll forgive the phrase, easily the most cinematic comic of the DBD, insofar as I feel like I've just sat down to watch a really great movie each time I read through it.

There's the smaller sequences, to start. Val and Merc's tug o' gravity fight over the stonework decoration. Their respective montages of time apart, with Val's growing numbness and despondency (random side note - I'm on the fence about the font choice for her narration. It oddly works the further I get into the comic, but for the first page it took me a bit to realize it was her inner monologue and not a narrator's voice - maybe cause it was a serif font? idk), and Merc going off to confront Newton. There's so many wonderfully contained scenes that make up this comic I could probably go on for longer than is useful on each one of them.

(But just to highlight one - the overlay of Corb and Merc discussing a relationship ending while Mietta is literally doing a cleaning purge in the accompanying panels was an inspired choice).

The bits of levity (hehe) throughout are woven in very smoothly, such that they feel fully natural with the plot, or make for well-timed punctuation to the tenser moments (I fully gut-laughed at Val's "this never happens" moment). The complete evaporation of these moments in the third act is another strong choice, as it lends dramatic weight to the whole "conversation-gone-deadly-wrong" conceit.

The story beat here that I find the most challenging is Merc's decision to shoot Corb in the apartment. Even taking into account here no doubt harried state of mind, it feels really tough to reconcile that she would shoot Corb over what *barely* feels like an ultimatum. It's a tough assessment to make because I really do enjoy the sort of Fargo-meets-Carnage setup where innocuous situations go deadly just because someone said the wrong thing, or because of a deadly miscommunication, but I'm still not sure, even after a few read-throughs, that I'm fully convinced by the impetus for this lynchpin action.

That said, I want to emphasize that I *really* like the third act conceptually, and in most of its execution. After Jade dies I had the classic "...huh, there's still a lot of pages left" moment, because I had genuinely forgot over the course of the second act that Corb and Mietta also had to die, per the DBD rules. I cited Hawley/ the Coen Brothers and Polanski above, but I really am a fan of these bottle situations that illustrate the peril in the escalation of matters that otherwise could have been contained at a conversational level. Corb and Mietta's deaths here feel so brutal, swift and pointless, but it's perfectly in line for how the scene feels like it should shake down, and Val's slow walk out to join Merc at the end is nothing short of heartbreaking (and another great use of the boxy framing).

Going a bit out of order here, but I do also want to congratulate you on how the deaths were paced out in this comic; the pacing is overall tremendously and deftly balanced, and having characters die at or as a result of the climax each time went a long way in selling the slower overall cadence of this story.

Of all the comics in the final round, yours is a standout in making me want to go back to re-read the earlier installments. I don't consider the round-to-round continuity to be the most important part of these comics, but I do appreciate it greatly as someone who loves the worldbuilding side of OCTs the most.

Also, on the topic of world-building, loved the little easter eggs here and there (the Klowe Merses cameo is seen and much enjoyed <3)

My heartfelt kudos on finishing out this tournament STRONG. The two of you as a team demonstrated a genuinely impressive range for story framing and telling with your entries, and I'm more excited than ever to see what you each have in store for us in future comics.

Y'all are bringing out the BIG blasts and fisticuffs for the final round! I approve whole-heartedly~~~

Very tidy, straightforward story here for the most part. I appreciate the consistency of Jade and Satraxia's showdowns, insofar as they keep boiling down to face-on violence despite the best-laid plans of everyone they encounter. The escalation of damage throughout the rounds reaches a terrific climax here, and should there be a season two I shudder to think what destruction they'll work.

The framing of a long-running anime that you've been diligently putting to work the whole tournament long serves really well here, as your able to work Val, Merc, Corb, and Mietta in pretty easily with no need to really dig into anything beyond their names and skill sets. Everyone's motives for being present flow naturally from the dialogue, which moves at a good clip for most part (more on that later).

The pacing gets a little iffy for me in a couple spots, where I think you correctly identified that some breathing room between action pieces were needed, but perhaps could have used that breathing space to more directly serve the larger story. Merc and Val feeding Satraxia, and Corb getting chewed out for messing up Jade's fight make sense in a vacuum, but feel a bit out of place in the larger story (I'm hard-pressed to say I even agree that Corb specifically did anything to mess up the fight early on - she and Mietta crash the scrap together, and it's Val who ultimately brings the initial clash to an end). I'm not one to say that every piece of a comic needs to be optimized to serving a larger point, but some of these things came close to, or did in fact, introduce hiccups to really immersing myself into the comic.

I'm a bit torn on the deaths of the opponent OCs in this one; Corb's death feels much too pat; almost insultingly so after we saw Val and Merc at the very least put Satraxia on the ropes briefly. *Their* deaths, by contrast, honestly feel drawn-out to the point of poor taste, another part of the comic where I feel the need for more elongated pacing was called for, but maybe taken a breath too far.

Mietta hits a fair balance between the two, and I like that her death comes last, because it feels the most cathartic of the four, and, given what kills her, feels the most consequential.

And speaking of Mietta's death, I like that there's no hesitation for Satraxia to put herself between Jade and the blast. For two characters who can't help but do all their talking with their fists, it feels right.

(Side note - *are* Jade and Satraxia supposed to be about to die at the end? The ambiguity isn't really a weakness of the comic either way, but I am more than a little curious)

The art is nicely even-keeled throughout the comic, and your colors do a great service to the anime finale aesthetic I'm assuming y'all were aiming for. The big blasts and building-dropping look appropriately awe-inspiring, of course (love the angle where Val is revealed to be the one lifting up the building, and the final city-leveling blast with the mietta-charged sword), but the small touches go a long way too; Mietta cleaning up bean spill in the background of Jade and Corb's back-and-forth, the circular tears in Jade and Satraxia's clothing that makes them echo one another visually as they lie side-by-side...all terrific.

The life you get out of the consistent and lively colors throughout helps the comic stand apart for this final round, in addition to bolstering the look (tm). Mietta and Satraxia's energy blasts get a crucial differentiation and added intensity from the coloring, and it keeps the ruined cityscape from seeming overly-bleak, which might not have served the serious-but-slapstick vibe of the comic as well.

There's a few spots where I'm a bit challenged to say confidently how a bit of action plays out, or what the purpose of a certain scene is. Satraxia and Jade clashing in the opening two pages, for example, gets tricky because I feel like it can be read as either Corb and Mietta touching down on a bolt between them and knocking them apart, or (because of how everyone's position's line up) that their attacks created the balst that forced them apart, and corb/ mietta just happened to arrive in time with that.

There's some great reaction faces and poses throughout here. Right in the opening pages, I got a chuckle out of Jade shouting at C and M anime style, and Corb's flailing reactions to getting thrown off-balance on pages 3 and 4 (the shot of her shielding/ clinging to Mietta was a very cute touch tho, I must admit~~~)

One final note - I appreciate the small touches in Satraxia's posing and expression on the last panel. Whatever she's emoting (I don't have the words for it right now) is a great mixture of resignation/ contentment/ exhaustion, and the tail around the leg is a very cute touch. I know I dug into the expressions a bit above, but that page was a standout in the face department for me.

Nicely done all around you've both been Oculama standouts since day one; and this fun and high-fueled finale to this season of interstellar cops and robbers is yet another bullet on that CV ;)

With excellent, consistent art as always and plenty of well-done action, this was a brisk and enjoyable read from start to finish. The opponents' characterization was a bit light, but forgivable in the context of the episodic nature of the story so far.

That said, the payoff to Satraxia's and Jade's relationship felt jarring and unearned.

As much as I adore hero/villain will-they-won't-they, it just didn't quite land for me. What it boils down to, I think, is the way Satraxia's misdeeds veered away from the cartoonish into the gratuitous. That's not a bad thing in a vacuum, to be clear. The way she killed Val and Mercy was absolutely horrific, and CleanWholesomeFun and Footini deserve credit for the execution. Corb's and Mietta's deaths were also phenomenal gut-punches; Corb getting wiped from the face of the earth in a single panel contrasted beautifully with Mietta's dramatic last stand.

It's the transition from that to the cute ending, Jade seemingly happy as a clam after watching friendly associates get atomized, that lost me.

I'll admit that this is very subjective on my part but, well, a review has to be subjective if it's from the heart. It was a terrific run and there's so much about this comic that's laudable. I just couldn't follow it over the last hurdle.

Your winner by unanimous (brain cell) decision. From tying together and resolving each fighter's storyline to landing the emotional beats with pinpoint accuracy to once again showing off an absolute mastery of spot blacks, this is gold medal material.

I've been hyperbolic enough about jg's and Horo's work, so I'll keep myself restrained this time. The way they brought Satraxia, Newton, and Corb together to set up the conflict was brilliant, I loved everyone's dynamics with each other, and reading the last few pages was the closest I've come to full-on sobbing. It all worked for me, from the visceral action to the small but precious touches like Val's grave being visibly fresher than Mercy's.

There were some rough edges in the line work and the missing backgrounds did nag at me as I went, but the highs would make me forgive far worse sins than that. Perfect landing.

The ambition on display here was staggering and, for the most part, fully realized. Taking the time to really go into how Val and Mercy responded to the breakup instead of just doing a quick collage was absolutely the right call. There's so much to be said for letting those sorts of things breathe, steadily building the same oppressive air of malaise that the characters are living under.

The blink-and-you'll-miss-it visual gags were also on point, as usual. I see you, Cool S.

That said, for as much as I loved the journey this comic took us on, the inciting and final incidents just didn't quite hit for me. This might be the chronic fatigue talking but I just can't quite grasp what Mercedes was trying to accomplish when she pulled the building down. I couldn't follow the escalation from futzing with a bird to mass property damage .

Similarly, as delightfully soul-crushing as the finale was, Mietta going straight to murder that early in the conversation didn't feel (and I wish I had a less ironic word here) organic.

This was another phenomenal effort from two of the best in the business, but for me, the killshots were just off the mark.

this comic is pretty interesting, 69 pages drawn with a rough yet simple style yet able to tell where they are and what happens is worth the read. Also, I remember y'all both managed to finish before the other two. Whoo boy, I think the moral takeaway that I can get from this comic, is that people can corrupt and destroy for the sake of love. You are both able to draw the complexities of all characters' situations and emphasize changes within the characters. From a narrative standpoint, the story follows three simple chapters based on Newton's Laws, condensed into one season finale. the intricacy in the plot, and how each character tangles up is what makes this story worth of attention. However, the sacrifices that I don't like about this comic are some characters like Jade Shinigami & Miss Beretta acted out of their characters for the sake of what the plot armor and for Mercy & Valentine to get dirty kills. I feel it would be better If, from the beginning, all characters' alignment differences were hinted at rather, than, trying to follow the plot linearly. Because some character goals and motivations why would they prefer to do such a thing is still unclear. This comic is great! but tangled in some very steep competitions and complicated narratives. But despite all of that this entry is still a powerhouse that needs to be remembered.

This entry is stunning yet interesting, for a penultimate episode, you both serve each character's loose ends perfectly. Except, one character that I felt a bit unfortunate because she's not in the present day anymore, is Jade Shinigami. Yet, it elucidates the motivation of the partner for her setting. You both capture the character's emotions perfectly, with the right usage of silence and language. The only letdown I get from this comic is that Mercedes & Valentine are killed offscreen, which is anticlimactic coming from a "Death Tournament" involving bounty hunters, but able to redeem it by showing the good qualities of both Mercedes & Valentine. Speaking of both of the gals' lore, I liked how you Incorporated Newton as the final boss of the entry, once again, utilizing every available lore. Overall this is a nice comic that wraps up the whole tournament with a sufficient amount of detail to the lore.

I'm impressed, everything is wrapped up perfectly without any time skips. Once again, you guys put Satraxia and Jade as the main attraction here. I like the way how you portray Valentine and Mercy as ragtag bandits that wanted to team up with Satraxia only for them to get selfishly murdered. It is a nice character addition to their complexities & shows their Anti-heroisms. I like how both sides are breaking evenly on a six-man team face-off but still, center around Jade & Satraxia as the main ones. The flaw of this entry is that the artwork, despite it is the only comic that was colored, was cartoonishly rough to the previous two entries. This round's entry is worth a shonen season finale, and y'all work is living up to it!

I like the way this comic starts. A lot! But I'm not so sure I really like the way you do the transitions between each group - especially page 11 gets hard to follow. Lingering longer on each of the groups and going for a more "meanwhile, with so-and-so" approach would work better, I think, but this comment is *mostly* personal taste. I would have loved to see more panels per page as well - or at least less white gutterspace.
I like the sound effects a lot, good job on that. And the death(s) of Valentine and Mercedes were absolutely gnarly, good job on that.
Overall, I think I, as a reader, am missing some context for a lot of interactions. This comic is almost solely combat, which fine in its own right, but I do miss some preamble for Satraxia's "pacification" in the end - she's been singlemindedly hurting and maiming the entire comic, and not once has she shown any real interest in Jade. Arguably, she greets her, but this still just feels like a teasing quip, and not hidden affection. The characters feel flat, and I understand that it's a side effect of the short format, but I do miss some more weight behind each of the characters in this comic.

The setup in this comic is bonkers, I love it! Good decision to frame this around a wedding. Newton as a gravity wizard is such a good concept, and I know you two didn't come up with it but you use it really well. What is particularly good about this comic is that it feels like a longer story where everything before the "start" has been cropped out, and the reading experience really benefits from it, it's been utilised super well. I think the art style switching between super crisp and kind of sketchy takes away from the overall impression, especially the pages in the start when the story hasn't yet fully started - the time skip is easier to look past, as the story is over by then.

This comic goes extremely hard. It's got the length to support the amount of plot in it, and you demonstrate well your character writing chops. As I read it I do miss the other characters a lot, it feels like this is mostly about your own two guys, but you do manage a satisfactory payoff in the end. Sometimes people just... die from a fuck-up. It's good. I have to sit with this comic for a while, I think. Your collaborating on the art is really good, with pages where one of you works on the backgrounds and the other the figures, I love that kind of thing! This one's a winner in my book.
Unrelated to judging the comic, since I'm wrapping this up and I know all of you can see all the reviews: I really like how you all split the characters up into different constellations. Very good.

Really strong entry! The colors really popped and the action was incredibly fun and readable! The pacing and character dynamics were super strong, with a nice interplay between characters and pretty clear goals! I think I felt a little bit of mood whiplash whenever one of the Big Deaths hit though. The intensity and grimness of the violence felt a little bit jarring against the otherwise fairly lighthearted banter and aesthetics of the comic. That said, I think it overall came together in a lovely package. I think the ending was a tad abrupt, and given that it's the finals I might have appreciated a little more denouement. That said, it's a really lovely package when all is said and done.

Incredibly rich character beats and quintessential action! I really like the reveals and the pacing of the story and how you played with expectations and tropes to put together such a charming narrative between Corb and Miss Beretta. The visual gags and action panels both hit like gangbusters and the way the character relationships tie together is just magical. The artwork has a few rough edges but thankfully that's a thing I'm into? The simple black and white allows for some incredibly graphic and visceral visual language that I just can't get enough of. The climactic action sequence has some solid impact but the real show is definitely the emotional climax and throughline that you nail beautifully with that final timeskip. What a great ride.

Despite the amount of chaos and huge variety of motivations and personalities at play, I think it's amazing how well you were able to keep the core of the story focused on the rich, and complex relationship between Val and Mercedes. I think the sheer volume of emotional energy and drama that is both on the page and fills the margins with subtext and subtle expressions is really mindblowing. There was something very Cohen Brothers about the juxtaposition of very genuine human drama next to sudden bursts of violence and death. If there's one thing that you guys consistently nail with these it's the internality of the characters and how how much conflict runs under the surface of their choices and actions. Tremendous work.

What a wonderful finale. The art in this is some of the best we have seen thus far in Oculama in my opinion. The consistency and clarity of it shows the strength of y'alls collaboration. To have all 27 pages be completed to the same level, fully colored, is a great achievement. Excellent use of backgrounds. I also really enjoy some of the little touches like the interstitial panels, where there is an extra gutter making a tiny panel. There is something quite fascinating there to be explored as a comic technique. The writing is fun as well, very breezy and also quite clear, the stakes both physical and emotional are well laid out. Overall, in my opinion, a faultless example of an OCT comic! Very well done!

Oops, three bangers... Another one I can simply only gush about. What a monumental achievement in terms of raw output... but it is all necessary, all wonderful. Not a single ounce of padding here in service of a stunt, just a huge mountain of great comics writing and art gifted to us the undeserving audience for free... You both deserve so much more than the mere accolades of your peers for vital, interesting, affecting work of this caliber. Truly, you are both out here elevating the form of what an 'OCT comic' is, what it can mean, what it can look like... What emotional highs (and what emotional lows) can be mined... This should be studied as the masterwork it is. We're not worthy!

I feel totally inadequate to review this! Y'all are both operating on a level far above my skill. I can only respond to this as a total fanboy. I devoured this. What a huge and exciting work, so worthy of a double team death tournament finale. Both of your contributions to the art are so vibrant, alive, exciting, they sing together like two distinct instruments in harmony. The writing is everything, funny, charming, silly, but also at the same time poetic, deeply emotional. Epic in scope - what a great ending. In awe of the level of work that so clearly went into this. I look forward to our rematches >:)

I liked the art! It was very expressive and fun and colorful. All the fight scenes are done really well. Lots of great backgrounds, the whole comic is fun to look at. I also really liked a lot of the character expressions.

Mercedes and Valentine's death felt kind of weird to me? I like the idea of using their powers for the death, but the goriness felt over the top to me and I would have liked to see them have a moment together before the end, or go out in a cool way like Corb and Mietta. I also felt like the ending with Jade and Satraxia holding hands at the end didn't really feel earned? I would have liked to see them actually hash out their emotions.

I liked how you wove the different characters together with friendships and pre-existing relationships. There's a lot of fun dialogue and I like the little actions you put in the background, like Mietta and Corb smooching.

Thank you for Corb in a fancy suit (￣▽￣*) Loved how much of a scumbag Newton was and how he was used to tie M+V together with Corb and Mietta. Lots of really good expressions and action. I really liked the use of screentones and big solid blacks in your inks.

I think coming back to Corb years later with her finally able to fix Mietta is cool, but her becoming a scientist felt like a little bit of a stretch? It also felt like there were a few pages with a lot of white space that felt a little empty in comparison to other parts of the comic.

I really like how Jade and Satraxia's conflict was handled in flashbacks, but it still was woven through the story and had so much impact on everything. Really good impactful last scene for Mercedes and Valentine.

Jesus christ so many pages. You two are insane. The length and the three act structure of the comic give it kind of a completed movie like feel, if that makes sense? I like how you aren't afraid to get into difficult emotions and relationship stuff. Really great dialogue all around.

I think I would have liked to see the non V+M couples get a little more focus, just because this is a death battle.

I really like how a lot of the fighting feels grounded/bodies mashing violently together, it stands out from more anime style fights. Lots of great background gags, and I like the lore build-up of Veil. I really liked how you got creative with paneling in a couple of places. I liked how you mixed your styles together more at the start, and then as they seperated you drew your own pages.

Damn, that has to be the most brutal and sadistic character execution(s) in this death tourney. Pretty inventive means of escape too! I felt that the plot and the characters were a bit one note compared to the other comics this round. I can understand the desire to shoot big lasers but ultimately that isn't usually as engaging as snarky banter or learning something new about the characters. The comic is very grounded - there is never any confusion over where a character is thanks to consistent backgrounds and scene setting. This can be a tough thing to keep up for the whole comic, but you've done a great job here. I've also gotta hand it to your shading, which was also consistant throughout the comic and helped give the characters some physical weight and depth.

As always, lots of great kinetic action on display here! And a hearty dose of pathos, what a bittersweet ending! I like that this was framed around a team-up against the wizard-fiend Newton. How each character was weaved into the same narrative was very enjoyable and none of it felt forced at all. It is a shame that Jade got a bit of the short end of the stick in terms of screen time, but I like what was done narratively with the character. Was she mouthing 'I love you' in her final moments? Was I able to tell just from the MOUTH SHAPES?? If so, that is incredible. Also really loved that expanding/retracting black hole trick Newton did. The ending is really sweet too, at least one of these couples had a happy ending (eventually).

Birds were harmed in the making of this comic, zero out of five.

Ok, so that tug of war with the big concrete bird head as a visual metaphor for their deteriorating relationship and escalating emotions before everything crumbles? That's the medium used to it's greatest strength. Val and Merc breaking up while Jade mourns, ignored? Double gut-punch. And there's that great lonely Merc on page 16 without even a panel border to surround her. As raw and emotional as the comic gets, there's always humour sprinkled throughout. I love the little mailbox below Newton's floating observatory. Val's inability to...perform. The little references to the tourney's past comics. I could keep going on but basically I think this comic tells a compelling narrative in a very effective way. I could never have anticipated it ending this way.

I enjoy the art style but the humour did not click with me. The sequence killing off mercedes and valentine felt a bit stretched out for the sake of the cutaway back and forth gag.

The story has a similar pitfall I find bounty hunting stories often do where all the characters show up because of a bounty and so there's a big fight in an environment that could be changed to anywhere else and nothing would be different and that's all that really happens. Perhaps I have just seen it too many times in various OCTs. With the build up of these characters from past rounds and this being the finale of a tourney, I believe the plot should be a bit more involved and its characters show more of their, well, character that have been built over past comics.

Overall, it was neat looking but I felt unsatisfied.

Oh my GODS I was screaming in the leadup to corb all tiidied up! It's so WRONG!

There are so many good faces in this. I got a little lost in some of the fight scenes but I often find them hard to parse in comics in general though. This was beautiful. The ending was so sweet. Wonderful art and a wonderful story tying up all the buildup from the past two rounds into a worthy conclusion.

Stand out moments: The panels leading up to the corb suit reveal and the satraxia double murder panels. The former made me just scream NO! and getting audible emotions out of me is impressive. The latter is just a very cool parallel for a person whose fallen so far.

Oh no....

What a depressing comic. I'm genuinely upset. A constant lingering on a breakup and an incredibly fucked up ending.

I did find it took a while, even too long at some points, but the length serves to enhance the ending. The long build up works. I also struggled a bit with the lore about newton and veil in this one. That would be this comics weakest points I think.

Stand out moment: the panels where Val is standing emotionless the same way across multiple panels starting on page 31. And of course the uh. The ending. Wow. I know its a death tournament but that was brutal. Amazing.

Ahh, this comic is such a blast of action right from the start. The violence never quite lets up, but the ebb and flow of the brutality keeps things from getting stagnant. The dual scenes of Satraxia crushing Mercedes and Jade feels like it doesn't really work, the imbalance of energy takes me out while reading. But the focus gets right back in afterwards, so it's a slight slight. The absolute beatdown ends with a nice relief of tension, rather than being incredibly dramatic or tragic, it feels a little silly and lighthearted: a perfect fit for Jade and Satraxia. Wonderful!

The blend of characters here is sublime, everything feels naturally placed but so well integrated with each other. There's so much accomplished in this regard with the visual storytelling: little reminders of characters' quirks and how their more fantastical rules will play off each other. The culmination of this strong action and storytelling in Jade's proclamation is great, but it feels like the comic loses a bit of steam here until the epilogue begins. Val and Mercedes are both giving strong performances here, so it's still quite nice. The ending is a strong payoff to all the conflict and pain, everything earned. Lovely!

Wow, this comic has such strong pacing, everything is so tightly controlled as the characters collapse around each other. The paneling especially rolls that tension around on a knife's edge, it's harsh and painful and cramped in really expert ways. The third act twist with Corb and Mietta escalating things into a full on battle feels somewhat contrived, but the payoff to the characters and the build up around that choice are so strong it hardly matters. the world feels big, in that there are so many parallel stories crashing around each other, but small in that every little character and action counts. It's great!