>>218293No you're right, speech bubbles are pointing to the background characters instead of the people speaking. First look through, I thought it was like two people sitting, looking on ahead with people on the beach speaking. The silhouettes are really hard to decipher, I couldn't see the left one until someone else commented that they have glasses on. Then I could finally put the visual puzzle of it together to sort of see a person.
A comic's linework is going to be a lot messier than anything meant for pin-ups like his usual sketches he posts, speed is the name of the game in comic production. But it's really rough as you pointed out on this page. Salt doesn't have a more formal comic studio since he isn't a comic artist. A cleanup step with a cleanup artist is needed to go over the page and get rid of all the line roughness that's showing here. Salt could do it himself, but in the same time he'd spend cleaning, he would be able to produce the entire next page's line work instead. The cleanup step is way below him and his skill. So we're just seeing the results of zero cleanup, a good cleanup artist would have this sorted in 10 mins and looking as nice as his usual sketches.
Salt's all about quality, comics are all about finding the right balance of good-enough quality for speed's necessity, so it's definitely a weak spot for him on the visual side. The not so great hand in the 4th panel and the other stuff is just Salt working at adjusting the dial on his internal quality slider and prioritizing different parts.
On the lettering (dialogue placement, bubbles), just another thing that takes a lot of practice to get good at. The curious case in the 1st panel sticks out, but also check out the 4th panel. The perfect equidistant dialogue bubbles presented in each corner of the panel is a serious challenge to the reader to know which way to head after the top left one. The top right bubble should be moved inward and down some, to have it vertically lower than the first bubble, and nearer towards the middle of the panel to catch the reader's eye before they accidentally skip down to the third bubble in the bottom left. As it is now, there is no indication which way to head for the reader and its just a gamble if they parse fully left-down first or fully left-right first to get the right order now.
It's the little nit-picks like these that are like, "yeeea, does it really matter?" but they do, they add up IMO. It was big enough to get you looking at and scratching your head. S'all good to critique and good feedback.
Overall, there's only a few artists in our fetish working comics full time and regularly falling into these issues to learn from them. And then most readers probably won't care so there's that too. But Salt cares a lot about his craft, so good chance he reads the feedback and keeps it in mind for future pages as he keeps working on comics more. He's already crushing it, scoring a 100/100 and working on picking up extra credit with his comics works too.