GenejokeLol yeah- there are two sorts of unhelpful reviews:
reviewing
Puff-pieces and Tear-downs.
Two different extremes- One is for the benefit of the comic author's ego and possibly to curry favour with them or promote them. The other is for the ego of the reviewer and to entertain the reviewer's audience.
Neither are particularly helpful for improving the quality of the work because that's not the focus. It'd be fantastic if it was, but when it comes to those extremes, it's not.
For example, a site like “your webcomic is bad so you should feel bad” won't give you any insight on how to write a better webcomic, but it MAY entertain you, and if it does then it's done it's main job.
As a working webcomicer, when looking for useful stuff to apply to yourself or pick up pointers on how to better give a review, you'll know to steer clear of reviews where there's an over-abundance of obvious hyperbole (like a silly Yahtze game review), or a clear attitude or thread of bias that runs through the whole thing- as in “this work is like this because the author is a…” and "here is another example of the same sort of thing, the author is obviously…"
A useful critical review, as opposed to an entertaining one, will be quite balanced throughout as the reviewer seeks to evaluate each point on it's own merits: ie. “The art is rendered extremely well, but the detail can overwhelm the action in the scene. The story has a slow pace and is structured quite unevenly, especially toward the end, but the dialogue was punchy and helped build the action” rather than “the art is good, I liked it. The writing is horrible, the author cant write,”
- The latter isn't really balanced it just pits different aspects against one another without properly evaluating them.
Helpful criticism was something we had to do a lot of back when I was doing fine art at Uni :)
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I didn't mean to sound as if I was displeased with all my reviews in the review forum though! From memory some people DID indeed pick up on some issues, and I do appreciate it when people have nice things to say, even if that's not really the place for it.