=O not bad at all, I'm glad to see you stepping a bit out of your comfort zone.

The new shading technique works really well for you, especially in the first half of the comic. The use of darks and lights really makes the figures pop in some panels. This effect diminishes a bit near the end when the background grays start to diminish the bold and powerful contrast effect. The background gray seems darker there, but in retrospect it could just be because Faw got lighter without his shirt.

Personally, though, I think the final panel is one of the weakest. You had a good thing going with the black-gray-white color scheme, and branching out into color so abruptly really makes your lack of knowledge on the topic obvious.

I think Dev mentioned this a few pages back, but a lot of the color experimentation I've been doing myself through this thread was based off some things I read off John K's blog. While I'd hardly consider him an expert on color and don't agree with a lot of his statements, it's very entertaining to see his analysis of various color schemes. Any of his posts on the subject are worth a look.

The major criticism I have of your last piece is pretty plainly that it's hard for me to follow. Some panels are notably ambiguous: in the "DOM" one near the top the blur effect makes it hard for me to tell who hit who, and in the panel directly below it I can't really tell what is moving. It looks like someone broke through the wall and into the room with the tree, but a few panels later it looks like both Faw and Eirru are back in the room with the stairs. Except there's evidently some tree there too? I don't know. Somewhere a tree got Eirru too. Did Faw's arm suddenly go General Ysengrin in the panel where he heals the little girl?

I've never really thought you were good at handling Eirru's movement and dialogue. I tried to establish her character as something of an antithesis to Faw's more anime-styled "stand still and monologue" (which I definitely poked fun at a lot), and evidently did well enough for it to stand out when you wrote her out of character. It's not very interesting when every character is pretty much like you.

If you have trouble capturing her character it may help if I show my sources. For her dialogue I'd suggest reading Watchmen and paying special attention to the sentence structure of Rorshach's speech, and for her movement/fighting style I'd suggest watching a TF2 Scout tutorial (and ignoring the parts about the pistol). One of Eirru's lines in my second comic is pretty much directly pulled from that video, and the whole idea of avoiding direct combat is pretty central in her actions - especially after Faw starts to get crazy powerful. You can convey a lot about someone by how they stand, how they move, and even how far they stand from other people.

(I guess voting starts now?)