Advice for book writing.

[Benny The Miraj]

If you want to communicate a mature story, I think the best way to do that is to forego images entirely and leave things up to the imagination of the reader. Once you show your readers the main characters, it can ruin the tone of the story for them. This happens to me a lot when I read books (even very well-written and well-drawn ones) and I usually regret looking up images of the characters. There's very little to gain from adding images and a lot to lose.

Oh hey there, really? Because Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Marjane Satrapi and Warren Ellis would like to say hello.  There is a great deal of merit in graphic literature. 

@Gors See Maus


The problem here OP is that your designs have to match your writing and frankly your designs seem more friendly to a platformer, not a serious graphic novel. I'm all for break the mold but if you are hung up on being more straightforward and by the book "very serious" you need to change your aesthetic to match it.

To be fair, I'm not exactly going for "very serious." I actually want to avoid being too serious, as I feel things that are "very serious" tend to lack emotion and charm. I still want to add a good amount of whimsy and humor. I was more or less just trying to make the story mature enough for readers.

I'm going to try and write the book without putting too much emphasis on what the characters are. Like, for example, I'm thinking of writing in subtle hints as to what the characters species are, like referring to Benny as a "City Rat" every once in a while, without outright confirming the species. That way, people who only want to read about humans can imagine them all as humans, while furries and people who could care less that the characters aren't human can try to imagine the characters for what they are. Is this a good idea?