SUMMARY
Renders are great.
Writing is ok.
The combination is not fruitful.
WRITING
Average. The characters are all caricatures, none of them feel like real people and all appear to be characterized by a desire to degrade others. The relationship between the protagonist and her husband is never really established before it is destroyed; it's hard to empathize with betrayal if no trust has been built, first, and the husband is introduced as being a deplorable human being to begin with. Finally, some statements are just completely ridiculous - who on Earth would install tinted windows so that you can look from the outside in but not the inside out, and who would believe such a lie?
To be clear, this is not "tl;dr: gimme the pictures". I like reading. I have paid for, read, and liked erotic novels, and some of them have even been on the same theme. This is not a gratuitous critique of the length or the genre.
LAYOUT
I like the vertical format for a graphic novel. The split screens are neat. It looks pretty good on a tablet. I have enjoyed similar formats, for instance by
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- who in my view is criminally under-appreciated, so go fund him.
However: if you want to make a graphic novel, use text boxes / bubbles, use the layout to guide the viewer's eye and frame the shots accordingly - do not cover the art and its careful arrangement in a wall of text!
COMBINATION
There is no synergy between the text and the pictures. It is actively counterproductive to copy-paste an entire story on top of pictures.
The most obvious example is lengthy description of visual cues. Why keep entire paragraphs describing things and people, e.g. the two dresses in the window, when we can see them in gorgeous and stunning detail with one glance? Not only is the picture hidden, the text feels redundant; this is active encouragement for readers to skip it, and may engender resentment of the waste of time if it happens too often. I would recommend either cutting or re-writing in a completely different style, e.g. as comments or questions made by the people on screen speaking in the first person, not lengthy exposition in the third.
In short, this first version takes little to no advantage of the potential combination of the two media, and the result gives the appearance of being lazy - and I say this with sadness because I know that there's a lot of work in both writing and rendering, so it's really a shame that the sum of the two parts ends up being closer to 1 than 2 because the way they are combined actively detracts from each of them.
