Tired of reading the same tired story with the same tired character types? Maybe it's time to look at webcomic community collaborations.
Out in the wild wild web, there was a webcomic war that was created… by accident. There are also, dares, comic exercise,and jams. Crossovers have also been done successfully before. Also a quick note that webcomics are being deleted from wikipedia.org
Webcomic Jams have been around a long time, but on comicgenesis they really took off after a small accident.
The Comicgenesis versus Drunkduck war started out as a joke someone put into the wiki. Someone from DrunkDuck found it and then asked in the comicgenesis forums if it was serious, and originally it was just taken as a joke, but then an agreement between the admins of both services took place, allowing for the ComicGenesis versus DrunkDuck war Jam.
Unfortunately, most of DrunkDuck's side of the war was lost when DrunkDuck's service was deleted by their hosting provider shortly after interest in the war died down. Hence Comicgenesis won on a technicality. Since this jam, there has been an unwritten rule for ComicGenesis jams that multiple contributors to the Jam will also save a copy of all the pages, just in case.
The two most successful Jams on ComicGenesis post-DD war are the Fairy Tale Jam (completed) and the currently running MajorJam.
The goal of a Jam is to produce a webcomic with as many different people while trying to keep a coherent story. The above listed jams work because of one person holding the reins to make sure it reaches an end. There have also been many more jams that just trailed off without an end.
The first "jam" I ever saw was the WenProv II from Josh Lesnicks comic "Wendy" forums, unfortunately nearly all the images are lost to time (March 2001.) Again recommending that all collaborations be saved by multiple people.
Webcomic dares, are a new (for comicgenesis) attempt at getting people to draw… well anything. The goal being to draw whatever the previous poster dares, and use whatever interpretation you want.
Webcomic exercise, is similar, where you have a set of rules and 30 minutes to draw a comic with those rules, use any interpretation you want. Nobody can see the results until the posting time limit is up.
Crossovers are probably the oldest community based collaboration, often between one or more webcomic artists. The largest one that I remember being the "Great Framed Escape" where the characters from a few webcomics were chased through several webcomics on then keenspace.com (another example of why collaborations need multiple people to keep a copy,) this was unfortunately lost to a system crash.
Crossovers also have a downside, since they become canon with your webcomic, you have to leave that part of the comic accessible through the links it was created for, or better yet, let the other webcomic author involved keep a copy of your part of the strip leading upto, including and a bit after the crossover point. Should the webcomic ever be released in print, that part of the story needs to be included.
Final topic of the morning. Did you know that editing anything on Wikipedia about something you create is considered "Vanity" ? Many webcomic entries have been deleted from Wikipedia due to the authors of the webcomics going in and correcting things about their comics. Now, everyone wants to have the most accurate information possible in an wikipedia entry, but apparently being the author of the webcomic excludes you from editing it or risk the entire thing being deleted.
My suggestion, is create a new wiki entry on comixpedia.org and if you also happen to be on comicgenesis, there is a wiki there too. Put the correct information up there, and let the information migrate over to the wikipedia without your intervention. Problem solved, no more Vanity flags.
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