Comic Creator Challenge

I've been thinking about this a lot over the last few days, and I'm inclined to agree with Chris's comment that simple is better when it comes to the specifications.

I think that, going forward, we should have an alternating system whereby in one round the theme is narrative and in the next it's stylistic or visual. I figure it'll make it easier for people to mesh their own style of work into the round's requirements.

So. As it seems to meet with general approval, I think "gutter" should be the next round's theme. After that, we can decide on a stylistic theme and work from there.

Yeah, there seems to be some good interest in round 3 at the moment so I'm wary of letting it die off too much. SO.

Round 3 officially starts the 22nd of May, with the deadline being the 12th of June - that's 3 weeks to create and submit your entry.

Theme is "Gutter", and there are no format restrictions. Any page design and any colour palette is acceptable. I would suggest each entry is limited to 6 pages or less, but if you have an idea that involves more than that, go for it.

I'll post up a full list of everyone who's said they're taking part on Sunday night, to get a feel for things. I'm also trying to think of a few other ways of getting more people interested; I'll post up when I've got something more concrete.

Nope, all you have to do to be included is send in an entry before or by the 12th of June. Keeping track of who's makes it a bit easier is all.

Good to hear

While I'm thinking about this, one of the things I'd like to do to expand the idea a little is have some extra background on the people who take part and how they put together their entries. It'll probably be easiest to have as a feature for the "winner" as decided by the poll, and I think it'd be interesting for everyone to share that kind of information. I'll work out some sort of format for it and post up my ideas in a few days, but in the meantime if anyone else has any suggestions on what they'd like to see or any other things we could add to it, let me know.

I've just checked my mail and found that the links have, indeed, gone banjaxed. I won't be able to do anything about it until this afternoon but I will get it fixed and post an update here.

Looking forward to round 3's entries but I'm a bit behind schedule on mine - have to crack on with it tonight...

If you can get it scanned, email it to me (fyshbowlcomics@gmail.com) and I'll arrange including it in this round's entries on the site.

It's no problem, the more entries the better. After your second round entry I was hoping you'd take part again

/me looks shiftily around

...

Yes, it's nearly done. I'm sorry for all the delays, it's in no small part due to disorganisation on my behalf. It will be up by tomorrow evening and we can start discussing the entries (and the theme for the next round - yay!).

Right - sorry for all the delays with this, folks, but round 3 is now online. I'll post up another poll in the next couple of days so you can vote for your favourite entry. As ever, let me know if there's any glitches in the site, I have a couple of updates still pending. Anyone who's submitted an entry and wants to have a profile or website listed against their name, send me on the details and I'll put one up for you.

We could do it various ways - limit the size of the gutters, limit the size of the panels, limit the number of panels, have a structure consisting of a set number of panels per row/page...it'll make things fiddly from a design perspective, but I'm intrigued by the idea after having to junk my original 9-page idea for the last round and re-do it onto a 1-page grid layout.

Oh good, I'm glad to see it's not just me that likes the photo notion. I like the idea of incorporating aspects of the photo as plot points - it does make it more interesting. In fact, how about this:

Starting point is a (suitable) photo, with specified key points (eg persons/objects depicted, overall theme, colour palette, layout, use of lighting...). At least one of the specified key points has to be used in the context of the entries, in such a way that the comic could be understandably linked to the picture in some way. Anyone who wants to can use the photograph itself in their entry, but the entry still has to incorporate one or more aspects of the picture as some sort of plot point.

I'm kind of hazy about leaving "theme" or "mood" as aspects of the photo without explicitly defining them, because for a lot of photos they can still be open to interpretation (one man's photo of last week's happy summer picnic is another man's reminder of the wife he lost, etc). Although actually finding a photo that's worth using and is free could be difficult. (That said, going forward we can always have another round where people can take their own pictures and submit them).

Anyway, it looks like people are up for making things a little bit more experimental which is cool, so any ideas you have, throw them out there. (Another one that occured to me, although it'll probably prove difficult between scripting, storyboarding, and legal issues, was the comic equivalent of music videos - pick a song you like and make a comic that you think goes well with it. Though given that use of lyrics now requires you to compensate the artist, this could end up being costly or generally dodgy...)

Incidentally, regarding the design aspect - I've really liked the entries we've seen so far and I'm happy that people taking part seem to be enjoying the idea as much as I am, but don't worry too much about constraining your work as such to meet the requirements of print. I'm at the early stages of planning a new website for the whole endeavour which will better suit what we want to do (don't hold your breath; at the earliest it'll be several weeks before anything is moving with this, and realistically it's more likely to be at least 2 months), and one of the things I want to do is shamelessly ape what Chris did with the This Way Up site - namely, create virtual comics in Flash which people can download, so that they can read all the entries from any given round in one collection. The print idea is definitely not being discarded, but we have plenty of time yet and if necessary we can use some creative design approaches for the page layouts to get around it.

On another note (yeah I know, this is long, but, well, that's me ) - I've been making a point to ensure that anyone who submits an entry is listed as the author of their respective work, and I will continue doing so. Does anyone have any objections if I put out feelers to folk like Mongrel about using the artwork that's been submitted? I figure the worst they can say is no, and it'll get people wider exposure and might also get more people interested. What are your thoughts?

Briony Noh wrote:

Not so sure about the song idea for all the reasons you listed, unless you don't actually quote the song - possibly the title, but that's it. The challenge then would be to recreate the message/mood/flavour of the song in graphical form without using any of the words or music. Limitations I can see with this, though, include that not everyone has the same musical tastes, so the song would probably have to be either a) well known and thus probably overworked by now or b) one of several choices which I think might just defeat the purpose of seeing how different people explore similar themes.

Yeah, I was thinking that for the song thing each person would need to pick their own song, which makes it a bit mucky....still, might play around with it at a later time though.

Briony Noh wrote:

But another less tricky concept might be to rewrite a fairy-tale as though it really happened. Or choose a news item and fictionalise it (obviously you can't use the Sun or the Star. That would give you too much of a head start). But these are probably writing workshop ideas more than comics. I don't know. What do you think?

I can see what you mean about the writing aspect, but I think it might be worth doing anyway. Part of making comics is writing in any case, and with these sort of things you get the opportunity to really work at the design angle, which is always good fun. I suppose the main thing is to make sure people don't just focus on the story and let the artwork suffer for it...

Briony Noh wrote:

I've never had a problem dealing with wider exposure (my case comes up on Thursday week, but honestly I thought it said 'Naturist Beach' not 'Do Not Discard Litter On The Beach' - you can see how easy it would be to get it wrong) so if Mongrel or anybody else is interested, so am I, even though I don't get who they are. I followed the link and I still don't get it. Probably won't let my mum visit it, though.

Mongrel do a freebie magazine every month which has a lot of the material listed on the site - they have carried a good few cartoons and interesting bits of artwork in the past so they might be interested in using some of the work submitted so far. I'll start badgering them about it and see what they say.

Okey kokey karaoke! Round 4 is now under way!

The subject for this round is "Burning Truth", or if you prefer, any other permutation of the two words/ideas that better suits.

The deadline for entry submission is the 21st of August. While you're working on your entries, bear in mind that Round 5 is going to use a photograph as the starting point so start looking - anything you find or want to suggest, either email it to me or post it as an attachment to a comment in this thread, and we'll decide which one to go with.

I'm mailing everyone who's taken part so far, but poke anyone you know who might be interested with the details.

Onwards!