The webcomics blog about webcomics

Feats, Strengthy And Otherwise

Contests! Want fame, acclaim, and the imprimatur of the most Mancunian of all known webcomickers? Then enter the 2008 Scary Go Round Feats of Strength competition. Alternately, if fancy words and skellingtons scare you, try this on for size, from Ben Lehman:

The Game Chef game design contest is a very large annual tabletop RPG design contest, with pretty deep roots in the small press / indepedent RPG design community. This year, for our contest, we’re holding an Artists First! contest. This means that we’re asking artists to draw illustrations for a game that doesn’t exist, then we’re going to ask designers to design those games based on the illustrations.

It’s a good opportunity for small time artists who want to make some business contacts for illustration, and I know that there’s a fair number of those out there in webcomicland.

In other news, I assume everybody’s seen the cover art for the forthcoming Great Outdoor Fight book over at Heidi’s place, right? Gotta say, it’s a little human-focused for my tastes. Perhaps our society is both hetero-normative and anthro-centric, but at least one cat would have been nice.

Finally, our discussion of webcomics and the economics of free is winding down, but it’s just heating up over at The Daily Cartoonist. My favorite part is where Wiley Miller (a cartoonist) tells David Willis (a cartoonist) to make his point “without the snark” (which is the stock-in-trade of … cartoonists). The best points are presently being made by Kris Straub, and it looks like it might not devolve into a vicious cycle of Get off my lawn, whippersnappers! vs. As soon as you stop making buggy whips, Old Guy!, but one can hope.

Thanks for posting! I’ve been trying to think of ways to get the indie game design community and the webcomic community together for a while (they are similar in a lot of ways: bootstrappy independent artists working over the internet) and this one seems to be taking off.

If people have questions, I encourage you to e-mail me (at taogames@gmail.com or gamechef08@gmail.com) and ask.

yrs–
–Ben

I’m trying to be civil over there, but it’s hard. I’m losing a lot of respect for our distinguished counterparts. The blindness displayed is no less than willful, and it fills me with an abiding shame.

I don’t want it to be “print vs. webcomics,” but pro-web arguments are met with “yeah, but that won’t work” in spite of enormous evidence that it is currently working.

I’ve been constantly refreshing that thread all day, and I’m still confused as to what the central question/conflict/concern is. I’ve read the posts from both sides, and, call me biased, but the posts from the webcomic folks are more intelligent and less ambiguous, but the other side is either not getting it, refusing to get it, or operating on a different plane of existence.

Kris, I think you guys are fighting a losing battle. Remember, a lot of those same guys wouldn’t allow “webcartoonists” into the National Cartoonist Society– but those same guys sure want to know how it’s being done. If you gave them a cookie cutter plan to follow, they’d still say it was make-believe.

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