The webcomics blog about webcomics

Upright Today. Upright Is Good.

  • 1000 strips from Jorge Cham’s PhD, which is the one webcomic I can’t read because it’s too good. Grad school almost sent me into a tower with a scoped rifle, and Cham recreates all the reasons why so very well. Okay, I read it, but it leaves me deeply conflicted, and I am not looking back at my grad school days fondly, got it? I’m not.
  • Unable to find her watercolors, Rënë Ëngström uses a variety of coffees for pigments. The only question I have is, why has well-known coffee addict R Stevens never done this? He doesn’t always work in pixels, you know.
  • Good comments about Threat or Menace — keep them coming and I’ll try to address all concerns in the panel.
  • And finally, I’ve been told by a reader that my right to call myself a “webcomics journalist” (although I believe that “hack pseudo-journo” is the closest I’ve actually come to doing so) is in question if I don’t talk about the Choose Your Own Adventure thing going on over at Ctrl-Alt-Del these days.

    Truthfully, I can’t think of another webcomic doing the CYOA thing so formally before (but that could just be my meds), although one could plausibly argue that reader-involved webcomics could be found in the now-abandoned experiment known as [Insert Title Here]. Or, heck, the last eight-plus years of explodingdog. What would make CAD’s take interesting is if Tim Buckley’s got his whole story plotted out and shows us what the overall map looked like when it’s done … but based on his description, it’s made up as he goes along.

Okay, back to sleep.

Nobody cares, but I’ll just go on record to say I was planning a CYOA thing with my prose series “Dispatches from Wondermark Manor” last year. I think Bill Barnes talked me out of it, or at least gave me second thoughts.

I was planning on a CYOA thing where people voted for or against me staying friends with David Malki. Here we are, but it was a near thing.

Last year from February through the end of April, I put together a big choose-your-own-adventure comic as my piece for the Skidmore senior thesis exhibition. And then, because I’m a masochist, I made a flash version of it:

http://eitheror.smerwin.com/

It sucks on a slow connection and it still breaks sometimes for no apparent reason, but people seemed to enjoy it.

Oh, Jason Shiga also did a hand-made CYOA comic a few years ago (web version here, though of course that is more of a traditional author-planned CYOA and not audience-determined.

…it leaves me deeply conflicted

Perhaps that explains why PhD is not in A Good Start.

I think MS Paint Adventures
http://www.mspaintadventures.com/
could lay claim to being one of the older CYOA out there, although it’s only been hosted on its own site for about a year or so.

The really impressive thing is how many forum-based spinoffs and homages have been produced, many not in English. Something about Paint just … speaks to people.

Also, one of the slipshine comics was very explicitly a choose your own porn-venture. That was a while ago now.

Strange Candy has experimented a couple times with including reader input. There was this comic that had people choosing where Dom would go and a forum poll to determine what would happen to two of the male leads. I try to only use it once per story arc.

Let’s not forget Zach Your Own Adventure.

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