Paging Detective John Munch
The more you think about it, the more remarkable the shift of Kestrel from Queen of Wands into a recurring character at Something Positive is. This isn’t a case of an open source character that anybody can play with; it’s not a studio player doing roles in various strips; it’s not a cameo, crossover, or spin-off of one strip into another. This is a creator giving up control of a creation and allowing somebody else to take control of their baby. It’s remarkable because people feel proprietary about stuff that they create, and to give it to somebody else just feels wrong.
Weirdly, this has been done once before, and in a creative realm at the very top of the uptight-about-IP scale: television. Even more weirdly, webcomics might be exactly the medium for this kind of experimentation with characters. Webcomics creators (as a rule) own their characters outright; there’s no publisher, production company, or multinational asserting rights or wanting sign-off. When you’ve done everything you wanted to do with a character, you have the option to let somebody else (somebody whose work and vision you respect) see where something can be added. That’s got to be a terrifying leap of faith, watching your creation leave the … aerie.
