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Daily Grind Webcomic Challenge
Dauntilus writes "Bent Comics is sponsering a web-comic contest. Contestants put $20 into the pool, and they must update their comics 5 times a week. If they fail to update on time, they are out. Last artist in gets the pool. The contest started yesterday with a sweet $1,120 in the pot. A few big webcomic artists like Scott Kurtz (PVP) and Chris Crosby (Superosity) have even show up for the fun."
someone let the guys at ctrl alt del. know and penny-arcade...they would own all!
Good Karma, Bad Karma, doesnt matter to me... I'm still going to say whats on my mind!
It doesn't appear that any of the strips have to actually be good. Me and my stick-figure-guy could win this one.
Nice way to borrow money from those 'big webcomic artists' ;)) I bet at least 2 of them will produce 5 comics a week for a very long time...
One word:
Stencils
Art is not hard to crank out fast. Ideas are. I'm far more impressed with Dilbert than Get Fuzzy.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Darby Conley does the strip for a living. He doesn't need a time machine, just the extra 8 hours a day the rest of us are working. It's still an awesome strip, and it makes shittily-drawn and shittily-written strips that much worse by comparison, but just keep in mind he's not quite the superman most webcomics people with fulltime jobs and a daily strip must be.
The initial idea must have been a competition to provide that extra bit of incentive for the creators not to miss an update. With comics like PvP and Superosity in the running, it's now a race to see who gets to the grave first.
Kurtz boasts going years without missing an update (what about those sickdays and guest weeks?), I'm sure he can easily keep updating for years without fail if he makes the effort. The same goes for Chris Crosby of Superosity. For them it's not an incentive to update, they're in it for the money!
No one's going to win this now, it's never gonna end.
Yet another cheeky attempt at getting cheap labour. They get a site with daily updates down for free.
It reminds me of some design jobs that had a task for possible applicants. When you applied for the job, you where given a brief from one of their customers. Whoever did the best design, got the job...meanwhile the company got paid a few thousand for the guys work before he even started.
Dilbert would have been out the first day. One of the rules is that you can't use old strips that have been sitting around or have been previously published.
The Dilbert web site runs strips well after they've been published in the paper, which would disqualify the site immediately.
Please be sarcastic... please be sarcastic....
Even weirder: Pokey The Penguin. Be sure to check out the archives (the one currently on the main page isn't as bizarre as some of the earlier ones). And hey, it's a penguin so you are automatically required to love it, being a Slashdot reader and all.
I'm sorry. It would be extreemly easy for someone (or a couple people) to keep doing something once a day for the rest of their lives. I predict this is going to take a very long time to resolve.
Now, it might be intresting they put the money into a mutual fund or something, so that if the contest did take years, the reward would be worth it
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
My thoughts exactly. The winner of this competition will be the one with the most stable server!
Megatokyo is often criticized as being one of the most popular inconsistent comics, yet the author is on record as having a point in time where even he had a buffer (after some comic challenge thing, similar to the OP). He said he was set for about 2 weeks. Of course, he worked through that and got back on the missed updates. Lately, though, he's been on-time.
For anyone based on internet publication, I think timeliness is one of the most overlooked aspects of the process, and people often approach it in the same procrastinatey way they do term papers and homework. Unsurprisingly, the students that often perform well in school are the ones who have their homework done well before the deadline, giving them a buffer for editing and more
One of the reasons I personally like Penny Arcade is because there's always a new comic on MWF. And that's one of the reasons I completely lost interest in The Brunching Shuttlecocks when they were still updating -- they were on long hiatuses (hiatii?) for their last 2 years, so after a while it was easy to forget about them. At which point there's little reason for reading them religiously, and content gets missed.
I'm sure the comics that got involved in the OP are already quite timely -- otherwise they wouldn't get involved. I read it more as a test of how long a comic can stick around and consistently update, rather than how quickly other comics fall behind. I also see it as a statement that people view timelyness as an important and valuable aspect of web publications.