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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."
That eliminates Penny Arcade :-(3x a week, frequent screwups, but worth the free price of admission all the same.) Call me greedy, but I'd love to see PA daily =)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Of Real Life Comics. I read that daily too along with PVP and Superosity. Personally I was hoping Piro would join in, he'd be first out :)
Diesel Sweeties would probably win, if R. Stevens signed up. He said he's not going to, though.
http://www.checkerboardnightmare.com/
I'll take quality over 5 updates a week anyday.
Forcing them to update constantly would likely kill the comics we know and love until the contest is over.
"they must updated their comics 5 times a week"
I swear, someone is putting nonsensical grammar into every single article, just to see how we squirm and ped.
My other processor is big-endian.
It doesn't appear that any of the strips have to actually be good. Me and my stick-figure-guy could win this one.
Wait so this is basically a contest to see who's life is so devoid of content that they never miss a day of logging on and updating their cartoons ... sounds like whoever wins is really the biggest loser ;)
Squidi hasn't missed more than perhaps one or two updates in two years on A Modest Destiny. But, he is rather unpopular among the webcomic community
Penny arcade only updates 3 times a week, and I doubt they really wanna change that.
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...
Have you ever seen Get Fuzzy? Granted, it's not a web comic (though it may be on comics.com or such) but they guy must have a time altering machine, for all the detail he puts in that strip. Wood grains, individual hairs, even the New Zealand All Blacks logo on Rob's cap. If the guy can do that strip daily, who's got a leg to stand on to say they can't?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
Is that this will be going on for at least 2 years. And then it will be down to 5. The only thing that is going to knock some of these artists out is some for of accident to their person or a sever server failure..... Uh... Shall Slashdot Slashdot those Slashdot wants to lose at update time?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
::cough::Jim Davis!::cough::
This rating is Unfair ( ) ( ) Fair (*) Funny
Sigh... If only. Modding would be so much more fun.
I think anyone that's ever tried a webcomic knows that consistency is the biggest challenge. It's hard to develop a routine and get strips up in a timely fashion with some degree of regularity. That's a critical factor in determining a strip's early success at drawing an audience. Internet users are lazy, and if you don't have any timeliness, they move on. People might counter with Mac Hall or Megatokyo, but those premiered during a slightly less dense webcomic atmosphere. Also, they drew audiences in with the art, which is the other key component. You can slack off on the updates if your art kicks ass and still maintain a decent audience. Hell, if you get both you become a rising megastar like Apple Geeks or Scary Go Round.
Yeah... some comics "cheat" every so often. For example, Sluggy Freelance almost never misses an issue; however, as an example, they recently took a few days off by making comics via using X-com screenshots and putting dialog bubbles on the characters instead of drawing comics. Sometimes, too, they'll have a guest artist (sometimes a deliberately poor one for comic effect) take over strip for a week or so.
Clean coal harnesses the awesome power of the word 'clean'.
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.
My brother once decided to collect the daily Rex Morgan in a big old scrap-book to try to figure out what it was about.
after he had gathered several months worth together it still didnt make any sense.
air and light and time and space
I think citing User Friendly hurts your webcomic street cred.
The point is that if you can drive yourself to quantity, you will achieve quality as well. Ask novel writers. Once you've created 5 new comic strips every week for a few months, you'll be better at creating good comic strips.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
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.
Or Schlock Mercenary. Hasn't missed an update ever. He said he wasn't entering because it would get boring if it went on for years without a winner.
Yeah, I think Squidi's achievement in sheer quality and production values over a period of years has been quite amazing. I can't say I'm wild about the new style backgrounds (or the dangerous tendency to start making Art with a capital A), but I have to take my hat off to the guy for the sheer amount of quality images, text and plot he has produced. As a comic, it's funnyish; as an exercise in continuity and development, it's outstanding.
I'm not quite sure what all the troubles surrounding the artist actually are. His editorials (except maybe when he gets political) strike me as remarkably organized and sensible, not the work of a net.kook at all... but it sure looks like he annoyed a lot of people somehow.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I'm surprised that more comics don't do this where the author of Sam and Fuzzy states that he has a buffer of about 22 comics so he never misses an update.
Of course, he only updates MWF so he's not eligible for the pool.
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
Not only Chris Crosby, Brad Guigar, Ryan Smith and Steve Troop have joined from KeenSPOT... ...but up and comming artists Jennie Breeden (The Devil's Panties), Bruce Goer (A Day in the Life), and Matt Johnson (Cortland) have joined from KeenSPACE.
The SPACE team WILL WIN!!!
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
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.
Shouldn't the point of a contest like this be to spur webcomic artists to produce reliably so that they can become more prolific, not to put cash in the pocket of someone who has already shown he can put out a strip a day on a regular basis?
Why would a webcomic artist who has already shown himself able to produce one comic a day for the past several years (even if it's not up until 6pm) enter into a contest like this?
The point is to provide a challenge and provide competition. For people who have already proven themselves in this arena, they are merely making it psychologically impossible for the intended audience to participate and hope to win. Someone who *just might* graduate to the next level of comic production may have decided to make the plunge and make a living at it. But with people in the competition who have already shown they can do it, how many people are going to drop out just because they know that they won't be able to compete in the very long run that this contest will inevitably go to?
I think it's a bit sad when people who are already making a living at webcomics decide to get involved in a contest that's obviously not aimed at them.
No, I didn't go to the site sponsoring the competition. If they intended these "semi pro's" to participate, he's scamming a sizeable loan out of a lot of people. If they didn't intend them to participate, it obviously wasn't stated in the rules. If they didn't even think about it, they're shortsighted.
I'll take quality over 5 updates a week anyday.
All those rules! And not one that outlaws posting a picture of "sheep in a snowstorm".
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
...a perl script that uses the GD library to draw random squiggles and the fortune file for text. Updated from a cron job.
:)
Indistinguishable from half the web comics out there IMHO
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
Doesn't Schlock Mecenary have a large buffer? I wonder if that was really considered for this comic contest, because it's kinda silly to pit buffered comics against unbuffered comics.
Angels 2200
Wandering Ones
Something Positive
The Devil's Panties
General Protection Fault
Irregular Web Comic
Alien Dice
Wapsi Square
Bruno
Clan of the Cats
There's plenty more at my web comic page.
I drank what? -- Socrates
No, both your paper and the Dilbert site operate in what is known as the "mysterious future." Therefore, what you see in the newspaper hasn't happened yet, which means you should go around saving people according to it's prophecies, and then vanish from television shortly thereafter due to lack of viewers. Your cat does deliver the paper, right?