Guest Comic by “Twigs” (Annotated)
Thanksgiving weekend seems like as appropriate a time as any to start rolling out the guest strips from readers we used to keep deadlines at bay, starting with this cute gag from “Twigs,” to use the commenter username.
After starting with a buffer of more than a full chapter, we were starting to need some kind of filler by the end of Chapter 5, and guest content was a grand old tradition of webcomics, albeit an eroding one. You’ll notice we only called for guest strips a few times and eventually resorted to other tricks to fill out our schedule, although John Waltrip’s faster working methods and freer workdays meant we had to do less of that anyway after Chapter 8.
Is it just me, or has the webcomics community become a lot less tight-knit than it used to be? Guest comics don’t really exist anymore. Collaborative projects are rare. It all seems to have just disappeared
More webcomics, more webcomics networks, better options for self-publishing these days, so it’s no longer the webcomics community, but several smaller communities. When I first started reading webcomics, it seemed pretty much everyone was on Keenspot (and before that, Big Panda).
Also, more webcartoonists can make a living off their comics these days. There might be less of a need to have guest comics when you don’t have to devote time to another, paying job.
I think that more than anything, it has to do with the audience demonstrating a much larger tolerance than we once expected for slow update schedules and delays or deviations from an existing schedule. A fair number of creators never exactly liked the deviations from their own writing and/or art style becoming a part of their archives, no matter how talented their guest contributors, but viewed them as preferable to “dead air.”
It was also, as Sirsoliloquy says, a matter of the community becoming looser-knit. Online interaction changed in ways that encouraged smaller, more insular groups of friends instead of one big mob, which removed a lot of the perception that there was one big “webcomics audience” and with it some of the incentive to pool our resources.
The concept is not entirely dead: Questionable Content still ran a week of guest strips this year and I see some newer contributors trying it out. But I wouldn’t say it’s a good strategy to stay on schedule at this point.
Yeah; I feel like you’re right about how the changing web changed the way the community works.
Like, Ryan Armand (he guy who did Minus) lost his website last year and disappeared from the web. Back in the day this would have been a huge deal. But these days, well, barely anyone cares.
Also, Sarah Ellerton is back, making a comic on Webtoon. Nobody seems to recognize that she used to write/draw some very popular webcomics back in the day.
Wat’chu talkin ’bout Willis? I’m currently finishing up one for submission to another webcomic I read that’s asking for ’em.
Interesting. I never really noticed the erosion of the guest filler tradition. But that does seem to make sense. Most comics I can think of that have guest filler have it the earlier archive of the comic. I haven’t seen any new guest filler in awhile.
What has caused this erosion? Something to do with copyright laws maybe?
I’d say see my other comment above… Copyright’s not really much of an issue when you’re doing a guest strip for someone else.