Before I get to that, I wanted to say just a few words about the experience. First, creating a comic based on people voting on various random options (the results are here) is pretty fun. Coming up with a story and being forced to incorporate certain elements out of my control was a great challenge and I’m happy with the way it’s going so far.

Second, creating comics is hard work. I wasn’t going 100% on this due to all of the other responsibilities of the job, but still, most of my working time the past seven days was devoted to this project. And I only got three pages done. Granted, I also had to write the issue, and also granted I haven’t ever done this before, but still, that’s slower than I thought it would be. It’s given me a new level of respect for the folks who do this for a living.

Third, I understand why the Rob Liefelds of the world get pushed into leaving out backgrounds. They’re a ton of work and you don’t feel like they really do all that much. I mean, background is pretty much synonymous with “unnoticeable”. But I realized a funny thing while doing this — if you don’t draw it, it’s not there. All of those little bits of scenery like trash or bricks or clouds, the page doesn’t start out with those already there, waiting for you to draw the interesting stuff.

Finally, I drew all of this in Flash, using a template I created based on the ones available online for comics creators. I did this so that the whole issue would be in vector format, able to be output either for web resolution or for print. If it were ever to be colored you’d have to lose that flexibility, as the coloring would need to happen in a bitmap program like Photoshop, but at least the original ultra-high resolution lineart would still be available.

Now I hope you’ll join me after the jump for my very first effort ever at a comic book, and as far as I know, the first publicly-generated Comic Book Improv!

(Note: To change pages, click the arrow buttons at the top right and left. If you want to view this outside of the blog frame, you can click here — your browser should play it full-size in its own window, which you can scale as large as your monitor will allow instead of forcing it to be the width of this column. Let me know how that works!)

Edited to add: Also, you can right-click on any part of the page and choose “Zoom in” to get a closer look.

You might be asking yourself, “Self, how does that make any sense?” And your self will say “Dude, seriously, quit talking to me, it’s weird.”

Tune in next Monday to see the results of this first experiment! It’s not often you get the opportunity to see someone potentially fail so massively, so don’t miss it.

First, this probably isn’t how the overall “Crowd Sourced Comic” will be, but until I figure out more of the detail on that and get some legal things figured out, I thought this would be a fun thing to try.

Second, having said that, here’s how this particular experiment will work. All you have to do is to vote on the various options below. After one week, I’ll take the highest vote-getting answer from each category and create a short comic book adventure (probably four pages) with it. With that, we’re off! Think of this as actors in a comedy troupe taking shouted suggestions from the audience for an improv routine.

Character

Choose one of the following six characters to appear as the main protagonist of the adventure (click each for a larger version). There are no female choices because this is difficult enough already and I suck at drawing women:

Setting

Plot

Random Element

*PSF: Potential Suckage Factor. Return to top.