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gwern comments on How to popularize LW ideas: a webcomic? - Less Wrong
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Comments (24)
Your post is badly named, as it doesn't seem to invite general discussion about how to popularize LW, but just ask for the evaluation of a specific idea, the webcomic idea.
So here's my evaluation thereof: No, at least not in the way you describe it.
Can you give me even a single example of a webcomic drawn and written collectively that is any good? Even stick-figure comics require a consistent style, both in art and in writing. Comics seem very low on the totem-pole of things which people can work collectively on.
So, no. If the LW community is ever to do a collective effort at something, I hope it's in some endeavour where collective efforts have actually had a chance of working.
The American comic industry is built almost entirely on a 'collective' model - one person writes the stories, another person may turn that into quasi-storyboard script, another does all the drawing, and another may handle the inking/painting etc. There are other steps too (eg. editors), I think, but beyond that I'm not sure. (Most of my knowledge comes from reading through the Sandman extras like the scripts and marginal discussions, where many details imply such a process.) Manga frequently has similar separations as well (since it was brought up in another comment-thread, Death Note was a pair, a writer & an artist), but I don't think it's nearly as common.
To name 3 well-regarded webcomics just from the ones I personally read which use such an assembly line process, Dr. McNinja Girl Genius, and Erfworld. (I guess there's Megatokyo as well, before they split, and Penny Arcade has a writer/artist split come to think of it.)
The Assembly-line process is not quite what I meant. One person writing, another person drawing like what T Campbell does (in Fans! or Penny&Aggie, etc) is one thing -- same thing with what Mark Stanley does in Freefall where he writes and draws but another person colors it.
Those comics still have one writer, and one artist. And so they maintain continuity of style.
I thought shminux meant a different process where we all contribute on all levels, e.g. by each individually picking from a list of topics and each writing and drawing a complete strip of them all, much as Wikipedia has many editors which can all create articles. In short a vertical division, not a horizontal one. This would produce discontinuity and vastly different levels of quality from day to day.
Probably. American comics do not maintain a single artist or writer over their entire run, usually, even creator-dominated comics like Neil Gaiman's Sandman rotate all positions (although there were far more artists than writers for Sandman, IIRC), but the turnover tends to be over many issues/months or years, and I imagine their general skill level would be much higher than a LW collective.
Eh, I'm not married to any particular solution, just thought that a regular strip, however produced, might attract some people not amenable to spending hours on reading either the sequences or the fanfic. Whether it is a good idea to attract attention of people like that, is a whole different issue.
The Gutters, which has provided me with a fair amount of amusement recently, seems to be consistently written by Ryan Sohmer, but drawn by whoever he can get on board for a strip.