I’m just saying…

This is a rebuttal/follow up to Occultatio’s essay entitled “Memology and Cross-Promotion.”

It turns out that I’m a would-be hypocrite. I was about to go on about how I rarely do guest comics for others for the purpose of self promotion, but that’s a damned lie. Of course, I often do them for friends as gifts. As an aside, no matter the purpose, they are always terrible. But I digress.

Guest comics are awesome. That’s my stance. My appreciation of comics was forged in the genre of Super Hero comic books, and still where my interests lie in my heart. As a comic book reader, and a Marvel comic book reader to be precise, I was quickly acclimated to the idea of someone else coming in and doing things differently. Whether art or writing, I was prepared to face change and reinterpretations with grace. In fact, I often enjoy seeing the things that I love reimagined. More often than not, I love to see what this other guy thinks of this comic I love. Sometimes it’s fucking rubbish, but most of the time quite enjoyable.

Let’s take for example the last couple weeks of Scary Go Round. We got to see how over a dozen other webcomic artists see Scary Go Round. It’s highly entertaining to see which characters they enjoy the most, and to see how able they are to mimic Allison’s style. Another example I can pull were those Bikini Suicide Frisbee Days over on Sluggy. Those were delightful to me, despite not being at all familiar with the Sluggyverse.

Before I lose whatever point I’m trying to hack out here, let me declare my overall feeling: Guest comics are a treat. They’re like a fun bonus. You came expecting Same ol’ Same ol’, but you instead a great surprise. I can understand how more purist readers might dislike them, as they are different from what they’ve come to expect and demand. As a creator, I myself have received a bunch of guest strips, vastly inproportionate to the number of comics I’ve produced myself. And as a creator I can tell you that receiving guest strips is one of the most delightful parts of the hobby. Because a guest strip shows you that somebody digs your stuff enough that they wanted to draw and write an installment of their own. So I think the whole tradition is more for the creators than for the fans anyhow.

I apologize for the scatterbrainedness of this post. I was out and about at a bar with a co-worker, his friends, and that guy who crashed Prince William’s birthday party dressed as Osama Bin Laden. No really, it was him. He’s in town because the documentary they made about it is in Silverdocs, the bigass Documentary Film Festival here in Silver Spring. And he thought Roach and I were “A spot of all right for a couple of blokes” or whatever. Yeah.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 13th, 2005 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Webcomics, My Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.