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."

ctrl alt del!

[L1nux_L0ser83]

someone let the guys at ctrl alt del. know and penny-arcade...they would own all!

Re:ctrl alt del!

[Carthag]

Diesel Sweeties would probably win, if R. Stevens signed up. He said he's not going to, though.

Re:ctrl alt del!

[NeoSkink]

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.

Quantity over Quality

[lbmouse]

It doesn't appear that any of the strips have to actually be good. Me and my stick-figure-guy could win this one.

Re:ctrl alt del!

[carninja]

Penny arcade only updates 3 times a week, and I doubt they really wanna change that.

Nice way to borrow money

[Yomers]

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...

Re:What about quality ?

[Golias]

One word:

Stencils

Art is not hard to crank out fast. Ideas are. I'm far more impressed with Dilbert than Get Fuzzy.

Re:ctrl alt del!

[Rei]

Yeah... some comics "cheat" every so often. For example, Sluggy Freelance [sluggy.com] 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.

Re:What about quality ?

[grungebox]

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.

Re:ctrl alt del!

[Elwood P Dowd]

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.

It'll never end.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Quantity over Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

This point has already been made [pvponline.com].

With Scott Kurtz and others in the mix who haven't missed a daily strip in years, you would have to ask yourself: is it worth the time and trouble to draw a crappy, non-funny web comic five days a week for years and years, where the only motivation is to win a few hundred dollars? I can think of easier ways to make money.

Cheap labour

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What about Dilbert?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dilbert would have been out the first day. One of the rules is that you can't use old strips that have been sitting around or have been previously published.

The Dilbert web site runs strips well after they've been published in the paper, which would disqualify the site immediately.

Re:No PA :-(

[Bobman1235]

Please be sarcastic... please be sarcastic....

I raise you one Pokey

[Gzip Christ]

Even weirder: Pokey The Penguin [yellow5.com]. 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.

Re:Quantity over Quality

[CoffeeJedi]

are either of these comics relevant anymore?

I still read UF every day, just out of habit, I havne't laughed at it in about a year. The only good storyline he's had in ages was the "The Thing" parody in Anarctica, but other than that, Illiad's just phoning it in.

As for Dilbert, it was cutting edge 10 years ago, but Adams has let it stagnate, its still the same tired joke told by the same nonentity archetype characters. To put it bluntly, its the new Garfield. its good for a chuckle, but its not engaging like PvP or Sluggy Freelance.

Anyone intrested in a 20 year, no-intrest loan?

[delmoi]

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

Re:ctrl alt del!

[Anonymous Coward]

and penny-arcade...they would own all!

And by "own" you mean still have the most un-funniest and shittiest web comic at 5 time a week instead of 3, then yes you are correct.

Heck, I will give you the plot/joke line for that whole week.

Panel 1:
Tyco: This fucking game/company/thing/etc sucks fucking ass!
Gabe: Fuck balls shit piss penis cocks.

Panel 2:
Tyco: But only fucking people who are fucking gay and are stupid fucking retards would like game/company/thing/etc
Gabe: I fucking kind of fucking like game/company/thing/etc ass wang fucking shit!

Panel 3:
Tyco: UR t3h fucking ghay fucking faggot!1111oneonetwo! ROFLTLSLSLolol1

Re:ctrl alt del!

[Mage Powers]

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.

Re:And the winner is...

[fanblade]

My thoughts exactly. The winner of this competition will be the one with the most stable server!

Re:Buffer cache

[EggyToast]

That's what comics that are truly serious and industrious about the job do. Most professional comics have a buffer time, partly because there's a lapse between the time it takes for it to go from the editor to actual publication, but also because when it's all that you're doing, it makes sense to set yourself up to cover for any sickdays, vacations, or whatever happens.

Megatokyo is often criticized as being one of the most popular inconsistent comics, yet the author is on record as having a point in time where even he had a buffer (after some comic challenge thing, similar to the OP). He said he was set for about 2 weeks. Of course, he worked through that and got back on the missed updates. Lately, though, he's been on-time.

For anyone based on internet publication, I think timeliness is one of the most overlooked aspects of the process, and people often approach it in the same procrastinatey way they do term papers and homework. Unsurprisingly, the students that often perform well in school are the ones who have their homework done well before the deadline, giving them a buffer for editing and more

One of the reasons I personally like Penny Arcade is because there's always a new comic on MWF. And that's one of the reasons I completely lost interest in The Brunching Shuttlecocks when they were still updating -- they were on long hiatuses (hiatii?) for their last 2 years, so after a while it was easy to forget about them. At which point there's little reason for reading them religiously, and content gets missed.

I'm sure the comics that got involved in the OP are already quite timely -- otherwise they wouldn't get involved. I read it more as a test of how long a comic can stick around and consistently update, rather than how quickly other comics fall behind. I also see it as a statement that people view timelyness as an important and valuable aspect of web publications.