Here’s an interesting new venture by Myspace: they’ve partnered with Virgin Comics to create Coalition Comix. Mike Carey, a veteran comic book writer, will guide the process of creating an entirely new comic on the site. And they are promising to take user ideas and votes to guide the story.
The guy running the show is Mike Carey, a former accountant who’s written for a bunch of popular comics including Batman, X-Men, Ultimate Fantasic Four and others.
This sounds like more of a gimmick than anything – good creative works are rarely the product of groups because the really radical stuff gets washed out by the majority. If you want to watch it all unfold, check back on the site on August 2 when it launches.
I think this is definitely a wonderful form of collaboration. Comics have been slowly dying in the last decade. Mom and Pop shops closing down, kids moving toward video games and internet. This is great that it allows people to join on the internet to create a new user comic. It would be great of the actual writers will also be able to get a printed version of their masterpiece.
DC comics are doing such a project as well with Zuda Comics. It will consist of users applying ideas and voting on others, to create a user comic. You may find more info at http://www.zudacomics.com or http://www.chur...m.html#comments
Eran
I agree with Michael. Groups (composed of strangers and newbies) working on a creative production seldom work. A typical comic is a product of a lot of labour and time and has a few but fantastic talent involved (creator, writer, inker, colourist, letterer)
There has been quite a bit of online action on comics nowadays (Zudacomics, IK Comics) but one company I’m watching closely is IK Comics. No gimmicks folks… this is the real thing. You have great comics to publish? they do it… digitally on web and mobile. And in a ground breaking comic viewer format which they developed. Check out the developer blog entry – http://ikcomics...al-comic-viewer
Too bad nobody will be able to use this because everyone has left MySpace for Facebook.
Batman’s sidekick Robin was once killed this way in the comics… by popular vote that allowed people to decide on Robin’s life or death (they chose death).
Matt – I agree that Facebook is making great gains; but one shouldnt forget that MySpace still has a much larger footprint and much great traffic. I presonally dislike the hacked-up-mess that is MySpace; but the masses are not renowned for their good taste, offline or on.
yeah this is the bad part about collaboration;
– the only buyers will be the people who participated in its creation
Exciting stuff… If you haven’t checked out Mike Carey before I recommend Lucifer and his stint on Hellblazer.