Wednesday, December 27, 2006

The Future is Now

A little while back Kris Straud (the webcomic tactician behind Starslip Crisis) started Halfpixel.com, a site devoted to "disposable internet humor." As far as I can tell, it is designed to give Kris a chance to experiment with spontaneous new comics without having to create a new site for each one - as well as all manner of other humor and thoughts as well.

And hey, that's cool - it's something between a webcomic artist's blog and a new comic itself, and is both handy at peaking into his deranged mind and enjoying some random funny on the side.

But what makes the site really awesome is that you can use it too. Users can submit their own posts, and if he likes them, he puts them up. That's wicked cool. I imagine there are a lot of funny people on the internet, and quite a few of them are part of the webcomic crowd. And quite a few of those don't have the time to make their own daily comic - but will be able to produce some real gems on a site like this.

It gets even better, too. One of the funny little strips he came up with on the site is Time Friends. Each strip of Time Friends has the same art as the others, but with the joke and punchlines changed. Very similar to many other fixed-art webcomics out there, though few of those were quite as gag-oriented, and tended to thrive more on their own wordiness. (Which is not to say that is a bad thing.)

But Straub's little strip was quick and easy. So easy that everyone could pop their own words in, and could make their own Time Friends strips. Heck, they didn't even need to photoshop the strip (though plenty did), but simply post the four or so phrases the comic would consist of. And when Straub saw these goings on... well, at first he was less then pleased at seeing others honing in on his field. After some thought, however, his generous nature won out, and he not only accepted it, he embraced the idea with the Time Friends Maker.

Enjoy.

2 comments:

Kris Straub said...

I'm not sure how (or if) I'm going to be okay with people just submitting anything they want to Halfpixel, because I don't want to end up in some creator's rights argument. But I want there to be interaction between the reader and the creator, I want the line blurred. I think it's a good foundation for a community.

Anyway, to solve that, I want to figure out some creative Flash tools to let people build their own strips under given titles, so I want to make an Interweb PI Maker and a [strip I haven't come up with yet] Maker and so forth.

Myth said...

Yeah - I think that having editorial control over what submissions actually get posted will be a large part of what actually makes it unique. There are plenty of simply free-form messageboards for people to post whatever silly things they come up with - this looks to go a step or so beyond that, which I think is what makes it so promising.