Plug Week Day 2 — About Communities.

When I got started on this webcomic thing, it was mainly due to a casual suggestion from a friend in a conversation (“Hah! that’s funny! you could make a webcomic out of that”). That, along with my desire to start a personal site and my lack of creative direction at the moment, sealed the deal. The end result has been quite rewarding.

Of course, as always happens with this whole Interweb thing, whenever you strike a weird fancy, say… purple lettuce, you find out that there are already thousands of people out there who have started purple lettuce fanclubs, written articles on the optimum leaf width and color (along with its HTML code and RGB equivalent) and have huge greenhouses in their backyards entirely devoted to the further improvement of certain purple lettuce species. Suddently, the bar for your little “Purple Lettuce place of [insert your name here]” has been raised. You’re up against pros. Not just any vegan kid with a strange craving and a personal site, mind you. These are real pros. And suddenly, you’re scared shitless. This happened to me.

When I started Overcaffeinated, all I read webcomic-wise was Penny-Arcade, User Friendly, Dilbert, Sinfest and the Calvin and Hobbes strips at uComics. I (naively) thought to myself “Hey, this whole gamer/geek thing could work! I’m both, after all!”. Little did I know that currently, everyone and their goldfish (as a fellow forumer put it) has a webcomic, and that mine is one of the most clichéd, used-to-death genres out there. I’m sticking with it, though, since I truly like my characters and the situations they get themselves into. Maybe there is still room for this kind of stuff out there.

But I digress. What I found, once I knew where to look, was a thriving, pulsing, gigantic community of creative people bent on making people laugh/cry or just plain think. There are literally hundreds of talented guys and girls out there that have something to tell the world and devote time, effort and money to put it into a comic format and release it into the wild, anxiously refreshing their stats page and checking their Inboxes, waiting to see wether the world gives them a big thumbs up, or gives them the finger (yes, we all do, only the big ones bother to filter their incoming mail and even they read all fan mail).

The first webcomic community I found was Rocketbox. Founded by ten webcomic veterans, and with a solid body of articles, it offered me a wealth of information and most importantly, a peek into the general mindset of the webcomicking community.

The second community I joined was Top Web Comics. You may have seen the list (maybe you found out about this comic there?). But the most interesting stuff goes on at the forums (fora). Whereas the noise-to-signal ratio is higher in the TWC forum than at Rocketbox, the community has established authors that are level headed and usually provide very interesting opinions, moderators that are frequently called into action, controversial topics, attention seeking vote whores, stoners, kids, old farts (I count myself as one of the latter. I’m definitely not the oldest — that would be you, Dinglemunch! — but I certainly belong to the old crowd. Maybe to some of the others too). All of these make for a very entertaining place to hang out at.

There are numerous inside stories within these communities. Rocketbox had a period of very intense activity (I think there was a slashdotting involved) and then settled on a moderate growth pace. The Top Web Comics site had its fair share of infighting and instability recently too, when it changed ownership. All in all, they are incredibly entertaining places to hang out at (remember that many of these people make it a point of getting people to laugh on a regular basis). If you have time, check them out. It will prove to be entertaining, at the very least, and who knows? you may find the webcomic you’ve been looking for all along, or make friends with very interesting guys and gals.

— sergio on April 08, 2003