Fan Comic (Patreon)

Hey folks,

I'm out of town this weekend, so I thought I'd use this opportunity to post an old Facebook fan comic from 2013.

Back in 2013 I decided to create a comic where fans would comment their ideas for each comic panel in a story, and I would draw the most upvoted comment. I found the original post on Facebook.

The rules were as follows:

Each panel will have its own post on the DLC facebook page. Reply to each post with your suggestions for the next panel.

Once I have selected a suggestion, all further suggestions for the upcoming panel will be ignored.

Your suggestion must continue the story from the previous panel.

The most liked suggestion wins, I break ties, and I have veto power (hopefully I won't have to veto, but just in case)

I made the veto rule in case people posted something truly awful, but mostly it was in case someone posted something that would be impossible to draw, or would take a hundred panels.

My original intent was to draw one panel at a time. However, what I did not forsee, was that almost every single suggestion from fans would take two or three panels to execute. And since I was doing it daily, it became quite an undertaking.

I added each winning comment at the end of each series of panels that I drew.

The suggestions as a whole ended up being pretty great, and the whole experience was quite fun. It was also ended up being interesting to see how I could warp and interpret each suggestion to make it fit better within the narrative.

The first suggestion was a pretty fantastic one. The opportunity to draw several Donalds gave me a lot of options. I love evil Donald. I should have used him in the actual comic. The inverted colors on his clothing and a dog instead of a cat on his shirt are a nice touch. Smart donald has the scientific name for a bobcat on his shirt.

This one went off the rails a bit, not unlike my story arcs.

Jeez, I find evil donald really disturbing. The last panel here is a good example of me reinterpreting the original comment.

"They take them to the King of Stormwind, who appears to be the first Donald!"

I'm pretty sure this was referring to our Donald, not evil Donald, but I probably felt using evil Donald worked better. So I tried to put in some exposition that evil Donald convinced everyone he was the original.

I love that someone made a callback to Narya digging himself out of prison. Including dead Marshall was just my added sadism.

The first panel here is a good example of why Donald makes for an excellent exposition dump. It literally has nothing to do with the winning comment, but it was important information to the story. Gigz' shirt saying "Meat" is pretty fun.

I remember reading that first suggestion about a siege of Donaldar and not knowing how the hell to draw it. I ended up just making a fart joke.

Why a muffin? Is it just a reference to summoned mage food? I have no idea.

Holy crap. Reading the name, "Duskwind" on the first comment unlocked a memory. Duskwind is a wow friend, who was in my guild at the time. I think I remember encouraging friends to post on the page and make better suggestions for panels, and upvote my favorites in situations where a comment I didn't want to draw got too many upvotes. I remember there being a couple comments that were really close in votes, and I liked one of them SO MUCH more than another, so I enlisted friends to upvote it. I was fixing the votes. How Machiavellian!

That Alterac Valley comment was brutal. I remember thinking it would never end, but I ended up turning into a bit of a deus ex machina and made everyone disappear.

Reading this makes me want to try something like this again in the future. The problem is getting enough people to engage in the idea to get a diverse set of suggestions and votes. Ideally I would want to do it on Patreon, but I doubt there is enough engagement for it to work. I'm open to ideas though, if any of you can think of a method to bring something like this back.