No real future for Open Source Characters
I have sort of been involved with this one little online community of open source comic characters. But recently I've pretty much given up on that line of thinking.
Open sourcing of characters has become a bit of an internet fad. The idea really sprung up around Jenny Everywhere a character that came into existence out of a cartoonist forum in the early 2K's. The character was pretty generic, but had a distinctive look. She achieved quite a bit of popularity inside the internet comic creator world and lots of people have used her at various times. Which is cool and what the concept was all about.
There are also a bunch of open sourcing people over at the Public Domain Super Heroes Wiki and the Free Universe site. I was hanging around on the free universe forum for a while, and even contributed one character.
But the more I looked over the work there, it did seemed like a depository for all those people who say "hey! I got this great idea for a superhero!" and plop it down. It seemd like everybody was creating characters, but nobody was creating stories. And that's why i think a lot of open sourcing is a bit of a dead end. Sure, Jenny Everywhere is a recurrent meme, but she's clearly an exception.She was created to be a flexible character that could be placed just about anywhere, and there was a large community of cartoonists behind her to propagate it.
The public domain characters from the golden age of comics have the advantage of a large body of work to draw upon, plus the continuing interest of new creators. All of which means the PD super heroes find an audience, but the newer OS characters are going nowhere.
http://his-spiffynesss.dreamwidth.org/5729.html.
Open sourcing of characters has become a bit of an internet fad. The idea really sprung up around Jenny Everywhere a character that came into existence out of a cartoonist forum in the early 2K's. The character was pretty generic, but had a distinctive look. She achieved quite a bit of popularity inside the internet comic creator world and lots of people have used her at various times. Which is cool and what the concept was all about.
There are also a bunch of open sourcing people over at the Public Domain Super Heroes Wiki and the Free Universe site. I was hanging around on the free universe forum for a while, and even contributed one character.
But the more I looked over the work there, it did seemed like a depository for all those people who say "hey! I got this great idea for a superhero!" and plop it down. It seemd like everybody was creating characters, but nobody was creating stories. And that's why i think a lot of open sourcing is a bit of a dead end. Sure, Jenny Everywhere is a recurrent meme, but she's clearly an exception.She was created to be a flexible character that could be placed just about anywhere, and there was a large community of cartoonists behind her to propagate it.
The public domain characters from the golden age of comics have the advantage of a large body of work to draw upon, plus the continuing interest of new creators. All of which means the PD super heroes find an audience, but the newer OS characters are going nowhere.
http://his-spiffynesss.dreamwidth.org/5729.html.