This is more of a rant than anything, though comments are, of course, welcome.
Ok, so I have a team of three people, myself included, working on our comic. It's coming along nicely. We have tons of stories waiting to be drawn, and the regular artist is working on making a buffer of comics so that we can actually open it to the public. All was going well, mostly.
One of the other two had been acting like a bit of a jerk. His ideas didn't mesh with the rest of the group, and when he and I had a discussion about something he began to act kind of childish. Now, this isn't normal for the guy. I mean he's been acting more like this over the past couple of years, but it was still a bit of a shocker.
So finally he decides to quit. I originally decide to try to keep him aboard, because he's a funny guy, and we are friends and all, but then I decide to hell with it and just let him go.
So now it's down to me and the artist. We're both kind of happy about it, because we agree on most things, are able to discuss things like adults and our humour is mostly the same, so it should work out, but I'm still peeved that these things had to happen.
Has anyone else out there had similar problems? I know most of you, at least currently, work as a team of one, but some of you out there must have gone through something similar...
That's the risk of collaboration comics. Your team must be finely tuned and know where you want to get, because there's always the chance someone might quit. Or even worse, the risk of someone pulling a Piro on you.
Us lonely folks are not at all invulnerable to that as well. Sometimes my writer just feels like quitting, sometimes my artist needs a boot in the ass so he can start working...
I think I get where you're coming from...we've got our own little defacto pairing here in regards to writing/drawing. He gave me a call and said 'we're doing a webcomic cos you can draw and I can't' and I said 'I don't have the time' and here we are over 50 comics later. I started fiddling with cartoon pictures about a school play I was writing at the time, and it grew into School Spirit: The Webcomic...
Okay...we worked out plenty of ideas and storylines and stuff, some being based around the original characters and plots of the play, some introducing new characters and problems of our own. I draw, and we both write.
At this stage, we've finished most of the important plot bits, so he's taken a bit of a back seat for now, as he's also organising a few other comic projects as well.
So far it's a good little situation. Every now and then we get together and discuss further story bits, we flesh them out over email and stuff, and I go ahead and draw them. In the bits between these sessions, I basically go off on my own and keep the stuff moving.
We've had a few little tiffs and stuff and argued over how things need to fit together, but it's worked so far. I guess it's like the guy who punched the laughing psychic...we've struck a happy medium....
Remember when your imagination was real? When the day seemed
longer than it was, and tomorrow was always another game away?
The other guy is me. Its pretty accurate really. Me and Dutch smacked our heads together a LOT to get it up and running. Sheesh.. I had to learn HTML from scratch to get that page working.. urgh. bad old days.
BUT.. now its up and running. Maintaining it is mostly Dutch now. We grind out a set of like 10 Scripts at a time, We agree on some very basic strip layout, then I come home and work on other projects while Dutch spends the next month actually MAKING the strip. So, yeah.. Dutch is kind of my "Piro", but unlike Largo that works for me. Especially since I also work on two other strips (soon possibly to be three) with other artists.
So yeah, every strip I do is a colaboration with other people. I am still not too sure if Dutch has forgiven me for getting him into this, but he seems to be enjoying it, so I hope he doesnt hate me TOO much.
"Trying hard.. to take it easy" Slack As "Hold on to your Lunch Money!" School Spirit
Yeah, I am pretty sure that my current artist and I will work well together. So far we haven't had any arguments, as we've been able to actually discuss things like adults and get things done (and we've both come out happy at the results each time).
It's just a bummer to see the other guy go, even if it's for the best.
see I have to balance the work load on my team. There is me, who does all the drawing, writting, uploading, coloring and such... that's the CJ part of the team... and then there is my partner Burgandy. See it's Burgandy's job to make sure I'm not sober but if I drink too much burgandy then my job becomes sloppy and I wake up with a head ache.....
(*note: CJ Burgandy is joking, she doesn't drink Burgandy before working on a comic, she drinks vodka)
Yeah I have problems with my partner as well.
He's just so freaking lazy! And selfish too! I mean, here I am doing my bit keeping up appearances in the forum - and his job, all he's required to do, the simple task of keeping the site constantly updated - he utterly shirks!
It's not easy working with an incompetant, but yeah, what else can I do?
You just have to consider that sort of thing when you decide to collaborate on a comic.
I used to do a gag comic with a friend called Torchlight Shootout (TLSO). We ran it fine for a month or two, with something around thirty strips. Our procedure was that I wrote, and he drew, and then I colored and posted. I also usually wrote the accompanying news. We hosted it on Livejournal (trust me, there's a way to do it) pending the creation of an actual site and domain.
Since he didn't know any method of creating websites and I'm not too horrible in HTML, it was also sort of my job to design a website. I didn't work on it at all at first because I couldn't think of a method to do it without me having to create a new page for each strip, and change a bunch of links. He wanted to have our own domain, so I couldn't have just gone to Keenspace.
I asked around for some ideas, downloaded some update scripts that didn't make any sense, and finally figured out a method to mass-update a bunch of pages with the macro function in Microsoft Word.
He'd been hounding me pretty often about designing a site, and I kept telling him I was working on it, but he didn't believe me.
At one point, his scanner broke. He said he didn't feel like spending money to get a new one, so I made a page asking for donations and found a good, inexpensive scanner at a local store. A bunch of his friends and family donated money and we got started again.
A few days after that, my computer died (the hard drive went). I was at a loss for what to do, because I didn't have a spare hard drive, or any money. I told him I didn't think I would be able to work on the comic anymore. He got really pissed and said I wasn't trying enough. After three or four days I managed to repair it with the HD from a computer we don't use any more, and I colored and posted the next page or two.
There was a period of about a week when I was having trouble thinking of ideas, and I was really busy, so I didn't send him any scripts. He didn't draw anything during that time, even though he had a few scripts I'd given him before. When I finally wrote some (like a dozen) and emailed them to him, he didn't draw them because he was sick. I did a few filler pages during that time.
He never did end up drawing them. When he started feeling better, around the time school started, I asked him if he was going to start drawing again, and he said no, he would be too busy.
Well, since then, I started my own comic, and he got really really pissed about it. He accused me of not caring about TLSO or working hard on it. He said I'd never put any effort into the website and that my plan all along had just been to start my own comic. I kept assuring him this wasn't true, and he seemed to calm down and started posting comments (sometimes inane, but usually helpfull criticsm) about each page.
Then one day he spammed me with like six pages full of gibberish for "deleting his post". I didn't know what the fuck he was talking about, because I'd never deleted any posts and didn't have any notification emails about any posts. I told him several times that I hadn't deleted it, and then asked him to stop posting the inane stuff because of a complaint I'd recieved about it.
He exploded. He went off again about how I'd 'never cared about TLSO' and 'ruined the comic'. He said all his friends hated me because I'd 'ruined TLSO'. I told him I didn't know what he was talking about, I'd never deleted his freakin' post, and he was the one who didn't want to draw anymore.
He said he never wants to speak to me again, and we haven't, in two months. This was my best friend, whom I've known as long as I can remember. The only thing I can think of that might possibly have lead to this is that he aquired a bottle of sake from somewhere and had been staying up extremely late and drinking from it. He said he wasn't getting drunk, but I never quite believed him, though I never said anything about it...
Disclaimer: By responding to this post, you acknowledge the possibility that collapse may argue with you.
When I first read it, I thought it was 'pull a Biro on me'...that's a pen...I found that funny...when I read through it again, it made no sense...
Any concerns about working in duo, do as me and the Cow! do...don't see each other for weeks at a time...that's easy here because we live two or three towns away (which is quite a distance out here) and are too lazy and poor to drive out regularly...
Or just do stuff quietly on the side and update the page when he isn't looking!
Remember when your imagination was real? When the day seemed
longer than it was, and tomorrow was always another game away?
I've worked in a team of 2 once, for a comic called "Eyesore" (now it's no longer online). I was the artist and the other, of course, the writer and webmaster. This guy was some sort of "leader" of the project, so whenever there was a disagreement on how to make the comic, he had the last word. Since the comic was his idea, he was the one who really had in mind how things had to be: so it's obvious that i had to follow his directions.
This may sound unpleasant, but it was actually fine and really worked well, especially 'cause he was always open to suggestions.
Now we making a new comic toghether, but with me being the leader. We haven't actually started yet, but, it seems that things are still working fine.
one of the very first comics i ever worked on was with a friend who got me addicted to cra... uh... comics.
we never got very far cos all he wanted to do was kill the characters off!
Magellan ... super hero cadets - their worst enemy is themselves! Loxie and Zoot ... cos nudists have adventures too y'know!
xmung wrote:one of the very first comics i ever worked on was with a friend who got me addicted to cra... uh... comics.
we never got very far cos all he wanted to do was kill the characters off!
Luprand wrote:On the one hand, collaborating with myself has taught me a lot of nasty secrets about myself.
On the other hand, I have no idea what pulling a Piro means.
--Sij
Ditto on that last part. I know Piro has to do with (gasp) Megatokyo somehow, but that's about it.
At some point Piro and Largo got in a disagreement as to where should Megatokyo's direction should be, and seeing as how there could be a Megatokyo without Largo but not one without Piro, Fred Gallagher just gave his partner the boot.
Fred worked hard to give the impression that it was a mutual decision but sometime after Rodney let out he did not want to leave Megatokyo.
.
