I like a good comic jam. Back in my days of salad at the College, it was usually sitting in a bar in smokey diving mainly foreigners passing near laptops, the shelves of large format turn penciling, inking and coloring panels working on the construction of a panel of a complete history both. It's the perfect experience to try to reproduce on the web, and it's just what Tyler Hutchison did with us to draw comic strips.
Draw us comics takes the simple principle of the comic Jam (an artist, a control panel, switch to another) and it's an experience completely based on the web, either with a basic mouse or trackpad-controlled drawing and painting tool or an optional plugin that provides full integration of Wacom tablet to the tool through a browser. It certainly is glitchy, Hutchison admits, but judging from some of the presentations on us to draw comic books, artists are more than willing to go through the whimsical to start installation process.
Hutchison has in fact worked on us to draw Comics for years, but began to build this version (by itself), it a year ago. He opened the tool before new registrations, but the first time that it has opened the doors to the back of the public in September, he had to close access nearly as fast; demand was strong and the servers have suffered under the load. That was partly because some inscriptions of prestige and promoting non-solicited from sources Jhonen Vasquez, creator of Invader Zim and Johnny the homicidal maniac.
Now, with additional assistance from Topatoco, which provides Hutchison with servers that host to draw us Comics for free, Hutchison is ready to try to bring new users on board - this time with a soft cap of 5,000 users. As of today, new users are free to register and participate, which requires just a simple sign-in Twitter (without any automatic display).
You can browse the creations draw us comics without registration, and they are often astonishing. Hutchison shared, something which I was surprised to learn, is that people have been very good on the self-monitoring: even though he has no control over what people take, they have not taken things in dark places very often and when they do, the community corrects.
"The basis of the user we draw comics until some sort has been an incredibly positive experience of Internet where everyone who uses this site has been really friendly and interested in making beautiful things," Hutchison told me in an interview. "There were very few people I saw on the website that have just done something to be nasty".
Hutchison is priming its efforts with us to draw comics: he took on the additional jobs to try to maintain the site, and it is essentially a one-man operation. But draw us comic strips is the very special rarity: a product designed and developed with no reason in mind beyond to give people the opportunity to meet and make something nice. I asked Hutchison plans recipes, and he said he played with the idea of adding access charges apply to certain features. But ultimately, he wants to make sure that free users do not have an experience compromised if it does not introduce multi-tiered subscription levels, and really, all efforts to make money would be intended mainly to keep the thing rather than any other lights. He thinks maybe implement a mechanic style 'pay-what-you-want' donation is the best way to go about doing this and it could allow future plans to build us to draw comics for mobile platforms.
So, to sum up, with draw us Comics, Tyler built Hutchison something amazing that people enjoy using. And if it is not that surprising because it comes from the webcomics community, where artists often give their main product and are happy to survive on merch, illustration of concerts and other sources of secondary income, it is still a good thing.
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