Welcome to another episode of The Pixelated Window of the Past. This is where I take a small break of webcomics to talk about webomics, go figure.
See episode one last week.As I said last week, Sprite Comics only require minimal artistic talent to produce. You don’t have to draw much, you only need to take the sprites from copyrighted work, modify them slightly, paste them together, and apply the text of your choice.
Of course, this means that if you have no need for artistic talent, that you might not need any talent at all, and make comics that only makes the author giggle, with poop jokes, sexual jokes, dropping the f-bomb for no apparent reason, make characters engage in sexual banter, often disregarding if they had any of the reproductive organs to start with…
Now understand that we don’t expect every webcomic to be ‘canon’. Canon is the term used in the industry to difference the ‘fanfiction’ from the ‘official work’. If the characters act in a recognizable way, and don’t show personality traits that are out of bounds (or cannot be explained by circumstances), they are considered as ‘canon’ most of the time.
Stories are the same as well, if a sequel is written by official or unofficial sources, then it could also get ‘replaced’ by a new story later, like Star Wars Episode 7 made all of 20 years of novel written non-canon. They are not less good, but the stories are to be considered as separate, alternate since they don’t fit in the same timeline anymore.
Crossovers also belong to the realm of fanfiction unless the ‘copyright holders’ decide to do something about it, like for example Dissidia : Final Fantasy, Marvel vs Capcom, or Project X-Zone.
In Sprite Comics, there are very little boundaries, as you can simply cut and paste characters of different sources without regards to anything. Some Sprite Comics will build a proper story that could explain, others may just put them together for the cool factor (like Mario vs Sonic).
Others simply don’t care and just put them together because they think it’s funny, like in this example. This was a parody of how many sprite comics don’t put any effort for cheap laughs.
Now defunct Ghastly comics had a dark sense of humor, and showed us what 90% of the sprite comics out there were made of.
And yet, even Sprite Comics have certain rules they should follow to stay readable and interesting.
Next week, we will cover the “Dos and Don’ts of Sprite Comics”.
