River Twine Holt Forums

News, everyone! Having received a few inquiries on this subject, the Council has ruled on the subject of submitting multi-panel, comic-strip style pieces in the club's art contests. Such pieces are eligible for participation in contests so long as they are generally viewable on a single 'page' (as in, an image that is viewable by most people on a single computer screen, without having to hit 'page down' more than once). Multi-page graphic stories -- a comic 'book' -- are not allowed in either Fiction or Art contests, because they are considered to be too much in-between the two categories to allow for a fair evaluation.

Of course, we encourage people to submit graphic stories otherwise; this only pertains to contests. If you have any questions on this ruling, please feel free to contact the Council.

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Joan M., Brightwood's typist

Cool. I was actually debating doing multi-panel art for the random pairings contest. I haven't completely decided how I am going to approach it.

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Peg(gy)
owner of Rainpace, Starskimmer and Deeproot (troll)

Funny how THIS contest seems to have sparked the idea in multiple people! Which is great! Can't wait to see what everyone comes up with.

I think it's because some of the situations that were generated are sort of hard to depict in a single illustration. Mine is doable, but if I did a multi-panel it would explain what is going on better.

Haha I like the challenge to set it in one picture and leave a bit of what happens to the viewer.

I hear you, Mel.

In my case (yes, I was one of those who had the idea) -- I can think of a way to do it as a single piece, and I think people would "get it". If the council had decided against this, I might have fallen back on that. (Or I might have done the comic-strip, just not for the contest.) The single-panel concept came to me first... but then I thought of a way to show a slight progression that would make it clearer. And I thought, "huh! why not?"

One of the things the council was worried about was... we don't want anyone to ever feel like they "have" to do a multi-panel piece for a contest. But the thing is, based on past contests and past winners -- the group has a tendency to vote based on a variety of factors, not just how "elaborate" a piece is. Part of it is the concept itself, or how it made a person react when they saw it. We decided that the same would continue to be true, even if contests had both single-panel pieces, and multi-panel pieces. Folks will probably continue to mostly react to the idea being depicted -- and that can be just as effective in a single piece as in a "comic-strip". (We wanted to be very sure that the decision would be fair to all entries.)