I'm participating in the Duck December Christmas art swap and I noticed they use a couple of neat ideas organisation-wise that I think would be worth stealing for HA:

1. Scheduled due dates for each page. That way artists know specifically what time frames they're working too, and a firm date lets organisers know when an artist hasn't been able to make it and that they have to go to Plan B. (Obviously it's preferable to just check with the artist what's happening, but this is the internet and people do just go incommunicado for extended periods sometimes).
2. The “deadbeat watch committee”. I don't like the name, but it's a brilliant idea signing up a few artists specifically as standbys to step in if any of the assigned artists can't get their pages done. In our case it would make sense to do that on an issue by issue basis.


In terms of timeframes, I suggest setting the due dates atsomething like 4 weeks before the planned publication date. Given the length of the HA production pipeline, that shouldn't be onerous for artists, and it would give reserve artists plenty of time to step in if necessary.


What do people think? Much needed organisational structure or too bureaucratic?

I think it's good, and probably just a more formal way of what we've been doing informally. Our artist list is also meant to function as potential stand-in artists; the problem here is keeping it up to date. So the difference would be having dedicated stand-in artists for each chapter, right? Which might be good, considering many artists still on the list might have gone AWOL in the meantime… :p

Pretty much. It's the difference between having to run around at the last minute checking with a bunch of people who may or may not be able to do it, and knowing there are reserves already on standby.

And on the artist side, there's a big difference between having agreed to provide emergency art if necessary and anticipating that vs being asked at the last minute unexpectedly.

We may even end up with some reserve artists who aren't actually assigned pages for that issue but are happy to step in if necessary (I think that was essentially my status for a while, actually).

Firm deadlines are really useful for an artist too: at the moment there's a lot of ambiguity around when the pages have to be done by. I worried about my pages for Fandango so much that I ended up doing them ayearearly. xD Other artists are undoubtedly leaving them until they're actually needed - without a clear picture of when “when they're actually needed” is. Everyone has other stuff on their plate and knowing when their pages are needed by let's us (a) plan around that and (b) notice early if there's going to be a clash and we have to bow out on a specific page.

Looking back at HA first few issues, I notice that artist like fuku, Hero, nepath, abt were the allstar heavy hitters in getting pages out on a weekly basis. Yes there was a few artist that got some pages out but hardly any repeaters from issue to issue. I think what happen was the pace of publishing pages kept everyone excited to want to participate. As soon as we slowed down, the interest was no longer there, (at least for some). Now as soon as the first generation of artist started to do less pages, new artist like ironhand, irreverent, and Shastab got to be runners from the first set of artist.



Now I know that there were times the issues slowed down due to website mishaps or artist dropping out at the last minute but this time it was our fault for letting more than half a year go by without publishing a signal page from the main story. For some reason or another I felt like I should have stepped in and pushed those pages until the next artist has some pages. My reason for not doing so was I didn't want to over step my lane by hogging up pages when it is a community project. Being that said after reading this thread, I think I'm going to do just that to keep the pace going some what.



I use to love when Thursday came around, pages came out, but now I'm starting to lose interest and just continue SolarCells mini series starting January. I even spoke to irrevenant about it and it seems he got his head on his shoulders about this whole HA project being pushed forward. (I love the way this guy thinks). The ideas here on this tread is a great idea and yet somewhat unrealistic. Back up artist(s) would work to a point. I think what we need are some incentives like the one that's in place now about your character participating in a issue of HA. I think that, more or less, made the first generation of artist successful. It worked so well in fact that their characters are literally the corner stones of HA now. I mean, if I have to, I'll even help color line art to keep things going if the artist don't want to color. And thats another thing. If I do fill in, someone have to color mine in. I can keep if a colorist colored my stuff.


Anyhow, I spoke too much and I have no idea how to get more artist on board other than keep the pace going so that new artist can at least get there characters in an issue or two of HA.

As much as I regret having waited so long before reassigning pages on HA #9, I'm afraid it didn't change anything in terms of the attention HA gets. It took a dive when the duck's interface changed, and it's been stagnating ever since then. Also, due to real life stuff I haven't been able to promote HA and interact with other dd creators as much as I used to do. So, generally, if you'd like HA to get more attention, and infuse it with new blood (in terms of new artists and characters): Get in touch with your favorite dd creators who might not be aware of HA, explain the concept to them, tell them they can have their own characters interact with other dd characters etc.

By the way, the first work fuku did for HU was a promo piece for EGO. Back then I offered any artist on dd to create a promo piece for EGO which “simulated” a tie-in with their own comic - all they had to do was create a piece with their own characters looking to the sky and add the tagline “Watch the skies” and the HU web address. They would then post these pieces on their own comics and I would post them on HU. Not only was it an opportunity to advertise HU all around dd, and the creators' comics on HU, but also to create the appearance that ALL OF dd was a (potential) part of the HUniverse.

tl;dr: (1) Reach out to creators on dd personally. (2) Generate interest in the dd community.

Do you think it's worth reaching beyond the DD community too? The Duck as a whole is pretty quiet nowadays.

From memory, Virtus found his way here from DeviantArt.

What changed about DD's interface?

Oh, I just meant the site relaunch/redesign under wowio.

Regarding dd: I think it makes sense in principle; it's just important that we reach out to people who can actually make comics, not just create OCs. Virtus's joining HA was mostly due to Sebastian Sandberg's being enormously helpful during the launch phase of HA.

True. I was thinking about reaching beyond the Duck for contributors, not just characters. Since we're talking about artists I figure if they're interested, in most cases they'd be doing art as well as providing characters. If they even want to provide characters at all. We have some artists who don't - I started off that way before I came up with Chaos.

Not that I really know how to go about doing that, mind you. :/

Abt_Nihil wrote:
Regarding dd: I think it makes sense in principle; it's just important that we reach out to people who can actually make comics, not just create OCs. Virtus's joining HA was mostly due to Sebastian Sandberg's being enormously helpful during the launch phase of HA.

Are you thinking any site beyond deviantArt too?

I think it would be worth reaching out to anyone anywhere who could be interested. Not entirely sure how and where to go about that though.

A separate but related issue is that the Duck just isn't as busy as it used to be. If the Duck as a whole could draw in more people there'd be less need to look further afield.

How many active ppl are with HA now? How many contributors do we need? I think I could get one person to do some art for us. I have to talk to him first and see if he has time. If he does, I will be inking and coloring his pencils.

It's hard to say exactly how many active contributors we have right now because people wander in and out, and their level of availability varies. (Everyone here is a volunteer and real life happens).

We could definitely use more contributors and at the moment I think it's pretty much a matter of the more we can get, the better. We need at least enough to be able to consistently produce a page per week. More contributors than that would let us get ahead of the game.

Yep - the more, the merrier! Or the faster updates.