Salutations,
honored guest! Welcome to Alternate Endings, famous for fine
webcomicery and voted Second Runner-Up for Most Sanitary Site on the
Internets*! We are Nick Palmer and Roz Martinez, imaginauts
extraordinaire, and by wandering into our humble domain you have become
contractually bound to assist us in our latest amazing enterprise**! We
hope that you’re not drunk because, like it or not, we are now partners
in storytelling.
You
see, dear reader, Alternate Endings is an experiment in collaborative
web comics. We need you (and you, and you...maybe not you in the back,
but definitely you over there...) and as many
people as you can ask/beg/bribe/extort to help us tell a story. Inspired
by the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books of our distant childhoods, Roz
and I conceived of a webcomic steered by the reader, an exercise in
internet democracy and improvisation where you, our
readers, tell us what happens next via a poll offered at the end of
each strip. Each week's strip will offer at least three branching
possibilities. Readers will have from the time the strip is posted on
Monday until 9:00am Friday each week to cast their vote. Some options
may be deliberately ambiguous in nature, while others may be obvious in
their result. Either way, we surrender the strip’s direction entirely to
our readership so that we may be compatriots in telling the most
exciting, moving, or merely the craziest stories possible.
Neither
I nor Roz know where this experiment will carry us. I don’t even know
where to find my pants! New characters may join us while old ones depart
during the course of this madcap journey. Entire storylines may meet
their thrilling conclusions, only for new adventures to arise in their
place. Will the comic be filled with laughter, terror, or flights of
fanciful whimsy? Who put the bomp in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp? Where
the hell are my pants?! The answers to these burning questions (and
more!) await us, but we can’t do it without you.
Your
role is simple--- read the strip, gather your friends, vote for where
you want the story to go, and hang on to your hindquarters as we all go
for a ride through the world of artistic experimentation! You can find
us on Facebook,
Twitter, and Google+, or email us at altendcomics@gmail.com.
Please keep in mind that everything about Alternate Endings is a work
in progress. The look of the comic, its home on the internet, and indeed
the creators themselves should be considered in beta. Your feedback is
the most powerful factor in shaping this webcomic, the factor which
keeps us on our creative toes as we walk through the fire of artistic
endeavor. We’d like to thank you for being a part of Alternate Endings,
and hope you are as excited to see where the forks in the road lead as
we are to plant the signposts. If for some reason you should ever find
yourself displeased, remember our Golden Rule of Customer Satisfaction:
"If you don't vote, you can't bitch."
Being
of overwhelming import, this first poll will run a bit longer than its
offspring, opening August 18th and closing at 9:00am CST on September 1st, 2012. As said by a
wordsmith far greater than I, “It's a dangerous business...going out
your front door.” Yet that is exactly what we must do now, my friends.
Which door we take and what we find outside is up to you.
*- This claim is a lie.
**- Contract only legally binding on the Micronesian archipelago of Shanzalibar, which may be a fictional place.
