It’s that time of the year again, when Life and Death comic swerves into its yearly multi-comic crossover for the Yearly Halloween Cameo Caper. While these crossovers have been happening for seven years now, I must admit I never really bothered getting into them. A good part of this lies with the difficulty of following the various storylines. Part of this lies with navigating the comic. If I have to click through a half dozen links to read a crossover, I’m not going to be that interested. That, and I must admit the Clan of the Cats/College Roomies from Hell Halloween Crossover back in 2000 spoiled me in that readers could read the entire crossover on either comic’s site, and thus negate the need to jump from site to site. It was this innovation which led me to start reading CRfH in the first place, rather than driving me from both comics (and likely webcomics as a whole).
Interestingly (and I don’t recall if this was done in previous Halloween Capers), the strips are being hosted not only at L.P. Hogan’s Webcomic Crossover & Cameo Archive, but at a central hub with each comic linked and in chronological order. This admittedly makes the crossover much easier to read, though it still suffers from the usual problems inherent with multi-comic crossovers… especially those that aren’t tightly scripted with a plot that weaves together the elements of each participating comic, which becomes increasingly difficult with each additional participant, due partly to update issues and with integrating the characters and existing plots to create a coherent whole. And I must be frank: the 2012 Halloween Cameo Caper is not a coherent crossover and will likely confuse readers who follow only one or two of the participating comics.
That said, I will admit I was mildly interested in some of the comics I saw; I’m not sure what was up with the giant with the princess in his pocket, but it seems odd enough to stir my interest. Likewise, I didn’t realize that Reinder had started up a new comic about one of his secondary faerie characters from his old Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan strip. As for the story, it seems those comics that update most frequently have dominated the storyline, with those strips that update less often (such as Life and Death) seem to exist only to cheerlead their more active brethren. And let’s face it; while the best crossovers have well-crafted stories that blend the best elements of the participating comics, ultimately crossovers are about introducing differing comics to new readerships, and the Halloween Capers don’t bother to hide their intent to do this.
This is the first year with a comic site with strips in chronological order (or as close as an order can be figured out).
While some comics may do crossovers for just attracting new readers some do it for fun.
I don’t really read these Halloween crossover capers. After I’ve seen the first couple of years, I’ve stopped bothering since then. There’s no real plot or consequences; it’s just there for the sake of being there. It’s really all pointless.
Heh, I’ll say you have the point on several occasions :)
The Halloween Capers are not serious crossovers per se, but rather a merry cameo go-round where artists jog along different storylines(rarely getting to the bothersome coordination/planning parts og such feath), connection, cameoing, referring and crossing over with each other on the fly.
I usually compare the event to my time at DnD when I as a DM following up an introduction to a new city by asking the players: “What will you do now?”.
The result was evident soon after when 6 players were running in six different directions, all depending on their own goals. Soon we had one shopping armor and flirting with the Smith’s daughter, one doing a little thievery on the side (and all to soon either end up fleeing the cityguards or fighting his way out), one studying at the local wizard, trying to talk down the prize of spells, one walking the sewers looking for a lost dog and the rest ending up at the local tavern, hooking new adventures and/or starting a brawl… and at various points these endevaurs would cross each other, hit off and turn into new directions.
I never had to plan a cityadventure, they wrote themselves, but it was a chaotic crazy run where you never know what came into people’s mind next, but where you had the fun catching up and seeing where it all went.
Thats usually the case with the Halloween Capers… you know the basic setup, and thats that… everybody can sign up and all have their own ideas and will try to mingle them with what happens in the other comics along the way.
Something like this could only happen at Halloween :)
And Graham, it may seem pointless from a readers site, and indeed it is chaotic and unstructured, but the basic idea is for the artists to let loose and have fun among others of kin, and that part seems to have merit every year :)
The Caper has never been super-coherent, but this year it hasn’t helped that my comic-drawing schedule fell apart so that I only managed to do 5 out of 10 scheduled pages of what was supposed to be an intro for the whole event. Ironically, since then, my schedule has opened up a bit more – I managed to get a short holiday and work on a 24-hour comic, even. But that all happened too late for me to help introduce the event the way I had planned to.