by Serhend Sirkecioglu
The Middle East is, except for The 99 (which I can’t read without cringing every other page) not to my knowledge a big scene when it comes to comics, but I recently stumbled upon something from Lebanon: a rather standard web comic with a very noteworthy twist. Sarab, The Interactive Web Comic is a story where the reader votes on what happens next. The current fan base, from what I read, seems to be into groping female players in online games, but that aside it’s so far a rather standard/bland Monomyth drawn in Photoshop. They even have a animated short of how the story could have played out with the other choices on their Facebook page, but its seems they stopped updating at page 19, which is a shame cause they have a pretty decent following and a really good idea. I hope you check you it out and pester these guys into updating again, as they have a good business model and an OK story on their hands.
A little more digging unveiled that this comic seems to be made possible by a company called Seeqncewhich is a cool name for a comics publisher—too bad they are not. They’re a “startup accelerator” company which helps Lebanese entrepreneurs get off the ground through a intense screening process which leads to a 100k incorporation of funding and resources for the few they eventually select. No mention of Sarab on their main site—I hope the guys and gals behind this comic did not burn through that 100k for just those 19 pages and a fancy website.
We actually did something like this a few years ago with a webcomic called Turtle Vs Bunny. It was our take on the Tortoise and Hare with a Spy vs Spy twist. When it was running, it updated on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Readers got to vote on who they wanted to see win the race.
Whoever got the most votes between updates got the upper hand in the next comic. The character with the most overall votes won the race.
There’s another online comic right now doing the fan-voting thing, written by none other than Scott Lobdell…but it’s commissioned by Axe Body Spray.
http://www.youtube.com/axe
I’m well aware of that Axe comic. Yeah, there’s a big difference between a voter based narrative happening in a region with little to no known comics scene and a corporation making a high end cash grab(though kudos kudos to Scott Lobdell for landing the gig).
also this format overall does have its problems, you could paint yourself into a corner or even end up with something like Axe Cop, where the story goes off the deep end and becomes inordinately silly.
Hi there! I negotiate translation rights for English language comics and I was really interested to see your research into comics in the Middle East. But when I tried all the links, none of them worked! Is that evidence of censorship, do you think?
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