And, yes, it will give a distinction to make things clear, though probably “words by” not “rewritten” because some will likely never be written by the artist.

Our own Alan Gardner did a very popular panel for Full Tilt called Foobar, which ran for a time through the lockergnome site. Alan just drew a tech-related picture and let geeks write it. Chris Pirillo told me that a thousand of his readers every week were submitting captions. Chris would choose what he thought were the best three. Foobar went over really, really big. In fact, the reason it stopped is because bandwidth costs were so high at that time that the huge traffic created by Foobar and a few other geek strips we were running was impossible to financially support.

Cartooning is a mix of writing and drawing skills and the reality is that not a lot of us can do both well. I see a lot of good art paired with poor writing. Those who allow others to write gags will wind up making more money than if they don’t, I predict. Well, unless you’re very talented at both. I doubt that Wiley, for instance, would want to allow this, and he wouldn’t need to.

But then again, another thing we intend to do is allow a bit of customization without rewriting the entire gag. I got a wonderful Christmas card this past year from another Full Tilter, Mark Hill. It has Santa arriving back at the North Pole and Ms. Claus says “You’re getting back late.” Santa says “Dawn Douglass was extra good this year.” Ha! Wonderful! Who wouldn’t want a cartoon with your own name in it!

If Wiley provided a gag on INKswig where people could insert their own name or the name of a friend, he’d sell a ton of them.

To Rick’s point, our permanent site will have a feature that a lot of you aren’t going to like, at first glance. And that’s okay. Anybody who participates in INKswig doesn’t HAVE to allow it.

But the reality is, people want to manipulate content. Like this says, we want to be a part of the group and of the process. At Swig, we’re going to allow readers to take cartoonists’ art and write in their own word balloons — but ONLY if they are “generic” gags. This won’t be for character-driven strips. It would be wrong for people to put word’s (often obscene, no doubt) in established character’s mouths.

This will mostly be for panel gags, like when there’s a generic mother or geek or boss. And it will be clearly noted who drew the gag and who contributed the words. Anonymity will not be allowed on either side, in order to cut down on that obscene stuff, as well as hateful attacks, and so on.

The thing we are going to allow for chacter-driven strips is language translations. Cartoons are very accessible and universally loved. I think people around the world should be sharing them, so that we can get to know each other better. So INKswig will allow people to translate cartoons into whatever language they wish. Then when the copies sell, the translator will make money, as well as the cartoonist.

Wouldn’t you like to read the cartoons that Chinese and Japanese and Indian and African and…artists make? I sure would.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/216

Frankly, I don’t see a comics site as one that would ever generate enough traffic to make ad revenue viable. It makes me all the more curious as to Dawn’s model.