It is completely free to participate, although if you like, you can purchase the book that will contain the whole year’s worth of Challenges, in case you want to work ahead or keep them for posterity.  You don’t have to do every week, but we hope you will!  We will also be launching new forums, including a spot for people participating in 52ComicChallenges to post their work and get feedback from others.

We hope you will also post the challenges that you complete in your blog or journal, meme style, and encourage others to participate as well.  One of the main focuses of 52ComicChallenges will be to build some much-needed community in the Small Press Comics arena.  We always see the same awesome people at the conventions in the Small Press Ghetto, but then we say good bye and don’t see them again until the following year.  Come on, people, it’s 2007 and most of our phones can get online at this point.

Our other focus is to encourage people to push their limits and work outside of their comfort levels.  Some of these challenges will be hard.  You’re assuredly familiar with our stuff enough to know that we tend to do weird experimental comics anyhow.  But these smaller challenges will hopefully be just that — a challenge!  As we received the entries for small town/BIG CITY this year, we realized that some of our contributors have been participating in our group projects for the last four or five years!  When you compare their recent work to their older work, it’s jaw-droppingly-awesome to see how much everyone has improved over the years. (Which is not to say any of them were less than amazing to begin with.)  We hope that by offering weekly exercises, we’ll encourage people to try new things and tone their comic-making muscles.  And we’ll be right there beside you, doing cool challenges and getting buff.

To kick off 52 Comic Challenges and get you excited about this year’s Large Scale Open Invite Group Anthology (to be announced  July 26, 2007!),  we have put together two mini group projects:  Lost Lunches and Crash!Boom!Bang!

Click here to download the invite flyer for these two projects, or visit us at San Diego Comic Con or Wizard World Chicago!  We encourage you to print this flyer, steal some copies at your school or job (we won’t tell) and distribute to your artist & writer friends, bring to your local sketch night, pass out at school, or leave at your comic shop.

Lost Lunches:  A Treasury of True Throw-Up Tales

Write and draw a one to two page comic about a time when you vomited. That’s it. One or two pages, true story, vomit.
Each entry should be a self-contained story and not part of a daily ournal comic or other ongoing series. Entries should be about a specific experience and tell a story from beginning to end.

DEADLINE: October 1, 2007

Crash!Boom!Bang!: A Consecutive Cacophony Comics Collection

You are in a dark room when you hear the following series of sounds:

CHRRT
VREEP
PLINK
SKSSST
BLURGLE
VING
FRRUNGT
PAF
SPANG
WFFT
TCHUG TCHUG
REEEEEE
KA-TONG
WHAM
SMURCHLE
BOOF
TSSSS
TING

Write and draw a two page story in which you show us what events transpired in order to produce those sound effects! All of the sound effects must appear in your comic, in order, with no added sounds or dialogue. Sound effects do not have to appear one per panel, you may distribute them throughout your story however you’d like.

DEADLINE: October 1, 2007