Scooby-Doo Personalized Comics

Years ago, I talked about the notion of personalized comics. You give a company your name and a handful of minor details, an they could drop those into a comic book story thereby making you a character in the story. I had a storybook version of this as a kid, but it had to be manually typewritten. I suspect it was a HUGE amount of effort and only worked finanically because they must have paid someone slave wages to type the whole script out for each and every book that was sold. Marvel attempted this in the 1990s, relying on their Captain Universe character as a stand-in for the customer. (The whole Captain Universe concept is brilliantly ideal for this type of thing. Like, if I didn't know better, I'd like the character was specifically created for exactly a project like this.)

Up until maybe 2000-2005 or so, those types of stories were relatively rare because it did require a fair amount of manual effort. However, by 2009, when I wrote that post, the technology was far enough along that I felt it could be handled relatively easily. Databases meant you could plug in the inividual's name and details into the story quickly and effortlessly, digital lettering meant that dropping that now-customized script into art files was also automatic, and print-on-demand printing meant that there would be effectively no set-up prouction costs. You've removed virtually all of the manual labor involved with creating these beyond developing the initial basic story. So why was no one doing personalized comics?

Well, apparently someone has finally gotten around to it!

Poorly.

Well, poorly from a comic book art perspective at any rate.

There is now a Scooby-Doo framework where you can personalize yourself into a graphic novel version of "What a Night for a Knight," the very first Scooby-Doo cartoon from 1969. You plug in some basic details about yourself -- including a customizeable Hanna-Barbera-style avatar -- and they'll produce a hardcover book of the story with you inserted as a new character...

I'm of two minds about the result here. In the first place, the addition of a customizeable character is relatively well-done. I mean, yeah, there is some measure of looking like the additional character was just pasted into existing art, but it's not at all bad for a completely customized, entirely new character design to be dropped into an existing story automatically. Certainly a vast improvement over the generic art that just presented a generic character and only change the name in older books of this type. But whoever put this together doesn't seem to have much knowledge or familiarity with actual comic books. Setting aside that it looks like they basically just took screen shots of the original cartoon, the page and panel flow is clunky at best.

I learned about this project from Scott Niswander's recent video about his going through and getting one of these. He's the one who noted the panels look like screen shots of the show. (I'm almost certain they're not precisely just screen shots, though -- those wouldn't print well AT ALL. They must be re-drawn. Either new for this project or re-purpose from an old storybook based on the episode?) He also noted that much of the dialogue assigned to his character is just lifted from other characters in the show, mostly Daphne and Velma. All of which suggests to me that this project was almost entirely built out by the programmers and developers figuring out how to make all the backend systems run as smoothly as possible, and there was minimal effort on the creative/storytelling side of things. Which further suggests to me that this is more of a proof-of-concept product than anything else. They're testing this to see if it is indeed profitable to make these types of books on a more affordable scale that than used to be possible.

If that is the case, I hope this is successful. I'd love to see more of these types of things -- I'm genuinely disappointed these haven't been more prevalent given how ubitquitous the technology is. I'd just like to see them afforded some interesting and creative storytelling by professional cartoonists to make some results that are cool and interesting beyond just the fact of their existence and the potential they purport.

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