mezzacotta - Awkward Fumbles: FAQ

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is Awkward Fumbles?

Awkward Fumbles is a collaborative comic strip. You design a comic strip with pictures—but no words!—and send it to us. We'll get someone to fill in the dialogue and then we'll post it here on the site.

How can I contribute artwork?

Make a comic strip with no dialogue and send it to us, at the e-mail address shown on the bottom of the page. That's it! We'll do the rest.

In slightly more detail:

Do not include any dialogue or captions in your comic. You may include some text that is part of the art; for example a building might have a sign saying "Bank".
Do include empty speech bubbles, areas for captions, and generally blank space where we can put the words. We will not add speech bubbles to your art. All we do is put words over the top of what you send us.
Image size can be anything as long as one dimension (height or width) is less than or equal to 800 pixels.
You must agree to the legal conditions shown below. By sending us a comic, you are agreeing to these conditions.
Tell us what name you want credited as the artist!

How can I contribute dialogue?

We post a selection of submitted artwork to the mezzacotta wiki. Readers are invited to write dialogue for the artwork by adding it to the appropriate wiki page. (You'll need to register for an account on the wiki to do this.) When we think a submission has suggested dialogue good enough to use, we'll make the comic and post it.

Dialogue writers are currently not credited, so be aware of this if you want to contribute dialogue. We may change this in the future.

What's the legal stuff?

All submissions to Awkward Fumbles will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 licence. If you submit a strip to us, you agree to the following:

You affirm that the strip consists wholly of material which does not violate copyright or any other law. The work may contain:
- original material for which you own the copyright;
- material by other people released under an appropriate Creative Commons or similar derivative works licence, appropriately credited;
- public domain material; and/or
- small amounts of otherwise copyrighted material used under a fair use provision for the obvious intent of parody.
The work may not contain portions of copyrighted material that would fall outside a fair use provision.
You absolve us from any legal action which might be taken against you as the author of the work, should you fail to adhere to the above point.
You authorise us to publish the strip under the Creative Commons licence mentioned above.
Your name or nom de plume will be attached as the art creator credit (unless you prefer to be completely anonymous).
We will not claim authorship of your artwork, nor will we make any profit from it.
We may, at some point in the future, republish your work in a print or other collection. If we do so, all revenue (if any) raised above the production cost will be donated to a registered charity. (We are not actually planning to do this at this stage, but if we ever do, it will be much easier if we have this permission up front, rather than having to e-mail everyone and ask for it.)

Where did you get the idea for this?

Aha! The legendary Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics started a comic called Whispered Apologies, which pioneered this concept. Unfortunately, Ryan and his captioning buddies ran out of time to write clever dialogue, so the project ended after a few months. We thought this was a huge shame, and decided to start up our own version.

Why the name Awkward Fumbles?

Ryan took the name of Whispered Apologies from this Dinosaur Comic. Need we say more?