Regular listeners to the show will be aware that we have been receiving a lot of great promotional material, swag if you will, from various comic artists wishing to promote their sites. Daku and I have been trying to come up with a fun and interesting way to give this stuff away in contests and as rewards to our listeners and readers. I think we have just thing.

I am officially announcing “The Monthly Web Comics Scavenger Hunt“. Here’s how this is going to work. On the first day of each month we will announce a topic for the rest of the month. We then want people to gather links to comics across the web that pertain, refer to, involve, or otherwise mention that topic and send us the list of links. By the last day of the month the person who got us the most qualifying links to comics about our topic will win a handful of web comic swag. And let me tell you, we have some real high quality stuff. The Alpha Shade books alone are worth entering the contest.

The links can be to direct strips, pages, or panels, but they must be part of an ongoing comic title. No plain old illustrations or random images. They have to be part of a comic. If you run a web comic and create a strip, panel, or page that has to do with our topic during the month, that will count as long as it is used in the course of the regular comic. Just putting it in a special out of the way place outside your regular comic will not count. If you search on google and find some random cartoon that is on a toy package or album cover that does not count. If there are multiple comics in one title that deals with our topic each individual comic does count. However, we’ll try to avoid selecting topics that any one comic title can claim to their whole archive. So, no topics like “video games” will be declared, although individual video game titles might be, that sort of thing.

I hope that’s clear enough. If you have any questions about the details or if you want to get your promotional material (book, shirt, rubber chicken with your site’s URL, etc.) to us to be used in the recurring contest send us an email. I think this will end up being a fun thing to do and may expose people to new comics while they search for comics related to our topics. At the end of each month we’ll put up all the links we get, so eventually we’ll have a pretty interesting topic-based index of web comics.

Return to the site August 1st to read about the first topic in the The Monthly Web Comics Scavenger Hunt right here at Digital Strips.