Stephen Reid of NCsoft Europe — creators of online games such as the Guild Wars series and City of Heroes — dropped us a note about a charity event they’ve been holding at UK comic shows to support EveryChild, “an international development charity that works with the most vulnerable and marginalised children in many of the world’s poorest countries to enable them to grow up free from disease, poverty and exploitation as valued individuals within strong communities.” (per their website).
Reid’s email has all the details you need if you’re interested in helping out and getting a sketch of your City of Heroes character:
In a nutshell: interested readers can turn up to a UK comics show, donate to charity and get a great sketch from a comics pro. We’re heading to a show this weekend so timing is perfect.
Anyway, the charity project is called Draw the World Together, which was originally Andrew Wildman’s idea. (Andrew was a long-time artist on Marvel UK’s Transformers, and has also done art for IDW’s Transformers series, as well as plenty of work for Marvel in the past.)
The basic core of the idea is that at various comic / sci-fi shows NCsoft exhibits at, Andrew and other comic artists sketch the in-game characters of our players, in exchange for a donation to the charity, EveryChild. This has been hugely popular with players, especially of our superhero MMO City of Heroes; they get to see their comic-book style character immortalised in… well, a comic book style. You can see just a few of the sketches in our gallery.
So far we’ve done this at Bristol Comic Expo (05/06/07), Brighton Comic Expo (05), Memorabilia (06) and London Film and Comic Con (07). We’re going to The Comics Show in Birmingham this weekend, and we’ll be at Memorabilia again in November.
So far, we’ve raised over £6,500 (about $13k) for the charity, and I hope we’ll raise another £2,500 before year’s out. NCsoft doesn’t take a single penny of this by the way; all the donations go direct to the charity.
In addition to the artists who sketch for us (a massive list including Dave Lloyd, Dave Gibbons, Doug Braithwaite, Liam Sharpe, Mark Buckingham, Mike Collins, Charlie Adlard, John McCrea, Leigh Gallagher and loads more) from last year we’ve also put some of NCsoft’s own ‘real life’ characters into action to raise cash. Visitors to our stand can pose for pictures, and for their donation they get a nice printed version to take home. So if you’re looking for ‘interesting’ photos to add to the story, check out our Flickr feed.
If you’d like to know more, you can visit:
Our gallery of sketches: http://eu.plaync.com/eu/dtwt/gallery
The DtWT site: http://www.drawtheworldtogether.com/
Our Flickr feed, with loads of show photos (check Memorabilia last year): http://www.flickr.com/photos/ncsofteurope/
A couple of YouTube videos showing the artists sketching, and, er… me:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=IwjHpD4O9vU
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=GeyJRE25Z80
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=r18iWjl58AM
October 10th, 2007 at 11:30 am
Cool beans! Mind if I promote it over at our site?
October 10th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
Hey JK, thanks for the story! If I’d known I’d be quoted so liberally I’d have been less verbose.
As a special incentive to anyone who reads this and comes to The Comics Show this weekend, mention you saw the mention here and I’ll get you a special gift.
October 10th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
Oh and Merlin – plug away!
October 11th, 2007 at 9:24 am
It’s a great idea, Steve. Unfortunately I won’t be able to come and grab my gift
since I live in Italy, but should you ever visit one of our cons (Lucca Comics and Games, for instance, the biggest one we have) I’ll be more than happy to support you all the way. I love City of Heroes and Villains and helping kids around the world is just great. I wish there’d be more of these ideas thrown around you know?
Best,
Dario Beretta aka Blue Rush (Milan, Italy)