Shipwreck is a minicomic collective with a focus on making things.

As big digital spaces become increasingly alienating and demotivating, coming together as little collectives or circles structured around making stuff seems important.

I emphasise 'making stuff' as I don't mean it as something trivial - artist groups that polyp off from social media typically morph into psuedo-feeds (sharing/promoting work just for the sake of sharing/promoting it), or become essentially unproductive spaces (just chatting whilst continuing to structure any productive activity solely around social media). What we need to do is move away from those kind of communities as being our archetypal image of non-social media digital art spaces. We need structured communities, with defined objectives, and routines, and cultures of cooperative work. Communities that make something.

That all sounds very grandiose, when of course the idea itself is not that radical - likeminded artists should come together, support eachother, and make things (everything else that follows is secondary and a nice bonus). Or, to put it another way, the point is that if we're going to create meaningful and sustainable alternatives to social media, they have to actually be useful to the people involved.

Shipwreck was my attempt at putting that into practice! It's a very sweet and friendly group - there's not at all the vibe of structure and discipline like I allude to above, but nevertheless the underlying principle is the same. We're all here to show up, make something, and share the fuzzy glow of all looking at our work together at the end of the month. The concept with Shipwreck is each member tries to make a 1-2 page minicomic each month, in whatever media and to whatever theme they like.

Since starting in April 2024 we've made about 200* pages of comics! Each month we publish all the comics as an anthology. Hosting them remains a bit of a work in progress so watch this space.

(*this figure is only ever good for about one month at a time, of course!)