I can tell from the way you're describing that the hope and spirit of this is for artists to band together and support each other, and it's meant with really great intentions! ;u; But it ends up feeling like a kind of favour-trading that I don't feel quite right about! There's a couple of places this is rough:
- It's a bit weird when you realise that comments push you into Trending and Popular on Tapastic, so in essence you're trading a service that manipulates those algorithms, which.....kind of like trading votes? It's a bit iffy. I know it's just one person, but I once had one commenter go through and respond to a bunch of my archive and that activity alone pushed me into the Trending category. It makes a difference.
- If I were a young artist looking for an art buddy, in an unorganised system, I'd be terrified of being the last one picked for dodgeball. Besides that: do I get to pick my buddy? What if someone picks me but I didn't want to pick them? What if I want someone as buddy and they don't want me? What if I get assigned to someone whose work I don't really like? Awkward. This stuff would need to be worked out!
The idea of organising a Mentor System is a really cool one -- but I feel like if you want to do that, the BEST way to do it would probably be to get a bunch of people to volunteer as Mentors first, and then put out a call for people interested in having an Art Mentor, and those people would get assigned to/chosen by the Mentors who have already agreed to take on whomever.
You'd still need a thread like this beforehand I think, to have people say "I'd be interested in participating in this as a "mentor/mentee" and making sure that there's interest before organising it.
There's a level of responsibility here, is the thing -- if it's just a casual friends-thing, then if you lost interest in the comic, you'd wander off, or maybe you'd get behind sometimes and tell your friend "dang I need to catch up still," -- heck, I fall behind on comics I really like all the time -- but if you've signed up to be someone's feedback then you can't just.....stop giving them feedback. There's no end date on this, which could be messy if you both had different ideas of how long this was gonna go on. So I think it'd be more genuine to treat it as a responsibility -- you're signing up to be someone's mentor here.
ALTERNATELY, while we're throwing ideas at the dart board, it might be kinda neat to have a like...critique club? Where every [period of time] you all meet up and get paired with someone and crit each others' work, and next time you might get paired with someone else, which would take the long-term responsibility out of this idea and make it more casual -- you might have a chance to make friends, and you have a guaranteed place of feedback, but you're not being CONTRACTUALLY PAIRED FOR LIFE, and if people drop out, it's fine, since everyone would get re-assigned every meeting.
