Máquina de Quadrinhos

» see maquinadequadrinhos.com.br as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Fifty eight million comic strips came out of one Brazilian website in three and a half years. That is the number Mauricio de Sousa Produções put on the Máquina de Quadrinhos when it was over, alongside three million visits from sixty two countries, and it is the reason this belongs in a graveyard rather than a footnote. Most user-generated toys of that era can only report registrations. This one can report finished work.

It opened on 11 September 2009, built by Mauricio de Sousa Produções with a company called Lector.com. You registered, picked a nickname, and got a panel grid plus a library of ready-made art: characters and backgrounds, with balloons for the dialogue. You arranged them, wrote the dialogue, saved the strip, and sent it into a moderation queue. If it passed, it was published under your nickname and everyone else could vote on it.

The art is what made it different from every other strip builder on the web. Turma da Mônica has been the dominant children's comic in Brazil since the 1960s, and Mauricio de Sousa's studio handed out the actual licensed characters, not lookalikes. A ten-year-old with a browser could put Mônica and Cebolinha in a scene the same afternoon, drawn on model, for free.

I was twenty five in 2009 and writing code for a living, so the age gap alone puts this out of reach. The bigger distance is that Mônica's gang is not a reference that exists in Turkey. There is no shelf of it in the bookshops here and no dubbed cartoon anybody my age grew up quoting, which means the whole emotional engine of this site, forty years of characters you already loved, was switched off before I arrived. I am looking at the machinery with none of the feeling attached.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it worked ~

Registration was free and so was a basic pack of more than a hundred images. A subscription unlocked the rest, organized into themed packs, which is where the money came from. Published strips were scored by other authors in named categories, script and art among them, and moderators ran contests through the year on Carnaval and Christmas themes. You could follow other authors and get told when they posted something new.

The studio kept extending it. A CD edition arrived in 2010 for schools and libraries, built in Adobe AIR, with asset packs themed on curriculum subjects like geography and mathematics. In August 2011 the site added a game, Estação Robô, opening with one station of twenty eight levels. More stations were announced and never built, which in hindsight is the first sign that attention inside the company had moved on.

~ the printed ones ~

The promise that made the site matter was print. From the start, the strips the moderators rated highest were candidates for the official Turma da Mônica comics, and from 2010 some of them actually ran there, with the author credited and paid. There was also a Revista Digital from 2009, a moderator-selected anthology anybody could read.

Think about what that meant to a child in 2010. Not a badge, not a leaderboard position, but your name in the comic you bought at the newsstand, next to work by professionals, with money attached. Almost nothing else on the web offered that, and nothing offers it now.

~ the moderation ~

On 8 November 2011 the site dropped offline. It came back on the 11th announcing a partnership with the R7 portal, presented as an upgrade to the platform. Whatever the arrangement did for hosting, it marks the point where the operation started to slide.

By early 2013 the moderation was not functioning. Strips with adult content involving the characters were getting published and staying up, new accounts could no longer be created, and the moderators were no longer there. A site whose entire product was children arranging licensed cartoon characters had lost the one process that made it safe to run, and its owner is a family brand that cannot survive that kind of content sitting on its own domain.

~ the notice ~

The site went off on 19 April 2013. Mauricio de Sousa Produções said it was having security problems and that the Máquina would come back better than ever. It did not come back. Two days later, on 21 April, the address was serving a closing notice instead, and that page is the primary source for the death.

The notice sits under the studio's handwritten wordmark and reads: "Após quatro anos de muitas histórias e diversão, o portal Máquina de Quadrinhos da Turma da Mônica está encerrando suas atividades." After four years of many stories and much fun, the portal is ending its activities. Then thanks for taking part, and one piece of housekeeping: the customer service address was still active if you had questions. The strips were not offered back. The domain no longer resolves at all, and fifty eight million comics went with it.

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