Well, it's finally time to just do this: I am releasing Lightbringer to the public domain.
I've been reluctant to do this for a while, partially out of a desire to go back to it, partially because a friend of mine said I shouldn't in case someone else gets it big and starts making money off of it, but I can't sit and wait for that to happen. If no one's working on it, then nothing will happen with the character. I started Lightbringer because I was an angry, opinionated 17-18 year-old who really wanted to make comic books and saw webcomics as the best way to do that. I was a crappy writer and a crappier artist who didn't understand how a lot of comic books actually WORK, but it got people interested and excited to some degree. I tried to keep up with it as my interests and focus shifted towards more criticism instead of writing and my schedule became much more hampered by other projects that I needed to do in order to get money, but the passion just isn't there like it once was.
I still wanted to do right by the character, especially since the artist at the time, Sergio, still wanted to work on it, so I asked people if they were interested in writing and I got plenty of submissions... which I never found time to sit down and read. I'm glancing through most of them now, mostly because I feel bad that I never got back to these people. It's my own fault for opening the floodgates when I wasn't ready for it, so my sincerest apologies go out to all the people who submitted pitches or were really enthusiastic about it. I hope you still are and are trying to do interesting things with your own writing and artwork. And hopefully now you'll have the opportunity to do so with Lightbringer if you so desire with my full blessing.
Now what does me releasing it to the public domain MEAN exactly? Well, it means the character and the pages that I produced (you'd have to check with the other artists' themselves for permission to use their artwork, since I'm only releasing MY work into the public domain) are free to be printed, reused, and altered by people any way they see fit. If you want to create your own story and use all the characters in Lightbringer with it, even horribly mutilate them as some kind of catharsis for hating me for some reason and then print it for money... yep, that's completely within your right. If you want to tell new stories with Lightbringer and the characters, you're free to do so as well. That being said, once YOU create something with it, that's yours to do with as you see fit. No one else can reproduce YOUR work with the character, since you've basically created something new and original by your hands. It just means that if someone else wants to make their own interpretation of the character, they can do that, too, as long as the work they're doing with it is their own.
What does that mean for the actual Lightbringer webcomic page? Eh, probably just going to leave it to die on its own if it hasn't already. By this point, Sergio has long since moved on with his own work, including his current webcomic
Thirteenth Child, so he probably won't be available to work on it if you were still hoping to do so.
I'm still proud of what I did with Lightbringer, even though most of it is bad. It taught me new tools to use in art programs, the harsh criticism I received helped get me on track for producing slightly better stuff and, at least, taught me more about the medium and eventually into criticism as a profession. A lot of ideas that I have for Lightbringer's future I may end up using in Atop the Fourth Wall itself, but otherwise if you ask me about some of the stuff I had planned or at least ideas I had, I'll answer them.
Still, I'm hoping that some of you out there will produce something more with it than I ever did and I wish all of you the best of luck. ^_^