On 11 July 2008 I opened up a Facebook Group, called Garen's A-Z of comic strip characters, where members of the group would use the discussion board to suggest comic strip characters beginning with the next letter in the alphabet. The character that received the most 'votes' would then be drawn by me the next morning - a new character every day - and posted in the group's photo gallery. There were only two definite rules:

• The character had to have its origin in comics (animation characters were regularly mixed up)
• Once a character had been drawn, another character from that book or series was not eligible later in the alphabet

The group reached about 230 members, with about 25-30 (+/-) votes going in for each letter, and the originals were auctioned off at the Caption comics festival in Oxford on August 9th. You can read more detail on the characters in the A-Z category on the blog. Here is the completed alphabet (click the thumbnail to see bigger):