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Remember that time Splinter Cell superspy Sam Fisher was in the middle of a dangerous mission on a rocky island, and suddenly he began hearing the voices of a pair of dopey video store clerks in his head? Or how about that dimwitted shmoe in Half-Life 2 named Gordon Frohmen whose life ran parallel to famed freedom fighter Gordon Freeman?

Not ringing any bells? Well, perhaps that's because these things never happened. At least not in any video game. They're just the imaginings of players who were inspired to tell stories using images from their favourite games.

This isn't machinima — the art of recording video from games to tell an original story. It's an entirely distinct media that has come to be known as gamics; comics made using game art.

The term "gamics" was coined by Toronto resident Nathan Ciprick. He established one of the first websites dedicated to gamics, www.gamics.com, two years ago.

"Star Wars Galaxies was what gave me the idea," said Mr. Ciprick, who has been publishing regular updates to his "Path to the Force" gamic since the site's launch. "The key was in how the characters talk to each other in the game. A little bubble appears over your character's head, just like in a comic. I realized I could tell a story with this."

The 33-year-old recently left a job in the corporate world to pursue his creative goals full time. He now develops new installments for about a half-dozen different gamics every week based on games ranging from Tomb Raider to Grand Theft Auto. People from as many as 70 countries have visited his site, and his gamics are going to be part of a video game art exhibit in a New Zealand museum later this year.

Mr. Ciprick compares the process of writing a gamic to writing a script for a low-budget film. "You know you have a limit on the locations and characters, so you have to write something tailored to what you can work with," Mr. Ciprick said.

Once a story has been penned, the next step in gamic creation is taking screenshots, a process that involves posing characters and environmental objects in accordance with the story. Work then moves to an image editing application where each screenshot becomes a panel in the final comic. Speech balloons are laid on top of the pictures, and any required special effects are added.

Most gamics writers say that creating suitable screenshots is the hardest part of the process. That's why Half-Life 2 has become the game of choice for the medium. Shortly after the game's release in 2004, a downloadable modification was developed by a fan that provided players godlike control over virtually every element of the game. Called Garry's Mod after the fellow who created it, this program led to the development of dozens of gamics based on the game, including "Concerned: The half-life and death of Gordon Frohman" (www.hlcomic.com), a strip that draws as many as 12,000 unique visitors on days when new episodes are posted.

"Concerned" stands out from most other gamics by virtue of the quality of its writing and presentation. The author, Christopher Livingston, was once a script supervisor for Nickelodeon. Now a desk jockey for a plumbing company in New York, he was looking for an effective means of creative expression.

"I was a little hesitant because my comic is mainly a gigantic in-joke about the

world of Half-Life," Mr. Livingston said, adding that he himself isn't a hard core gamer, and that he has almost no interest in comics. "But I saw that people were really devoting a lot of time and energy to their own comics, and thought I should just go for it."

As "Concerned" grew in popularity, Mr. Livingston joined a quickly growing community of gamics creators working in co-operation with one other, and has received help from his colleagues. Preferring writing over tasks associated with visual design, Mr. Livingston has employed the help of other gamics creators to enhance the look of his strip, including Michael Clements, creator of SKETCH (another gamic based on Half-Life 2), and founder of the Half-Life 2 gamics site www.phwonline.com.

Mr. Clements' site began about a year ago as a way for him to distribute one of his own gamics. But it quickly grew and now attracts a daily average of 7,000 visitors.

"One day the public ate 60gigabytes of bandwidth," Mr. Clements said, "which is quite a large sum considering we only distribute .jpg picture files."

It wasn't long before he realized the popularity of his site could be of benefit to other people in the gamics community. "I thought that letting other people use my site to hold their gamics would help bring the community together."

It did. His site now plays host to several of the most popular gamics series on the Internet, including Jeff Brandt's "Apostasy" series, a Half-Life 2 strip that many gamics fans and artists believe sets the bar for the game comic format. Mr. Livingston calls Apostasy the "godfather" of gamics. "It's really a graphic novel — artistic in design, layout, and writing."

But there's a significant artistic difference between a graphic novel and a gamic; namely, graphic novels feature original artwork, while gamics duplicate copyrighted images from games. Artistic veracity aside, the use of copyrighted material raises an even bigger question: what do game publishers and studios think of gamics creators appropriating art from their titles?

Perhaps surprisingly, the video game industry has apparently been tolerant — in some cases even encouraging — of gamics.

"I've spoken to a few people at Valve, and they've all been very complimentary about my comic; very helpful and supportive," Mr. Livingston said. "Their whole company philosophy seems to revolve around providing the [gaming] community with tools to tinker with their games."

Valve, for its part, did not return a request for a comment for this story.

Mr. Ciprick said his experiences with the industry has been equally positive. "LucasArts put me in their newsletter to show people my gamic."

He even obtained a licence from Playboy to use art from the game Playboy: The Mansion in one of his strips.

But not all studios are aware that their games are being used for gamics. A representative from Ubisoft Canada, maker of the game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, refused to comment because he was unaware that a gamic based on his company's game existed.

At least the game industry doesn't have to worry about gamics creators making money from their copyrighted game art. All three authors interviewed for this story said that their work, despite its success, is still by and large unprofitable.

But that doesn't bother Mr. Livingston, who maintains a humble attitude about his popular strip.

"All I'm doing, really, is covering a lot of Valve's beautiful artwork with word bubbles and filling the word bubbles with cheap jokes," he said. "If my comic has value other than getting a few laughs, it seems to be in that it's encouraging others to make their own comics."