Yes! Absolutely! We should do something like that!
Actually, I have an idea along those lines...Basically, what you suggested with incentives, perhaps. I don't think we have enough energy to start a competition, but we could do a collaborative thread where anybody can post on a theme (Black and White). I could make some comics of my own, and reward anyone who posts with a personalized sprite. Or you could do the same thing with doodles. Or we could form a super-team and do BOTH!
Whatever works. I think the most important thing is just to stir things up a bit in here.
GR has hit the nail on the head, I think. You just have to do what you do for yourself at this point, and if anybody likes what you're doing, you treat it as a perk.
Of course, it was like this on some level when I first started here. I'd go a long time between responses sometimes. I think it was the rising success of Wisest Pikachu that gave us our initial acceleration, along with the fact that everybody here was young and unhardened by the cruel whims of comic fate.
Personally, I don't think this stagnancy is destined to last forever. Initial conditions were perfect for a blossoming FanComics forum, and now they're not. Perhaps they will be again. I think the future may be in our newbies: The forum worked because there was a community of people all interacting, moving between fanbases. That community has largely dispersed, for various reasons. So it's to the new, uneducated, unwashed masses that we must turn. I think that they may one day bring us into that kind of community again.
Of course, I think we ought to experiment with prodding and seeing what happens.
~MC