TWCL

[Novil]

It seems that the Web Cartoonists’ Choice Awards are dead, since nothing has happened on their website for over half a year now. This means that there is currently no general webcomic award consisting of several categories and given by the webcomic community. In contrast, most other award organizations either nominate only some of the most famous webcomics for their webcomic category or have a very special, sometimes strange, taste.

Without a general webcomic award the webcomic community is missing a good opportunity to lead some interest to the best works in the field. Getting a major award, or just being nominated for one, is also a particularly nice reward for “not really super successful” webcomic creators whose website only gets a few hundred visitors a day. On top of that, a nomination for a Web Cartoonists’ Choice Awards has usually been regarded to be sufficient to establish notability for a Wikipedia entry.

Because of this it would be really cool if the Web Cartoonists’ Choice Awards could be resurrected next year or some other people would establish a new award.
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[mooncity]

Waddaya mean no awards for webcomics?! WHO was it who won themselves a Beaky, may I ask?


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Mooncity
Reversing the polarity of the neutron flow since 1976!


The comic strip that never was.

[Novil]

The Webcomic Beaky was only for new webcomics established during the last year, so no webcomic started in 2007 or before had the chance of winning.

My understanding of a “general” webcomic award is that awards are given in at least the following categories:

Best comic
Best new comic
Best art
Best writing
Best story (long form) comic
Best comedy (short form) comic
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[mooncity]

Ah, 'tis true.

Trouble is, the Big Dogs will likely win most of these:

Best comic
Best art
Best writing
Best story (long form) comic
Best comedy (short form) comic

I suspect that's thrown some cold water on enthusiasm for the WCCA. Unless a comic makes a really huge spash, and I suspect one that did would be new, it would be exceedingly hard to beat out Achewood, PA, PVP, etc., so on and so forth. Unless a comic was ineligible to win twice in a row, or the Big Dogs were barred from consideration (both partially defeating the purpose of the whole thing; i.e, who's best), newer comics wouldn't have much of a chance to win.

Though the WCCAs did give the idea a really good try.

If it comes back or is eventually replaced with something else, I'd like to see a category for who's done the most for webcomics as a medium outside of just making a webcomic. Sort of a Public Service/Good Citizen Award as voted on by the community of webcomickers.
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Mooncity
Reversing the polarity of the neutron flow since 1976!


The comic strip that never was.

[LukeSurl]

My understanding is that if you poke round on the internet long enough you'll find a recent comment from someone saying "It isn't dead, we're working really hard to prepare for the 2009 awards"

I also understand it has been like this for several months now.


How about starting a TWCL awards? I'm actually serious, talk to Ash and see if he'll give the full TWCL endorsement. We can then use our combined resources & contacts to create the necessary system (be it a select jury of esteemed persons, a closed election of peers, or an open election of general public). Thoughts?
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[MoonFreight3]

LukeSurl wrote:

How about starting a TWCL awards? I'm actually serious, talk to Ash and see if he'll give the full TWCL endorsement. We can then use our combined resources & contacts to create the necessary system (be it a select jury of esteemed persons, a closed election of peers, or an open election of general public). Thoughts?

Not a bad idea. I was wondering if something like that was feasible myself.
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[WriterWhoCantDraw]

Frumph of WebcomicPlanet.com had a similar awards ceremony last year: http://wcrca.frumph.net/. Not sure if it's being planned again for this year, though.

I think the WCCAs are probably off for 2009. I haven't heard anything about it in the last couple months.
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[mooncity]

You need to make sure the voting is fair, as in one vote per webcomicker. That way comic X doesn't get a million votes just because their fans like them or someone votes for themselves a million times. Might be the sort of thing that gets limited to webcomickers and not readers. WCCA made a good stab at that part.
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Mooncity
Reversing the polarity of the neutron flow since 1976!


The comic strip that never was.

[Zoe Robinson]

LukeSurl wrote:

How about starting a TWCL awards? I'm actually serious, talk to Ash and see if he'll give the full TWCL endorsement. We can then use our combined resources & contacts to create the necessary system (be it a select jury of esteemed persons, a closed election of peers, or an open election of general public). Thoughts?

I think this is a great idea, and not just because I'm drunk. We've got a good group of people here who certainly know their stuff, and the rest of us are okay too. If it happens, however, I think it needs to be performed in two stages:

1. Nomination stage, open to the public to submit their views on each topic.
2. Votes state; also open to the public but filtered down by a group of people who will:
a) remove spelling mistakes and consolidate duplicate entries
b) ensure the entries in each category are correct (so there's no 'they all suck', for example, or 'death pornstars from hell versus the slut beasts of cleveland' in the running for 'best children's comic')
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[LukeSurl]

One thing that did harm the WCCAs was the massive inflation of categories.

mooncity wrote:

Best comic Best art Best writing Best story (long form) comic Best comedy (short form) comic

That list is all you really need. Hell, you could probably lose the art and writing categories.

There are three ways we could do this:

A) Full Public vote:
Pros: Democratic, engaing to the wider public, attracts people who read a few comics but don't read "webcomics"
Cons: Technically difficult to set up, possibly vulnerable to IP/proxy fraud, large webcomics at significant immediate adantage over smaller ones, which comics are popular is already fairly well known (awards may seem rather pointless)

B) Webcomic Creators Only
Pros: Engages the webcomics community, peer recognition is highly regarded, technically simpler than above (may be able to do votes by email)
Cons Pretty much exactly what WCCA did, still a degree of bias towards already successful comics, open to allegations of "you scratch my back I'll scratch yours", do you allow every 12-year-old with a sprite comic on SmackJeeves to vote?

C) Jury of esteemed fellows (successful webcomicers)
Pros: Star power attracts attention (esp. if they mention being on the juty on their comics), most likely to give small/new comics a fair playing field, most unpredictable (mystery! exciting!), Technically very simple to do.
Cons: Closed process (unengaging?), difficulty persuading big people to be jury, difficult to choose perfectly balanced jury, open to allegations of bias

You could have three different "best comic" awards, one by each method, or have several rounds [longlist > shortlist > winner] decided by different methods, i.e. Every comic which can attract 10 public votes is longlisted, the longlist is narrowed down to 6 by the webcomicers, then a jury chooses the winner.
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[Dutch]

I'm a fair bit cynical about all these sorts of things. I'd much prefer we just went about making our products and forgetting about the ego trips
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[cdrcjsn]

This is more than an ego boost (though I can't deny that there is some of that).

People who make it into the final voting round will be almost guaranteed a lot of exposure which can equate to lots of new readers. So even those that don't win get a tangible reward for being entered into the competition.

And it's not like the webcomic creators really need to do anything. It's the webcomic award people that do all the work.
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www.familiar-ground.com

Vote for Familiar Ground!

[Novil]

A full public vote does not make much sense, not even in the first round. You could just as well use their Google Analytics charts.

I think it should be a two-round contest. In the first round every webcomic creator with a webcomic consisting of at least 30 strips can give 1, 2 or 3 points for his (up to) 3 favorites in each category.

The five comics with the most points in the specific category get short-listed. A jury of successful (whatever that means) webcomic creators then picks their favorite as the winner.

That’s an easy and fast process if you are just giving awards in the six mentioned categories (including “best new comic” so that at least one newcomer has the chance of winning.) Most other categories do not make much sense since almost the same webcomics would get nominated for them (after having a look at previous CC awards).
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[Harrington AW]

Quote:

or 'death pornstars from hell versus the slut beasts of cleveland' in the running for 'best children's comic'

But I loved that comic when I was a kid!

Er, anyway, I don't really have anything to add to the ideas above, other than if webcomic creators are going to be the ones voting, perhaps they should be excluded from voting on their own comic.

I dunno.

-S
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[Pzero]

Well the WCCA doesn't have a webmaster anyway (as mentioned on the site), so they'll need to fix that up first.
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