BuzzComix has announced the return of the buzzAwards.
The buzzAwards honor comics who have exhibited exceptional quality in a number of categories. In an attempt to expose those “diamonds in the rough,” buzzAwards strives to honors smaller comics (10,000 average uniques/day or fewer). The nominees will be picked by committee–not voted on by the general public (buzzAwards is accepting applications for judges on the committee. There is an application form on the site). This means that a comic with very little exposure and fan base could finally get the attention it deserves.
Submissions for nominations may be made until June 15th, and nominees selected by the committee will be announced July 5th.
The fun thing IMO about these award thingies is that the comics that do the presenting (“and the winner is and so on”) probably get as much, if not more, exposure than the comic winning the award.
I’ll be one of the first to wish this event good luck. It always warms the heart when a group or an individual wishes to offer exposure and sincere accolades to deserving artists and works in our burgeoning field.
I have to ask a few questions in regards to your event, though:
1) Who will form this committee (i.e., who picks the committee members?)?
2) How many members are expected to be on the committee?
3) Are there any criteria or prerequisite qualifications for someone to be on this committee? If it already exists, what exactly qualifies this committee to decide what works are deserving and what works are not?
3) How will the committee make its selections? Are potential nominees submitted by the public or external source, or is the committee responsible for doing complete research on all the online comics scattered throughout cyberspace?
4) How many categories does the event anticipate to have?
5) How does the committee accurately determine who is eligible/ineligible to be nominated? Is the 10,000 uniques mark the straight cutoff line? Other other factors considered?
6) Since this is a juried event, what are the set criteria for the categories? Are they already determined? Are they a broad template, or tailor-made for each category? Are you going to release the criteria/evaluation scoring system to the public prior to (or after) the event?
7) What is the participation factor for non-committee members? Is input solicited/welcomed? Will the public have *any* say in any aspect of the process/event, or are they bystanders in regards to the entire thing?
I’m sure I’ll have more questions later, but I figure that this would be a good start.
Bravo! I applaud this decision and look forward to see what comes out from it. 🙂
Looking through the BuzzAwards site, I see that you have already addressed some of these issues.
Well done.
Looked over your comic submission guidelines, and saw two things:
1) Judges will only review the 30 most recent comics of a comic for consideration for an award? Why 30? Is that too little?
2) From what I am understanding here, only comics that are submitted will be considered, and comics can only be submitted by the creators themselves. This means that only people who know about the award will be included? How are you planning on getting maximum representation? Are you afraid that you will only be getting a handful of participants, and thus skewed results?
3) Will the judges have the power to add other nominees, or must they only work with the comics that are submitted? What happens if the judges find that no submitted comic is exceptional in a particular category?
While I can understand why the commitee would not want to subscribe to a pay-per comic in order to rate it, it’s still not entirely fair to exlude pay-per web comics from these awards. I’m sure there’s a compromise that could be worked out in order to include pay-per comics on the part of both the judges and the cartoonists wanting to submit their comics.
Saga of the Ram
Well, for the WCCA it would be difficult since they let anyone with a webcomic vote. A pay-per-view comic would be at a severe disadvantage since I assume only a part of the voters would be able to get a good look at it. For the buzzawards the problem is similar, but also as to how many pageviews/day a comic gets. I think I heard something about that kind of information not being available for modern tales comics.
Oops, thought you talked about awards in general, hence the WCCA related part of the comment.
But I should mention that if the technical obstacles could be taken care of I see no reason why ppw comics couldn’t be part of it.
This is only addressing your particular argument, and not the initial question I posed:
On the same line of your argument, are you saying that book reviewers could make a fair and accurate review, based on only thirty pages of a novel?
Or even sixty pages?
What if you happened to read the only bad thirty pages of the whole series, and the rest that you didn’t read happened to be the bestest work in existence?
Just curious to hear your ideas on that, is all…
(note that this is not dealing with the idea of a continuing body of work only being judged by an annual event for the portion of the work created and published in said year — i.e., judges reviewing only the last year’s work of a comic for an annual award… which is an entirely other story/argument)
Modern Tales comics are, by definition, well-publicized, “mainstream” webcomics — not comics which need more exposure. Including us would defeat the stated purposes of these awards.
I applaud these awards, and wish the organizers well.
There are other pay-per-view websites which are not as well-known or highly trafficked as Modern Tales, and which might fit the spirit of these awards.
I hope that some accomodation is made for them.
Possibly the cartoonists, when nominating their own work, could also provide comp subscriptions for the judges? I know on all the MT sites, cartoonists have the ability to provide comps for these kinds of reasons (and for reviewers, etc.) I’d expect that any pay-per-view website has a similar set-up for its cartoonists. I’d hope so!
Joey
http://www.moderntales.com
–Must have thirty previous installments–
This doesnt slant it towards gag-strips or nothing…
To give you some idea of how nominations work at the BuzzAwards:
Last year, there were several strips submitted for consideration in the Gaming category. However, only 10K Commotion got nominated–and it hadn’t even been submitted through the proper channels.
Basically, a comic that was not listed on Buzz and had not been submitted for consideration was allowed to completely shut out the Gaming category by decision of the judges, without a single vote being cast by the readers. It probably still would have won even if the nomination process had been carried out fairly, but that should have been for the readers to decide. Not the judges.
When confronted with this, Buzz’s explanation was that the submitted comics were only suggestions, and not only were they free to nominate whoever they wanted regardless of whether or not the strip had been properly submitted (there had been nothing about this in the rules, by the way), they could give an insta-win to a strip if they felt like it.
Given all that–no, I don’t think the judges at Buzz are afraid of a skewed contest. They seem to be quite fond of them.
I don’t agree. If you can’t really get a feel for even a long story arc in thirty installments, I think you’re telling the story far too slowly.
Comics are a much more visual form of storytelling, and the pictoral portion goes a long way towards describing the setting, much as a writer would. So, I think that thirty pages of comic could tell much more story than thirty pages of novel. How much more? I don’t rightly know, but let’s say sixty. I like novels that mange to keep me informed of the situation every so often, say fifty or so pages. For series of books, it’s not always so important to have some sort of recap so often, but I do like it when each book in that series drops reminders every now and then. All this is just opinion, mind, but I believe it’s possible to get a good gague of the comic from thirty pages/strips. The thirty most recent, because anyone who keeps at it will improve, if just by repitition.
Why are you asking all these questions here on Comixpedia? I doubt mneonix08 (the runner of Buzzcomix and Buzzawards) will read this and get back to you. You ought to e-mail him or atleast ask these questions on the forums . . .