It’s that time of year again. We’re not talking about Single’s Appreciation Day but the annual We Love Web Comics contest. The past two years have been successes and this year promises to be even bigger. What is the WLWC contest? It’s our love letter to the rest of the web comic world. Digital Strips is here to promote and cultivate what is good in the medium and we can think of on better of giving back to you then a contest where the prize if all your print material as the prize. Enough gushing and on with the contest!

Your Mission:

We’ve been trying to figure this out for months and we finally agreed on a theme. One opinion was to have a web comic drama hate/love fest but our egos are way to big for that. Why have a contest and not include ourselves in the strip? Then we thought we should have you tell us what happened last year in web comic news but then we are too lazy to figure it out ourselves. Of course we then settled on the easiest thing possible, having you introduce us to web comics characters. Hopefully you will use your own but you could use any web comic character and put the two groups in any wacky situation you can imagine.

To win the contest you must draw any number of Digital Strips staff in combination with any other web comic characters. This strip can be of any size and of any length. We like being easy and having as few rules as possible so keep on reading to find the rest of the rules and the prize at the end of the rainbow.

Should You Decide To Accept:

You already know what you’re drawing but there are a few more specifics. Although there is no size limit don’t go trying to break our servers with it’s size. Do us a favor and keep the width to under 800 pixels but what about length you ask? Just how infinite can I make it? Well if your strip exceeds 600 pixels in height submit your strip in parts or in pages. The extension can be jpeg, gif, or png. We know there are others but short of sending the original photoshop/gimp files we really don’t want the hassle of converting anything if necessary. Lastly, image wise, submit a thumbnail along with your submission. This will make turn around time on building the site page much easier for us.

Who are the judges? That would be the well informed DS staff you’ve all come to love. There’s seven of us: Daku, The Geek, Midnight, Phil, Brigid, Brandon, and Jerry. There is no tie breaker and each judge will get six points to assign to whatever strips of their choice. If you really kiss up to one of us we may just give you all of them.

What is the criteria? Each strip will be judge for three things. Artistic merit, writing, and ingenuity. This means a gag strip is just as likely to win as a entire page. The point of this contest is to promote all of web comics from graphic novels to fantasy, from single panel to photo strips. Anything goes as the presentation will matter as much as the delivery.

When is the deadline? How long do you have to dedicate your entire life to what is the best web comics podcast since 1853? Four weeks. A whole month starting today and ending midnight eastern time March 19th, 2007. An submissions should be sent to us via <a xhref="mailto:%20digital.strips@gmail.com">email</a> by either sending us a link to it on your server or the actual image for us to upload onto ours.

In Your Best Interest:

The Prize! We’ve been telling you this for weeks now but we can’t promote ourselves too much. Just like the past two years this year the grand prize is pot of golden web comic prints. We started the pot with $200 of our own hard won gambling money and we’ve been receiving print material from you as well. But there’s more. The picture below is only the beginning as there are already 6 more books in the mail waiting for their close-up. On top of that everyone is free to send in their own prints to add to the pile and therefore get mention on the site. All prize winnings must arrive one week, March 12th, prior to closing date of the contest. Anything else will go towards next year.