The winners of the Web Cartoonist’s Choice Awards (AKA the WCCAs) have been announced! This year’s ceremony was hosted by Comixpedia’s own Welton Colbert.
If you aren’t the ceremonial type, the complete list of winners (which includes the nominees) is available.
Congratulations to everyone, organizers and participants alike!
I’m very happy about the awards– the nominees, the outcome, everything was great this year. I’m ESPECIALLY happy about the presentation, which was really outstanding!! A great job by all! We salute you!!!
One question– how come the only link I can find to the award presentations page is on Comixpedia? Shouldn’t there be a link on the WCCA site itself?
It is there. On the very bottom on the left, it says 2005 Ceremony. You actually have to go through this page to get to the list of the winners.
The awards were for the most part decent this year, but I have to call the committee on awarding Best Superhero comic to a Deviantart fan comic based on an existing and VERY copyrighted property. That doesn’t seem fair to the nominees who created their own characters and concepts. And I’ve already made my feelings very clear on this year’s “best” anthromorphic comic on my own website. THAT was a travesty. Not to say those two categories diminish the rest of the affair, they just stand out as results that should be avoided in the future for the sake of keeping these awards legitimate. I know that this is an award by cartoonists and for cartoonists, but to that end the guidelines need to ensure that qualified and deserving comics are winning these awards. This is not an issue of personal preference, it is one of fairness.
Surviving Mars
http://www.webcomicsnation.com/bdaniel/survivingmars/series.php
Wow, Scary Go Round actually won Best Comic this time. I’m completely unsure how to react to that.
Sorry, Zortic! I had a link to the nominees page, and that apparently changed into the winners page. It never occurred to me that I wasn’t on the home page. Might be a good idea to have a link from the winners page back to the ceremony, but that wasn’t my original complaint, which I hereby withdraw.
I’m not sure that the best superhero winner is invalid because it’s based on a copyrighted property. Aren’t a lot of the properties on the list copyrighted? I don’t know what arrangement if any the artist has with the owners of that series, but it is quite conventional in the Eisners Awards for somebody to win for their work on the Batman series or whatever. Whoever has the licensing, it is still the artists and writers who create the comic, after all.
As for the anthropomorphic category, I take it that you feel that on principle Dinosaur Comics should never be allowed to win any awards because of the way it’s created. I strongly disagree. For one thing, it’s not the effort required to make a comic that matters– it’s how good the comic is, and Dinosaur Comics is a very good comic. Secondly, there are many webcartoonists who work from templates, minimizing the amount of drawing they have to do– you’d be barring a lot of the most popular webcomics if all such series could not compete for the WCCAs.
Thirdly, you seriously underestimate the talent and ability of Ryan North. Creating a comic with the same artwork every time was an audacious move, almost guaranteed to fail. How did he manage to turn it into one of the most popular comics on the web? Because his writing is unique, hilarious, and irresistable!
You don’t seem to comprehend the situation with the Superhero Award- it went to a Power Puff Girls doujinshi that was in a Deviantart gallery. For starters, as a doujinshi it is NOT an authorized story. The artist made this without the consent of the Cartoon Network. It’s perfectly legal of course(He’s not profiting from it), and yes it’s a well done comic, but was not made as a webcomic. It was a fan comic the artist had made and was displaying in his public online gallery, not even in a webcomic format. A point made over at the Talk About Comics Forums is that this comic had a very unfair advantage because The Power Puff Girls already have a huge fanbase, a worldwide one, and- once again, were not the artists own characters nor ones he had permission to use.
Ryan North would have to be a creative guy to work with the same image day after day and create a different story or joke around it. I’m not faulting him for how he’s deciding to be creative. I’ll even admit I find his work funny, too. However, I will never believe that he puts in even half the time as the other cartoonists up for that award. He is only doing a portion of what they all do- writing. It may be a little trickier form of writing, but he is not sketching, he is not making line art, he is not inking or coloring. How is it fair to award someone who is doing so much less work on their comic than the majority of cartoonists? Would it be fair to give an Oscar to a film that is really just a still frame for 2 hours? The dialogue to said film could be brilliant- but it would still only be half a film, to that end. A comic is both a visual and literary medium, and Dinosaur comics only produces the literary aspect.
Brian– I’ll admit that the Power Puff comic was created under unusual circumstances, and I wouldn’t have voted for it myself. But the circumstances are extraneous to it’s qualification to compete for an award. I doubt that there are a signifigant number of Power Puff Girls fans who voted based on that. And in any case, the artwork for the winning series was really superb.
Regarding Ryan North, The Webcomics Examiner did a roundtable on the peculiar phenomenon of the “conceptual webcomic,” of which he is a prime example: http://webcomicsreview.com/examiner/issue050314/conceptual.html
Quite aside from conceptual artists working with this method, templates have been used by extremely popular webcomics like User Friendly, Diezel Sweeties, 8 Bit Theater, and PvP. Templates are frowned upon in print comics, but they are an integral part of the webcomics scene. What Ryan has done is simply taken the practice to a sublime extreme.
I’m a graphic artist myself, and I like to think that the visual part of comics is worthwhile. But graphic artists are obliged to compete with template-using authors on an even playing field.
Will Eisner did a comic once called Hogi The Yogi in which all dialog and other text was eliminated, to prove that the art in a comic was capable of telling a story without words. Moebius repeated the experiment with Arzak and some of his other short comics. What Ryan has done is turned the experment on its head, in effect creating comics without real artwork. If we are to understand the comics medium, we need to respect these experiments and learn from them.
We’re just going to have to agree to disagree then.