That was what I loved about Your Webcomic is Bad and You Should Feel Bad; it was very cathartic to find a reviewer who actually was willing to say if something was a piece of crap.

I read reviews to find out about new webcomics. There are thousands of them, and most of them suck. I’m sorry, but going to Drunkduck and reading them at random until I find one I like WILL, in fact, take up quite a bit of time.

It seems like nowadays there’s more willingness to judge webcomics with actual standards, where in the past the attitude seemed to be that amateurs should never be criticized, because they aren’t professionals.

This site is the first one I ever found that had good, critical reviews, and the ones I’ve found since have been from links posted here.

Didn’t Scott McCloud say something like that recently? About everyone trying to take something from every review and critique? I can’t find the link right now.

And it’s only “trolling” if they took it to LICD’s site or forum

But reviews are worthwhile, maybe not to the big guys, but definitely to us smaller folk. Drumming up an audience takes luck (the right crowd finds you and starts advocating for you) and money (you advocate yourself – ads, conventions), and the web is a big place where your comic can be easily overlooked. Yes, I enjoy seeing you review comics I already read to see your opinion, but I’m also very happy for whoever is lucky enough to make your queue. They’ve been noticed.

My comic has been reviewed four times. The first was a request that got a mediocre review (good scores, the review itself was poorly written). The second was not a request exactly, but alerting the guy to my existence which resulted in the most gratifying response to my work I’ve ever seen written. The third was from Robert Howard, who found us at a convention. The fourth was a review so negative and out of left field that it still churns my stomach (doubly worse because I followed the reviewer’s work but opted to lurk because I figured it wasn’t his cup of tea but he found my comic anyway). Ironically, the last one garnered me the most hits.

Now, of all those reviewers…Tangents is still sort of going. Four reviews, and I think my comic hit a glory spot of 1,200 unique IPs. I dunno how that compares to other comics, and there’s likely a bazillion factors at play, but hey, I like to think the publicity helped. And reviews or forum discussions help regardless, because it’s easier to plow through all the work involved in making a comic when you know someone cares about it.

But it also means that a “John Solomon”, who just seeks to dismiss everything, is useless as a critic, as he will not pay attention to worthy but unknown webcomics; he just wants to pan heavyweight and obscure webcomics indiscriminately. (The Bad Webcomics wiki seems to have taken over that role.) Nothing is easier than to despise everything, because to like a webcomic, especially a less obvious choice, would actually force you to stand your ground. (There is always something to be learned from the shortcomings of others, but when it’s mostly done to stroke the ego of the critic, it quite loses its usefulness.)

As much as I like to see a contrarian opinion on a webcomic sacred cow (I _want_ to read someone’s complaint about The Order of the Stick, a webcomic I like, but I can’t find any), it’s starting to be dubious when the reviewer seemingly has all the sacred cows lined up for shooting them down one after the other, along with much safer targets, with the reviewing process having all the inevitability of a Stalinist trial disguised as an impartial process.

This raises one question: To what extent is webcomic criticism compromised by the webcomics scene being dominated by networking (or, to put it less kindly, cronyism), and that those who criticize webcomics are just as likely to want to start one? It might be especially true for awards, but it could well be the same for criticism in general. Webcomics are still nascent, and probably considered frivolous by most outsiders, so who is usually concerned enough about webcomics to start reviewing them?

You get people who either don’t really care about webcomics and just think that it’s the easiest thing to review (meaning the result isn’t very good) or skewer (guys like “Solomon”, smart, but who like their targets to be the size of a barn), or who gravitate around the scene and would rather use it as leverage, i.e. nary a negative word, except for ultra-safe targets. (In a way, it reminds me of video-game reviewing, though in that case it’s not because everybody works in the industry or wants to, but because their hands are tied by advertising.)

Cases like yours, where I can’t see you belonging to either group, are rare. I don’t remember how I first came across your site, but I think I was just looking for a decent review of “Sore Thumbs”, and you were one of the rare people who reviewed it as a webcomic rather than from a political perspective. I disagreed with your assessment (two stars at the most, I’d say), but you were willing to put your arguments on the table, and I respect that. I’m getting quite tired of opaque criticism driven by agenda.

It’s interesting that you should mention Roger Ebert, because I have never been a film guy, yet I have heard of him and maybe read a review or two of his. I also remember you writing recently about a controversy between him and Armand White, whom I’d never heard of. (I later went to the New York Press site and read a few of his reviews. I quickly had enough: he seems the archetype of the agenda-driven critic, though I’m sure that there are even worse cases I don’t know about.) Ebert definitely seems to have a very nice touch when addressing such issues, based on your blockquotes alone.

I like Ebert’s baseball analogy, but I’m not convinced that watching Ken Burns’s “Baseball”, or being able to recite “Casey at the Bat” in its entirety, or to chuckle over parts of “You Know Me Al”, or even to admire the quaint atmosphere of Wrigley Field, is a good idea. It risks detracting from what major league Baseball has always been: a business, and a particularly ruthless one. If not for the Black Sox scandal, that easily might have been overlooked. Contrary to Ebert, I can’t find a single reason to be a fan of professional sports.

By the way, I love public libraries for one reason: they’re a blend of everything you can think of, but they sometimes have such gaping holes in their holdings that it will look almost erratic. What I enjoy far less is that the older books gradually disappear to make way for the flavor of the year. At least university libraries will retain one copy of everything they acquire. Municipal libraries, on the other hand, never seem to hold on to what they have. Mine seems like that anyway; I went there recently, and the contents on the shelves all looked so clean and recent; nothing older than fifty years at the most.

And I would like to second Delos’s comment: I can’t wait to read your “why review webcomics at all” entry.

I was looking for someplace that paid for reviews after ComixTalk stopped, so I sent the review editor over there a query. I eventually had to send him a whole review to convince him, but he says he’d like to see more. So here’s hoping!

Mike Again