This year’s Webcartoonists’ Choice Awards were announced several weeks ago – which is essentially a hojillion years in internet time – but I felt I should comment on them a bit anyway.

First off – I’m actually rather sad I didn’t make any predictions this year, as for once nearly all of the comics I was rooting for ended up as the winners. The main exception was Lackadaisy, a comic not on my reading list, which claimed quite a few awards this year. Given that it did the same last year as well, one would think it would stand as an easy choice to be added to my reading list, but somehow I still haven’t gotten around to doing so.

This was actually a really good year for the WCCA’s as a whole. Moments of drama were relatively few and far between – though not absent entirely. The ceremony itself (in the usual form of online comics) was incredibly well-done and easy to read, as opposed to the sprawling madness found in some previous years. The entire event felt more professional than it has in the past, and that is by far a step in the right direction.

This year featured the removal of the ‘genre categories’ – awards given out to the best sci-fi strips, the best superhero strips, the best romance strips, etc, etc. I was somewhat afraid of this change, largely because those fields gave some smaller fish out their a chance to compete while the usual big names swept the primary categories. But going through the awards now, I don’t really feel the loss as much as I expected – and looking over past years, it is definitely obvious that such categories often required a great deal of stretching to even find enough nominees for the ballot.

So, having said all the above good things about this year’s WCCAs… on to the complaints!

Only two, and the first one is merely to point out that, as usual, the event has an amazing lack of advertising. For something that is designed around getting input from webcartoonists all over the web, they do an incredible job of flying below the radar – from the beginning of the nomination process to the announcement of the results at the end. And I think that very lack of reaching out to the larger webcomic world as a whole is a key reason for the occasionally static results – we see a lot of the same winners and nominees, even in categories that aren’t necessarily the right fit for them.

And, yes, some of that is the natural result of this sort of event being a popularity contest at heart, and there isn’t anything wrong with that – but it also feels like it has one relatively small group of people involved in the entire show. If they can expand their audience, and draw in more participants, I think that would be a very good thing indeed. And the only way that is going to happen is if they actually make an effort to spread the word every year when the awards are actually happening.

Complaint number two is a more genuine one – I was appalled when I see PvP nominated for Outstanding Website Design. I know he pays people to professionally put together a website for him – that does not mean they do a good job!

His design last year was relatively slick and effective, but his latest site is completely out of control. There is no way to easily go to the first strip. I repeat – there is no easy way to go to the first strip!

There is not a button that takes you there. There is not a button that takes you to an archive! You can manually go to the little calendar widget buried in the bottom-right of the page, well below the fold, and select May 1998, the first month listed there, and then select the first comic. And it is not all that difficult a task, but it is about three steps more than such an act should require!

Similarly, when you click on an individual date in the calendar widget, it brings up, not a page with the strip itself, but a page with a thumbnail of the strip! Clicking on that then brings you to the comic itself.

Look. These are not horrendous, life-changing mistakes. Will it turn away some new readers? Sure. Will it frustrate regular readers trying to hunt through the archives? Probably. Are either of those problems that big a deal? Not really.

Seeing them on what is supposed to be one of the most professional webcomics on the net, on the other hand, is really disappointing. Normally, I wouldn’t have any problems with it. Similarly, I would normally be able to forgive the sheer amount of links and promotions and ads and other craziness plastered all over the page, because Scott Kurtz does have a lot happening and needs a place to put all that stuff.

But when the site is being nominated for being one of the most “Outstanding” around… well, as I said, it is disappointing. Not as a mark against Kurtz, really, but as a sign of how easy it is for a comic to be nominated simply because it is a big name, rather than because it is appropriate for the award at hand.

One of the downsides to relying on Piperka for most of my comic updates is that it is awfully easy to fall behind on comics it doesn’t track. Strangely enough, however… is that sometimes this can be for the best. For one thing, when I notice, it means there is suddenly a nice big bulk of strips I’ll have a chance to read through at once. Something to look forward to – that’s a good thing, no doubt about it.

But sometimes, when I notice, I realize that I’m not looking forward to reading them… which means I need to start figuring out why.

Anywhere But Here has been the latest such challenge – and a challenge it is, given that there is nothing wrong with the strip on the surface. In its previous iteration it fell into some pretty ugly territory, with winding plots drawn out over years and melodrama that spiraled deeper and deeper into unreadability.

But, in a rare event, Jason Siebels – the creator – recognized the troubles he was having, and after a few attempts to salvage the current strip, decided to just wipe the slate clean and start back from the beginning. And he did a hell of a job doing so, cranking his artwork up several levels right off the bat – and it soon became clear that the writing was quick to follow.

Since then, the strip has remained far more focused than the previous version. The plot is coherent, the characters are well-developed and the interactions are all effectively done. The humor is able to drag a genuine laugh out of me at least once every few weeks – no easy task. The art has fallen ever-so-slightly; I understand the reasons for no longer using color, but it is sorely missed. Of course, given how much the color brings the strip to life – and given that’s the opposite of the message it is trying to convey – removing it makes perfect sense.

And – ding! – there we have the hidden problem with it. The one thing that has kept me from really enjoying it, no matter how well it is written, no matter how gorgeously it is drawn:

I absolutely loathe the premise.

I hate it. It simply fails, for me, on every single level. And not because it is a bad premise or somehow offensive – but it is simply not a story that interests me.

Because, in the end, it is all about watching the Dude – the main hero of the story – get screwed over by life again, and again, and again. It is about watching his parents completely ruin his college plans for no reason. It is about watching his classmates and teachers conspire against him, about seeing him friendless and miserable and played for laughs… and, in the end, to see him simply accepting all this. For all his complaints and frustration, he doesn’t actually bother to fight it – primarily because doing so would invalidate the scenario the plot has envisioned for him.

I have complained about this sort of situation before – it happened in Abstract Gender, where the main character hated the hand life had dealt her, but was constantly portrayed as simply going along with even the most outrageous things, simply because the plot demanded it. It bugged me then, and it bugs me now.

And I say this knowing that this isn’t how Anywhere But Here will end – knowing what I know of the previous iteration, I am fully aware that we will see the Dude overcoming his hatred for his situation and learning to make the best of it, and maybe – just maybe – finding some measure of happiness.

But… not for a while, yet. For now, it is about life grinding the Dude into the dust at every single opportunity.

And the author has a hell of a good reason for this – he talks about the origin of the strip here, but I’ll quote the key part:

“Anywhere but Here is about life taking a left turn…no, a series of left turns. Anywhere but Here is about life continiously trying to run you into a cliff no matter how hard you try and jerk the wheel away.

It IS Schadenfreude, make no doubt about that, but it’s schadenfreude with a purpose. It was my way of exploring how to deal with life when it keeps trying to grind you down. Do you shut down? Do you fight? Do you wrest the wheel away from the fickle finger of fate, or do you just crash into the cliff and hope you survive the impact?

That’s ABH in a nutshell I guess. Do you deal, or do you not deal, or do you deal with not dealing.”

Now, that’s a powerful statement. It is one that comes from the heart, and yes… it is one that makes for a good story, and good storytelling.

It just isn’t my kind of story.

Seriously – you know all those hi-larious movies out there, usually featuring Adam Sandler, that involve around the main character being constantly embarassed throughout the movie? Where you see them put through the most ridiculous situations again, and again, and again? I hate them. I loathe them beyond imagining.

And this story, right here – yes, its more than one of those stupid movies. Yes, it is building towards a much bigger picture, and one day it will answer the question it asks, and move on from there.

But right here, right now, it just isn’t meant for me. It is simply too much concentrated schadenfreude – something I might be able to handle in small doses, but not when it infests every single element of the strip.

It took me a while to realize this – each individual update is so well-designed, and each tends to work for me in isolation. But put them all together, and it had started to get to the point where I was physically cringing every time the Dude got screwed over, and it wasn’t until I finally sat down and examined things closely that I realized this was a recurring habit.

Does this mean I’m swearing off the strip for good? Probably not. If Siegels takes this story where he wants to, if he builds it up into the sort of work I suspect he’s aiming for, and that it definitely has the potential to be… well, that’s when I’ll come wandering back. When I can sit down and read through the entire story at once – or when it is published in print format, nice and whole and complete – that’s when I suspect it will work. When I can enjoy the transition beyond the undiluted cruelty being handed to the Dude… I will find all well with the world.

But until then, it gets set aside.

Which isn’t necessarily entirely bad. After all, no doubt about it – having something to look forward to is, in the end, a good thing.

So, I was somewhat startled by a post over at MightyGodKing wherein he calls PvP to task for the hypocrisy of indulging in a drama-laden storyline after previously mocking other strips that do so.

Now, his previous commentary on PvP, which was a spot-on piece of criticism about the strip’s current lack of focus and reliance on desperate in-jokes and pop-culture references, was a very nice piece of work – and, in fact, helped fully delineate a lot of the elements that had been bothering me about the comic.

Which is why it is startling to see another post about the comic wherein I disagree entirely in pretty much every regard.

Now to be fair, there isn’t all that much to disagree with – the recent post isn’t very detailed, just a juxtaposition of two strips from the comic (one current, and one four years old), with the apparent goal of pointing out the hypocrisy of the current storyline. If that isn’t truly his intention, then I apologize in advance for assuming otherwise – see the usual disclaimer about it being hard to get a sense for what people are actually saying over the internet.

But, on the assumption that he is attempting to take Kurtz to task… well, I have to object with the examples he is using to do so.

Exhibit A, above, is where Kurtz is presumably putting down how some comics in the so-called funny pages wander into serious storylines, which can be grim and even downright depressing. But here’s the thing – while Kurtz has certainly not disguised his disdain for the majority of the newspaper comic strips, that disdain has usually fallen on the ones relying on tired, formulaic gags… comics that haven’t changed or evolved in decades. The above comic was posted back when For Better or For Worse was still considered one of the true comics of quality in the paper, when the Boondocks was one of the few to challenge the status quo.

Even beyond that, Cole puts forward in the strip the opinion that there can be a time and place for serious storylines. Not a surprising opinion, given that for all of PvP’s own reliance on gags, it has also often been driven by some significant stories built around drama and relationships – in fact, it becomes even more amusing considering that Brent (and his situation with Jade) has usually been the one at the heart of such storylines. Brent just sort of ignores the point, but it is still out there providing a voice of reason despite’s Brent’s ranting.

Is Kurtz seriously saying that comics should be nothing but simple jokes day in and day out? That the rest of the funny pages – the ones he rather universally loathes – are the ones to aspire towards?

Of course not – he’s poking some simple fun at the serious strips, sure, but doing so firmly tongue-in-cheek.

Exhibit B is the current storyline, wherein, as you can see, Cole’s marriage is falling apart. Even worse – it is happening right while Brent and Jade are in the midst of planning their own wedding. Sure, this is drama-heavy territory… but I also would contend it is the best Kurtz has been in months.

Despite the drama, the punchlines have actually been funny. I mean, sure, Brent finding out he has no legitimate reason to be pissed at Cole, and thus becoming all the more pissed, isn’t some powerful new form of humor than will redefine the genre – but it is rock solid in characterization and easily got a laugh out of me. And most of the strips in the storyline have been the same – competent and humorous strips that have also advanced the plot. As compared to just another round of pop-culture references, or trying to find yet another way to work in a panda attack, or a well-meaning but ultimately weak storyline about Shecky the troll.

Honestly? The time to take Kurtz to task for any supposed hypocrisy about “serious issues” was in 2005, when we had Jade suddenly worried she might be pregnant, and Brent trying to deal with the possibility of being a dad.

Which – guess what – despite only being two weeks long, was possibly the best storyline PvP has ever had.

Several months back, the webcomics community took notice of Wowio, a site that gives access to free eBooks.

Most of that notice, unfortunately, was negative – some misreadings of the company’s policies led many to believe that they shared user’s personal data with outside corporations, a practice that, unsurprisingly, most folks would not be ok with. Given the nature of the information required to start an account – credit card data, a scan of personal ID such as a driver’s license, or a non-anonymous e-mail address – a lot of folks dismissed it as something of a scam, and turned their backs on it.

Three and a half months later, I think that is a damn shame.

Once it was made clear how the company’s policy actually worked, I got right on board. Over the next week, I downloaded the few eBooks I was actually interested in reading (less than a dozen), and then I stopped using it to acquire reading material. Instead, I started using it to support webcomics with money that was, essentially, free.

For each person who downloads an issue of a comic on Wowio, the creator gets 50 cents. That’s the reason they have such a relatively strict sign-up process – so they can make sure each new account is unique, since there really aren’t that many ways to do so over the internet.

You can only download three books a day. And I suppose a dollar and a half doesn’t seem like the hugest contribution to put in your favorite creator’s pocket. But on the other hand… it costs you two minutes to do so, and you can do it every single day. Sure, you are limited by how many different webcomic downloads are available on the site – but I just took a quick look through, and saw around 166 just from titles I recognized. $83 dollars is looking a bit more solid – even spread out between a dozen creators. Especially considering every single reader can be making the same contribution.

And in the months it takes to make those downloads, who knows how many more titles or issues will be added to the site?

I’m not holding this out there as something people have to do, not by any means. But it strikes me that Wowio got a pretty bad rap when it first hit the scene, and deserves to be recognized for the opportunity it is: a chance for people to easily give some money back to creators without spending any out of their own pockets.

I mean, let’s face it – if every webcomic made a dollar off of every single reader they had, there would be hundreds more webcomics making enough to support their creators, as opposed to the several dozen there are now. Unfortunately, getting that dollar is not only a challenge, but an impossibility, for any number of reasons. Even for those who are really devoted to the comics and want to give back, it can be hard – I read hundreds of webcomics, and if I tried to support every single one, it gets costly.

So most people tend to support one or two of their favorites. And the comics that succeed are often ok with this – they count on getting money (via merchandise, donations or otherwise) from only 10% of their readership, or maybe even less. There is nothing wrong with not being able to give that dollar out.

But for those who really want to do so anyway, but just don’t have the money, or the ability to choose which webcomic out there deserves it the most… well, therein lies the beauty of Wowio.

It takes maybe ten, twenty minutes to set up an account. All signs indicate the process of doing so is, actually, safe and secure. Once you’ve done so, another two minutes a day to download eBooks and give back a dollar fifty to some deserving creators. While you’re at it, you can enjoy the product itself! Or you can just toss it out, if all you were looking for is the chance to give back.

I’ve been keeping at it. I’ve been doing it with comics I’ve stopped reading – for all my criticism of the works of Chris Crosby a few months back, I’ve probably downloaded twenty-plus of his strip’s issue since then.

I’m going to go back to the premise one last time – this is a way for readers to contribute money to the webcomics they read for free. Ok, I get that it seems to good to be true, but it seems to work. You download eBooks, Wowio gets paid by advertisers who like being able to put their ads in each book, and some of that cash goes to the creators that deserve it.

How is that not a win-win situation for every single person involved?

In the last year and a half there seems to have been a slew of webcomics focused less on wacky hijinks and more on tightknit relationship-based drama. Punch an’ Pie, Scene Language and Octopus Pie all come to mind – and interesting enough, they are also all webcomics launched by creators with previous works under their belts.

What I have found most interesting, however, is that they are also nothing like what I have become accustomed to. Most such webcomics usually rely heavily on the tension of unrequited love – you have several character clearly attracted to each other, clearly meant to end up together, but events conspire to prevent them from doing so for years at a time. Sure, it allows for an easy hook to keep stringing readers along, but it also seems like the easy way out – and after seeing the same plot time and time again, it quickly grows boring.

Which is why I am very impressed with all these recent webcomics that decide to go in entirely the opposite direction.

Octopus Pie took only a handful of strips to break up Eve with her boyfriend – but it did a good job of focusing her personality and setting the stage for the dynamics to come, and how she relates to her roommate and how she deals with her newest potential love interest. Relationships are a fundamental focus of the comic – and not just specifically those of an intimate nature, but all the connections between Eve and the world around her, with her family, her friends, her coworkers.

Scene Language, meanwhile, has involved even more turbulence – the first major arc involved one of the four main characters, Charlie, breaking up with her boyfriend, while two of the other main characters discover themselves in something resembling a relationship. The arc concludes with what seems to be the status quo the story has been building towards – the four protagonists rent a house together, and it seems likely they’ve found their respective places in the strip dynamics. The second storyarc dispels that notion, however, as relationships continue to shift, develop, and fall apart.

Punch an’ Pie, on the other hand, features a split I never saw coming. Oh, it wasn’t done in a haphazard fashion in the slightest – but it still came as a surprise. From the beginning we were told that the strip followed the life of Angela, whom many still fondly remembered from Queen of Wands. But despite Angela being the star, her girlfriend Heather seems an equally vital part of the strip from the start – and given the strip largely begins with their relationship moving to a new stage (as they move in together), it seems like something integral to the entire comic, and unassailably intact.

Until it’s… not.

These three strips are not the only ones to deal with this kind of plotlines, and they all approach it in different ways – some have gone through changes that cannot be undone, while others leave plenty of potential for reconciliation. Yet I find one thing undeniably clear – all of them, within their first year, are willing and almost eager to break the status quo. They are not content with leading readers along through the same stories and the same situations, with the hope for an eventual happy ending dangling at the end of the string, eternally just out of reach.

Instead, they shake things up. People change, relationships change, and – in the end – the world moves on. This isn’t just more realistic storyline, it is also infinitely more ambitious storytelling. I mean, look at how long these strips have been around, and look at how much has happened within them. Some comics can take years to cover the events of a single day, or week, or month, and even when all is said and done, nothing fundamental has actually changed. Which can still make for a fun story, sure – but how much less rewarding is that compared to seeing a character genuinely grow, or seeing life actually taking place before your eyes?

These comics may not be alone in the route they’ve taken, but I still feel as though we’ve seen a growing trend towards this brand of comic in the last few years. Maybe because the creators have dabbled (or more) in the field before, and have learned from those experiences. Maybe because, with the vast number of webcomics out there, it requires a stronger story to get the attention of an audience. Maybe because the authors and readers simply have more life experience to capture within their tales.

Whatever the reason, the trend seems to be there, and the arrival of stories of this caliber is a development I can certainly get behind.

Man – stop posting for a week and suddenly everything happens in the webcomic world. It would be a bit of a drag to rehash them all – and most of the news can be found in this post by Howard Tayler, wherein he says pretty much everything I would have said.

As far as other webcomic developments this last weel, I must say I appreciated some of the dorkoriffic halloween costumes;  I enjoyed the wrapping up of the latest story arc in No Need for Bushido, which managed to treat characters seriously without losing their personalities; I was impressed the surprisingly convincing flirtation going on in Nukees these days; and I liked the fact that the scariest image on Halloween was the future version of Penny that looks just like Aggie.

This is probably a low blow, especially to a man having his wisdom teeth removed today, but for the first three panels, I thought this was one of the most touching autobiographical webcomic strips out there.

All the little things aside, however, what I’d really like to discuss is Something Positive 1937.

Now, this is undeniably a cool little comic. It offers a more bite-size version of the classic S*P humor, which is nice. It is interesting to see the family connections and similarities – and differences – between the past and present generations. And the characters themselves are intriguing in their own rights, with their own stories to tell and lives to live.

But what really wows me about the entire thing… is how it seems to have come into being. Milholland had some extra advertising space on his website that was going unused for a short bit. Now, while most webcomickers would have used this opportunity to leave it blank or try and draw in more ads, he decided to create an entirely new comic that would fit in the spot.

Think about that – he added this little gem to his daily workload simply because he could. Because he had an inspiration and an opportunity to tell a story, and he decided to do so. I mean, that’s what most webcomics are in the first place, sure – but this was on top of all the other stuff he did. And now we’re over fifty strips into S*P 1937 and it appears to be a permanent fixture, and along the way he’s come up with a pretty awesome new advertising method along the way.

That’s just awesome. Not just because it means more free comics for his readers, but because it serves as a reminder of exactly how interested he is in the stories he is telling.

We see this in S*P 1937. We see this in bonus pages and world backgrounds and video miniseries. We see this in posting triple-size updates just for the sake of doing so. All of it evidence that these guys aren’t just trying to get an audience, it isn’t just about money or internet fame or any of that – it’s about telling a story, and they are just as eager as the fans to see where the story goes. It’s something easy to lose site of, and I’m always glad to be reminded of it.