TWCL

[wendyw]

Alright, we have a new board just for the awards now.

Let's continue to discuss these things in this thread for now and any issues that we can't seem to get a consensus on I'll open up polls for and let people vote on them to try and come to some solutions that way.

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Quote: Comics belonging to Judges or staff members of TWCL cannot be nominated. I’m not sure about this one. This could prevent some famous webcomic creators wanting to be in the jury if they think their comic would have a realistic chance of getting the chance to be in the final round or even winning.

The problem with letting people judge and be nominated is that it leaves things to open for accusations of corruption and rigging should those people win or come close runner ups. If a judge (or jury member - either term works) wins then it will look like they handed themselves an award, even if only the other people on the panel voted for them.
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[Chilari]

May I suggest we time the "ceremony" to coincide with the Oscars, at least roughtly. That's generally the award-giving time, and anyway, we can then have a definitive date each year for when something counts as a new comic - if the awards are in February, the new comics have to have been started between Jan 1st and Dec 31st of the previous year. I have a feeling WCCA did something along these lines too?

Then we can begin nominations around October or November, end them on January 1st, at which point voting begins, ending on February 1st. Judges then make their decisions, and the "ceremony" stuff gets sorted.

This will also give us a few months to plan the whole thing and put it into action.

Another point that should be brought up is what the ceremony would actually consist of. Now, the WCCA had artists draw the nominations section, which I reckon worked quite well, though at times seemed a little patchwork. I like the idea of multiple artists drawing "and the nominations are" comics, but perhaps give them a certain format so there's a certain amount of uniformity, while still having variety.

Another option is to have one guest artist to do all the nominations comics, though this would put a huge workload on them.

Alternatively, we could scrap the whole nominations strips entirely, and simply list them with images from each comic, chosen by the creators, and one artist draws "and the winner is" comics for each award - two or three panels, perhaps using two or three characters for the whole thing.

Finally, we could do a mixture of both - guest artists for each nomination strip and another for the winner announcement strips. This would involve a wider variety of artists, but would produce a problem getting hold of artists to do this stuff. How would we chose who does draw a nomination or winner strip? Do we ask a prominent artist for the winner strip, and ask for volunteers for the others? What about quality control - if someone volunteers and is really eager, but their art isn't great, what do we do? Or what about if someone from a big-name, small on art comic volunteers, like the xkcd guy? Do we say "thanks but no thanks", or just go with it?

I suppose every part of organising this will cause problems to arise, but I reckon we're a good enough community to be able to come up with a model that works.
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[wendyw]

anezka wrote:

May I suggest we time the "ceremony" to coincide with the Oscars, at least roughtly. That's generally the award-giving time, and anyway, we can then have a definitive date each year for when something counts as a new comic - if the awards are in February, the new comics have to have been started between Jan 1st and Dec 31st of the previous year. I have a feeling WCCA did something along these lines too?

That seems like a pretty good idea and we do have access to Fes's thread he started asking for comics that started this year to use as a quick reference guide. Of course that does seem a little cheeky.

How about the possibility of tying it in with the webcomic Beacon. Perhaps time the result reveal to coincide with the live show?

Quote:

Then we can begin nominations around October or November, end them on January 1st, at which point voting begins, ending on February 1st. Judges then make their decisions, and the "ceremony" stuff gets sorted. This will also give us a few months to plan the whole thing and put it into action.

That sounds pretty good. In addition we would have to open up registration for voting a little earlier, so possibly September and keep it open until sometime in mid December. That way registration and nomination overlap but there is still time to process the last of the registrations and for them to vote.

Quote:

Another point that should be brought up is what the ceremony would actually consist of. Now, the WCCA had artists draw the nominations section, which I reckon worked quite well, though at times seemed a little patchwork. I like the idea of multiple artists drawing "and the nominations are" comics, but perhaps give them a certain format so there's a certain amount of uniformity, while still having variety.

I wonder if it would make sense to give anyone drawing an award an already existing background image for the stage. That way we have one continuous element for each award if we went about it that way.

Quote:

How would we chose who does draw a nomination or winner strip? Do we ask a prominent artist for the winner strip, and ask for volunteers for the others? What about quality control - if someone volunteers and is really eager, but their art isn't great, what do we do? Or what about if someone from a big-name, small on art comic volunteers, like the xkcd guy? Do we say "thanks but no thanks", or just go with it?

Currently, I haven't even thought about that one.
I'm sure we'll work it out though.

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I suppose every part of organising this will cause problems to arise, but I reckon we're a good enough community to be able to come up with a model that works.

I reckon we can too.
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[Chilari]

Hmm, yes, the same background would work well, and save the artists time as well.

I think what we should start by deciding is who wants to be involved in organising this, and to what degree (after all, everyone has different commitments and different skill sets) and go from there. So I'll start a new thread for signing up for the organising committee.
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[Novil]

My proposal for the title of the award would be

the webcomic award

This way its name is similar to this site while still being general enough to not be seen as an award specific to a single website which would diminish its value.
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[Chilari]

I agree. And it sounds less clique-ish.

All in non-caps? I quite like how it looks, even if it's not grammatically correct.
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[Zoe Robinson]

I like "the webcomic award" as a title, although I'd push for it being "awards" if we're going for this because we're giving more than one.

Also, the idea of a consistent background to provide uniformity for comics is a good one. It would also save the artists a lot of time, so people might actually get the comics finished when (preferably before) they're needed.
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[mooncity]

Casual Notice wrote:

I would suggest a format similar to that used on the Tonys and the Oscars: Nominations are open to anyone even remotely related to webcomics. A comic has to receive five nominations to even be considered. The nominations committee (panel of judges) narrows that to 5 finalists. Those 5 finalists are subjected to a vote by registered members of the TWCL forum (whohave to have accounts before date x to prevent slamming).

Are we or are we not considering the Big Dogs for eligibillity? I vote no, only because I'm a little bitty pup myself.
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Mooncity
Reversing the polarity of the neutron flow since 1976!


The comic strip that never was.

[Zoe Robinson]

Define 'Big Dogs' and we may be able to discuss it. At present I have no idea what anyone else would consider a 'Big Dog', because I've never heard of many of the big and supposedly famous comics.
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[mooncity]

Penny Arcade, PVP, xkcd, Shortpacked, Dinosaur Comics, etc.
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Mooncity
Reversing the polarity of the neutron flow since 1976!


The comic strip that never was.

[funnyninjas]

mooncity wrote:

Are we or are we not considering the Big Dogs for eligibillity? I vote no, only because I'm a little bitty pup myself.

It depends on who gets to vote. If we let only webcomic creators on these boards vote, then the Big Dogs probably wouldn't get nominated anyway. If we let all webcomic creators vote, then a lot of people voting would want to vote for the Big Dogs. That would be problematic.

Also, we might not get much publicity without them. We couldn't really reach a huge audience if we keep this closed off from the Big Dogs. Nobody would care who won, because nobody would know about it.

We could have a few subcategories (forgive me, I'm bad at names):
Large Readership- Webcomics with a readership over XX.
Smaller Readership- Webcomics with a readership under XX.
Print and Web - Webcomics that are also in print.

That could have problems though, actually judging how many readers people have.
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[LukeSurl]

There's absolutely no good way to define 'big dog', the only way to even begin to sort them is to look at no. of hits, and such information isn't readily available.

And, to be honest, why should a webcomic be punished for being successful? An awards system which excludes a fairly arbitary selection of good comics is completely meaningless - a lot of comics are popular because they are considered to be very good by a large number of people.

As has been mentioned, there's no point doing an open public vote, becuase this will just confirm what is already known. Hence the need for either peer voting and/or jury.
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[ttallan]

I'm all for promoting under-appreciated webcomics, but I don't think you can in good conscience call this "The Webcomic Award" if you're going to start excluding webcomics on the grounds that they are too popular to deserve any more attention. If you want, call it the "Small-Time Webcomics Award", and I could understand it. Otherwise, be fair and let all the comics compete. Let the "Big Dog" comics win a couple awards, and then put those winners in the Hall of Fame and excuse them from competition that way.
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[Chilari]

As ttallan brought up in the other thread, where are we chosing the judges from? Just here? Or outside as well? There are some prominent webcartoonists we could ask, whose participation would certainly gain us publicity if they've got the time to commit.

So let's just set out what needs to be discussed and decided upon.

1. How the competition will be judged - everyone can nominate and vote, only webcartoonists, or a mixture of webcartoonists and judges.
2. If we're limiting either the nomination or voting list, how do we chose to limit it?
3. If we're using judges, how do we decide who they will be? Do we keep it in TWCL or ask outsiders?
4. What sort of time scale are we looking at? Coincide with the Oscars or the Beacon or whatever?
5. How do we decide which comics go from the nomination stage to the voting stage, and how many comics then get shortlisted?

Is there anything else that can be discussed at this stage? Perhaps we should have new threads for some of these topics.
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[mooncity]

I'd add a thread for Categories so we can boil them down to something that covers all the bases, but isn't unweildly.
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Mooncity
Reversing the polarity of the neutron flow since 1976!


The comic strip that never was.