Winners of The Webcomic List Awards 2009

[Novil]

After the discontinuation of the Web Cartoonists' Choice Awards several members of the webcomic community site The Webcomic List felt the need for a replacement and came up with the idea for a new award called The Webcomic List Awards in July 2009. Comic artists and writers, community staff... basically everyone involved in comics were asked for their favorites; the winner of each category was then established by a panel of judges, including for example Brad Guigar of Evil Inc. for "Best Gag-a-Day", among the five webcomics with the most nominations.

On the website of The Webcomic List Awards 2009 you can have a look at the comic pages drawn by our community members to present the categories, announce the nominees and celebrate the winners.

However, if you are just interested in the list of winners of each category, here it is:

Best Comic:

• Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell

Best New Comic:

• Moon Town by Steve Ogden

Best Gag-a-Day:

• Girls with Slingshots by Danielle Corsetto

Best Longform:

• Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell

Best Colour Art:

• FreakAngels by Warren Ellis

Best Black and White Art:

• The Abominable Charles Christopher by Karl Kerschl

Best Non-Traditional Art:

• The Dreamland Chronicles by Scott Christian Sava

Best Writing:

• Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell

Best Character:

• Digger of Digger by Ursula Vernon

As you can see the big winner of the first instance of The Webcomic List Awards was Gunnerkrigg Court written by Tom Siddell. Besides winning the main category "Best Comic" it also won the awards for "Best Writing" and "Best Longform".

If you have a webcomic site of your own, it would be great if you could write a news entry about our award and the winners of it. It is currently the only general webcomic award with additional categories other than "Best webcomic" (which exists for example as part of the Ignatz Awards or the Harvey Awards). However, it was also our goal to keep the number of different categories low so that each one is worth more. Since it is also not a popularity contest the most popular webcomics, Penny Arcade, XKCD, etc., don't win by default.

We believe that all winning comics are of very high quality and therefore worth checking out. So have a look at them and spread the word!

[Funderbunk]

Gunnerkrigg Court is a powerhouse of art and writing, it definitely deserves the wins.

Pretty cool. I didn't know the Web Cartoonists' Choice Awards had been discontinued, though. Why?

[JGray]

It is currently the only general webcomic award with additional categories other than "Best webcomic" (which exists for example as part of the Ignatz Awards or the Harvey Awards).

Webcomic Readers Choice Awards.

[Novil]

Pretty cool. I didn't know the Web Cartoonists' Choice Awards had been discontinued, though. Why?

It had organizational problems and its operators apparently lost interest.

It is currently the only general webcomic award with additional categories other than "Best webcomic" (which exists for example as part of the Ignatz Awards or the Harvey Awards).

Webcomic Readers Choice Awards.

Which is dead as well. It's not even on the WebcomicPlanet website anymore.

[amanda]

Drunk Duck has its own awards show ^.^  But I guess that doesn't count since it's for DD comics only.

I was a little disappointed to see some of my favorites from the nominees not take the wins, but I do have to agree with most of the final winners.  A fun contest =D

[Alectric]

I wonder if Tom is even aware that he won?

[Novil]

I wonder if Tom is even aware that he won?

Our committee head Wendy has written personal mails to at least five of the winners already. But then she had an appointment. The remaining two will get a notice tonight at the latest.

Steve Ogden of Moon Town has already written a news post on his website:

http://moon-town.com/comic/moon-town-wins/

[Rob]

Privately I criticized the heck out of this for various reasons I'm not going to go into because they really are "just my opinion." Publicly I'll say that in light of the the other awards cancellations I think it was very nice for the folks who did this to put in the effort and make it work.

The Webcomics List, despite it's staggering size and complexity (they currently track over 15k comics!) is actually a really good example of a place where everyone who loves and makes webcomics can gather together. It's much more focused on letting creators promote and getting the message to fans than anything we do but for what it does it does it pretty well.

I had the absolute pleasure of dealing with Ash Young's mother last year when I was trying to list some of my own comics there. Ash was on vacation and so his mother and I bounced e-mails back and forth while I tried to resolve issues I had with their site. As soon as Ash returned it was fixed in less than 48 hours and I got the added bonus of communicating with his mother who was absolutely charming.

Novil... or anyone else who was involved with this officially... I'd be happy to bounce tomorrow's frontpage article and put up an announcement about this if you are interested. I'd just need it to be a little more... matter of fact than this conversational forum post. And a logo for the Webcomics List at the top of the page (it doesn't look like you guys made a logo of your own but if you did that would be fine too). That would be good too. Let me know. I've got my instant messengers on or you can PM me here.... I check periodically.

So what are you guys calling these awards? "The Listies" or something like that?  ;D

[Rob]

All right.... it's a bit too late to bump the article for Monday. Maybe we can do something on Wednesday. Let me know if you are interested.  ;)

[wendyw]

Hi Rob.
I'm one of the forum admins over at The Webcomic List and the one who was daft enough of taking on the job of organising a committee for the awards. Novil, pointed me in the direction of the thread.

As far as names go, officially it's The Webcomic List Awards (yeah, I know very imaginative), but unofficially it's also been going by the name of The Twickles.

The awards logo is just a simple variant of the main site logo. This is the largest version of it that I have on this computer. Unfortunately my main computer failed miserably after it was moved to our new house, so I don't have any of the original files right now, not that you'd probably want anything any bigger anyway.

Tell me what else you need and I'll do my best to get you it.

[Rob]

Thanks for the logo.

The only other thing I can think of is a rewrite. Novil did a great job filling us all in as far as the facts go I guess I'm just looking for something a little more like a press release with links to all the nominees as well as the winners. And if you could set it up so the links are PHP ready (like you would post them here on the forum) that would be really helpful. You could even post it in here and then I can just transfer it over. Your call.

Lastly, I have to talk to the person who was supposed to run his article on Wednesday and see if he is ok with delaying until next week. If he isn't ok with it then maybe we can run something a bit different next Monday. Maybe you could write something about what it was like behind the scenes organizing that herd of cats.  ;D

Then we could list the winners at the end with a link to the proceedings.

Anyway, as soon as I hear back from him I'll let you know.

Also, as a member of the webcomic community I'd like to thank you for all your hard work. I didn't agree with all your choices but what fun would an awards show be if I did?

[wendyw]

I'll start writing something tonight and I'll send it to you via PM is soon as I've got it done to see what you think of it.

[Rob]

Sounds good. I spoke to the person whose article was supposed to run Wednesday and they have agreed to be bumped to next week. I'll need the article by 10 PM Eastern tomorrow to have it posted for Wednesday (that's 10PM Eastern on Tuesday since it's past midnight and I'm not sure where you are in the world).

I'll be up for a few more hours so you can get me by any of the various instant messengers under my name on the left here or I can check it tomorrow.

I'll talk to you soon. ;)

[Gibson]

It's funny, but I was a nominee in one of the categories and I had no idea until the winners had been announced and I started getting traffic from the link on the page where they announced the winner. I don't know if this was by design or some kind of oversight, but I would have liked to know. I mean, I would have announced being nominated on the comic site, since it is actually really cool, but it's weird now to announce "Hey everyone, check out this contest I didn't win!"

This isn't a whiny complaint post as much as it's a request/suggestion to contact the nominees next year, so they (or we) can enjoy the high of being nominated without the sting of the loss.

[wendyw]

Hi Gibson.

I did actually contact all the nominees before the winners were chosen, well tried to, but I can no longer access my Smack Jeeves account and couldn't find another way to contact you. I did try, honest, and I'm sorry I didn't manage to.

Things were pretty hectic around the end of last year and the start of this year with me and the person running the new site moving house right when we should have been doing the bulk of the work.

I know it's a pretty poor excuse for not having got in contact with everybody, but the move and related down time from the internet combined with another key member of the team getting a big promotion really messed us up time wise and didn't really allow us to do everything the way I'd want to.

The planning for the 2010 awards is already under way, starting months earlier than the 2009 awards did, to make sure that things like this don't happen again and even if real life rears its ugly head either me or one of the other committee members will be able to track down details for everyone who is in the running for an award.

The 2009 awards were our first go and I promise this time round they'll be better.