2005 Recruitment

[Zortic]

As the Holiday season creeps our way, we can't forget that this natural progression of the season means that the end of the year is just around the corner. Very soon it will be the year 2005; and with the New Year comes the 2005 Web Cartoonists' Choice Awards!

As the most popular existing award system exclusively for webcomics, the WCCA's continue to draw debate and controversy every year. Every incarnation has drawn people's views and opinions on what they think would make the awards better. And every year we seek out those controversial thoughts and ideas in order to work them into our award process to continually evolve it into the best system it can possibly be. This year, like every year, we invite you to join this process and help us improve the award system in order to make it as great as possible. We need your help and participation to make the 5th annual WCCAs the best yet by providing those innovations and improvements!

Not only are we looking for active, vocal committee members, there are also several key positions available. These are a great place to truly help make a difference in this year's awards. Check our website at http://www.ccawards.com/committee.html for a list of available positions. Then email me at zortic@yahoo.com if you're interested in either a specific position, or if you just want to be part of the general planning and decision-making process.

These awards belong to the entire webcomic community. The webcomic industry continually evolves and expands and we need to be able to adapt right alongside of it. The more you help, the better they can be. Please don't hesitate to volunteer!

[Toxic]

Movin' the CCAs up to January, eh? Well, I do have a few suggestions:

Bring back presenters! Those were cool. Just reading text saying who won is boring.

Bring back "Best Character" nominations! IE Best Male, Best Female, Best Supporting...

And maybe a few more interesting nomination categories, like "Best Adult Comic." If a category is so selective only one person can get nominated, ie "OUTSTANDING NEW CHARACTER DESIGN," get rid of it. Other categories that should be abolished: OUTSTANDING USE OF INFINITE CANVAS, OUTSTANDING CHARACTER Writing (Outstanding writing should cover that), OUTSTANDING USE OF FLASH (There are plenty of flash awards)

And please settle on the number of nominees for categories! 5 is a starter.

Lastly, I'd suggest a tie-breaking method for winners. Ties are boring.

[Zortic]

The timeline hasn't changed, but once January comes around, we want to have a strong committee working on it so we'll be ready by May.

And everyone is in agreement about the presentations. The only reason we didn't have any last year was because we lost the person responsible for organizing them. Just one example of how important it is to have strong active committee members.

The Outstanding Character categories were always problematic because they broke the format of all of the other nominees. It made it possible for one comic to have all of the nominations. We decided that it was more fair to have categories that were won by a comic as a whole rather than awarding a single element of a comic.

The categories (like every year) will continue to be tweeked and improved on. I think our tier system does a good job of covering the larger subjects, then breaking them down into awarding specific components of that discipline. But we always look at the previous results to see if we can improve any categories or clear up their presentation.

And yes, the number of nominees is clearly established in our rules. ( http://www.ccawards.com/rules.html )

But thank you for your ideas, I will make sure that the rest of the committee members look at your suggestions so we can discuss them and consider how they can fit into improving our awards.

Thanks,
Mark Mekkes