How is it a tangent? People have specifically expressed IN THREAD that bad webcomics don't hurt anybody, and thus the creators should not be subjected to pain. Hell, that's pretty much what this entire thread is about. Just because I'm relating a personal experience doesn't make it a tangent.
Mh, I thought it was because I couldn't easily make a connection between a single artist and a mass of bad comics. One artist cannot be responsible for thousands of comics he didn't create or incourage.
Yeah, fine, quality is subjective, and flaming the bad won't keep the bad from showing up. So what, though? It strikes me that within this conversation, nobody has rushed to the defense of any of the comics being called out, based upon the merit of their work. Instead, people are just defending the right for crappy comics to continue being crappy. A consensus on defining crap is objective enough for me. The question, then, becomes what do we do about it? How do we make the bad easier to ignore, and the good easier to find?
But really, very few comics were called out, and then I personally thought that discussing about general issue is more important than sticking to particular cases. But there's no consensus about what is crap. If I said that Penny Arcade or VG Cats were crap, half of the forum would jump on my back, but I really do and I wouldn't miss anything if they didn't exist. Forum could reach certain crap consensus about comics like Dominic Degan or Ctrl-Alt-Del, but then these comics are very popular so obviously there's no consensus on a larger scale. What would be a criterium for crap, and exactly who would be 'the worthy one' to decide what's crap and what's not?
And to complicate the issue more: let's say that we know what is obviously crap: really poorly drawn and written comics that have very low readership. But even then, you can't tell whether one of these artists will progress into a great artist or not. I've seen people progress from crap to very good stuff in a year, within this community, it happens. I don't think that anyone would have right to discourage these people.
I always thought that the fact that anyone is allowed in webcomics is it's best trait, and not the worst. It's the reason why I am here, probably you too, and definitely a majority of people around here. It's the defining characteristics of webcomics. First thing that attracted me to webcomics was that some of the best were dealing with topics that were too risque, or just simple too weird to be published in professional comics, but it was the first time I saw these topics dealt with in comic form. Some other comics were too poorly drawn for print but great nonetheless. Would "1/0", a masterpiece of comic, ever be published in a major publication, thanks to it's untrained simplicist drawing? In internet-less worls, these comics would be published for some small publisher, with distribution two blocks wide. Instead, here I am in Serbia, reading those comics.
I don't believe that most of the other entertainment industries you've mentioned are just as susceptible to being utter shit, though, because the investment involved necessitates some sort of editorial discrimination. Not everything pitched makes it to print, screens, and radios, and most of that which does make it to the public has benefited from at least some kind of engineering to ensure that the product is going to entertain most on some level. More than that, while there may be lots of bad, plenty of good is still made readily available, and even celebrated.
I may speak as a token criticiser of popular culture, but I don't have that impression. Editorial discrimination you mention is often very misguided and dumbing down. A load of bad movies produced every year, and with agressive campaigns they have, it overwhelmes good movies, making it very hard to dig them out. Digging through a smaller or a larger pile of crap doesn't make much difference to me. And anyways, the largest number of those comics that make unfavourable statistics for bad comics, linger in bottoms of guide, top lists and other places, unlinked by peers. You won't often stumble into them. Those that do make good comics hard to find, and comics that are bad yet still popular. But they are much fewer, and they've also gone through some kind of editorial discrimination (of audience, that is). Take Keenspot or Modern Tales - sites with an editorial approach, that pick out comics that are 'cream of the crop'. Yet these still end up with what, 1% of comics that I'm fan of. It may be because I'm rather discriminating, but I don't see much difference from, say, some Hollywood studio's yearly output.
I've been thinking about this all day, and the more I think about it, the more I realize one of the greater problem with webcomics isn't the proportion of bad vs. good. Rather, it's the lack of organization of comics on the web that really makes finding the good in the bad very hard. Publishing on the web is free, so anyone can publish, without giving any prohibitive thought to whether their creation is good enough to show off. Since anyone can publish, everyone does publish, and the sheer numbers of these entries create such a huge disorganized fray, it makes finding the good stuff that much harder to achieve. Toplists, search engines, review blogs, and even word of mouth can't classify it properly. It's a mess!
That may be true. There were even attempts to make directories, but then again there were too many directories which rendered them kind of ineffective, since webcomickers couldn't keep track of all of them.
It's one of reasons why I am defending well-spoken webcomic critics (as oposed to webcomic critics who use flaming and personal attacks as means of expression). It solves the problem of criteria, though there's no guarantee that your fave blogger will always like the same comics as you, but then there's no guarantee for anything in this life, eh?
McDuffies, sorry, but you do not have me figured out, and frankly, that's a very harsh judgment you've leveled my way.
It's hard to shake that impression sometimes, but I don't really think that. I kinda said it to provoke your reaction.
Also, you're not the only person in the world who has had to drive hundreds of kilometers to find whatever comics you could get your hands on. In fact, that's pretty much a description of me. I've lived in remote country spots most of my life, making the acquisition of any comics, let alone good comics, hard. During my three years in Yellowstone, for instance, the nearest newsstand or bookstore was over 220km away. There have been times in which I've had very little access to the outside world, and my fandom of comics has suffered for it. The sad part is that, in recent times, when webcomics were all I had to consume, they didn't do the trick for me. I get more enjoyment from the exercise in banality that are Archie comics, than I do from nearly every webcomic I come across. Call that trivial if you will, I don't care. I'm not looking for your sympathy. All I know is that, after a decade of reading webcomics, I can still count on one hand the webcomics of which I can actually call myself a fan.
But then, the problem isn't that there's too many bad comics, but that there's too little good comics - right? Can't you say that, if there were, say, 100 of comics that you like, you wouldn't care that there's 50.000 other comics that you don't? Webcomics, being largely hobbists, aren't too mothivated to create deep, great works that will pass the test of time. They aren't mothivated to plan ahead, or to read about the subject beforehand, to use references... They mostly do what they feel like at the moment, and (as I've said in other thread) that usually ends up in retracing steps of some work they're fans of.
But then what do we do? If we discourage bad artists (with flame talk for instance) will we make more good artists? No, only less artists alltogether. Of course we'd have to incourage them to take themselves more seriously instead. We can set a good example. I can name several examples of people going from amateurish to serious approach (consequently, improbing) incouraged by the atmosphere and comic discussion on this very forum.
Of course, the thing that would really help is if wcomics became more profitable so people who live from webcomics started investing more time and energy in them - but that will never happen.
And then audience would have to be more sophisticated, reading better comics thus making less bad comics popular - but we know that will never happen for sure.
Incidentally, if I counted comics that I'm fan of, or at least those that I'd strongly reccomend, I think I'd need both hands. There doesn't seem too many of them, but once I start thinking, examples of brilliance just pop out.
