ccawards nominees have been announced...
...which means it's time for (hopefully) the last rant about them this year.

Looking over the list of nominees indicates three things.

Firstly, there are several people doing comic work that have much more time to devote to their work than I have. A large number of the strips with very good artwork and definitely show that the artists put a lot of time into the work are strips that are updated weekly. This should be obvious. Currently, it takes me an average of ninety minutes to take a PE(aott) strip from the script stage to the final product. If I took the seven and a half hours a week and focused it on doing one really good weekly strip, PE(aott)'s quality would increase, but it just wouldn't be the same. I like the daily aspect of the strip, even when it is rough as it is.

Besides, I believe that as I continue with my art training, I will start producing better work, faster. I mean, take a look at Gaming Guardians (GamingGuardians.com) -- art machine "WebTroll" kicks out pretty damn good artwork -- in color -- each day. I don't know how long it takes him to draw, scan, and color each day's comic, but I'd guess around an hour to two.

Secondly, a lot of people don't really understand what some categories mean. "Outstanding Use of Infinite Canvas" actually had a description of the award right there - "This award recognizes comics that make superlative use of the "infinite canvas" popularized by theorist Scott McCloud, where a large section of narrative is on one "plate" and the browser window is used to navigate along the narrative, rather than click to bring up new pages." A quick look at several of the strips that made it to the final voting round don't seem to be distinct panels that require the user to scroll vertically to read the entire comic strip. Use of Infinite Canvas, yes. Outstanding Use? No. (For something that actually goes beyond simple up-down scrolling, see Scott McCloud's My Obsession with Chess.)

Of course, I'm going to mention the Outstanding Gaming Comic category. Megatokyo, Penny Arcade, PVP, Real Life, and RPG World made the cut. Megatokyo? Has anyone in Megatokyo ever actually played a game? At least with Penny Arcade and PVP, we actually have people playing games (or at least holding video game controllers and talking about games). I don't read Real Life or RPG World, so I can't speak to their amount of gaming presented in those strips, but I'm guessing RPG World is one of those fantasy/adventure comics where the characters make references to hit points and other game terms. (Let me check... Yep. It's not a gaming comic.) Where the hell is Dork Tower? That's all about gaming, is published in color three times a week, and is rather well known. (Again, Megatokyo is a gaming comic?)

Lastly, there are a lot of well-regarded comics at serializer dot net (serializer.net). There were several strips hosted there that made it to the final round; the majority of the strips there seem to update once a week. See also Indication the First.

Posted at June 1, 2003 02:30 PM