RentCavalier said:
Saevus said:
To avoid angering people who just enjoy things for what they are, I won't mention specifics. But about 90% of what I see in this thread I know from experience is just bad.
I'm not saying this as a critic, but with about a decade of experience as a writer, some serious study into fiction, and a few of my glorified scribblings published, I've got to say that 99.9% of webcomics are painfully bad and mostly useful as textbook examples of phenomenally bad writing. Stock characters, blatant wish fulfillment and self-insertion, shoddy or more frequently no characterization, painful dialog, and enough tropes and cliches to populate the whole of Siberia more densely than NYC. I could go on, and on, and on, but that'd just be pedantic.
Quality art is a bit easier to come by, but it still largely fails to do what the art of a comic needs to: express. It isn't enough to supplant 'Back in his apartment, John reclined on his sofa' with the art; it needs to evoke a response from the reader, provide emotional context, anything. Complexity isn't what's lacking; no one expects every panel to be a bloody Las Meninas. But even that which is technically quite accomplished all too often fails in actually communicating something important to the reader.
I agree with you mostly, but I would point to any of the comics I put in my "good" section, with the exception perhaps of Dominic Deegan, of being extremely good in both writing and artistry. Chalking up 99% of webcomics as shit is, honestly, an extremely broad and rather bad generalization. Like any medium, the majority of webcomics are fairly mediocre, which is why we appreciate the good webcomics when we get them.
That depends how you judge webcomics. If you compare them to the quality of most material on the internet, then only about 70% are crap. If you actually take the critics scalpel to them, ones that aren't downright bad are few and far in between.
And now, I'll eat my words of 'I won't mention specific webcomics'.
Penny Arcade, from what I've read these days, is one of the few that's good. It manages to be downright clever on several occasions, and is well above any other gaming webcomic.
Dresden Codak is like cheap candy - it looks great, at first, but it simply isn't. Extremely sloppy integration of text and art, self-gratification, a Mary Sue protagonist, strawmen abound... And above all, for all the praise the art gets, it is not good. It gives scenery, explosions, and gratuitous T&A, but rarely gives effective, cohesive flow or expression.
Dominic Deegan is bad beyond bad. You should feel guiltier than Charlie Manson for enjoying it.
LFG I quit reading long ago, so it may have improved since then. Character humour does not work when your characters are stock characters. The jokes are painfully predictable, the cast unoriginal, and the art is, once again, technically proficient but wholly uncommunicative.
Questionable Content also suffers from one-dimensional characters and, consequently, 90% of the humour is predictable. The characters also seem to have this bizarre hive mind; most tight-knit groups of friends end up being similar in mannerisms, but the way they're all on an identical wavelength makes Gilmore Girls look spontaneous. And judging by the art, people have different skeletal structures in Northampton. Or just love standing around in awkward positions.
xkcd is an exercise of repetition now. It's like Munroe's used up all his good jokes, and now either cranks out ones that are simply unfunny or rehashes of old jokes. Sidenote: C&H is the only webcomic that's proven it is possible to make rehashes downright hilarious.
My idea of good writing in a webcomic is, say... Order of the Stick. Namely due to well-rounded, developed characters that balance between realism (motivations, rationalizations, background, etc.) and D&D parody. My idea of good art is Kate Beaton's stuff; go have a look through her entire frontpage, and you'll see how expressive even dead-simple linework can be.
Just my bitter, disenchanted $0.02.
