I've been emailing and posting about The Webcomic List Awards all over the web recently, the reason being I'm the silly person who offered to head up the organising committee.
A bit of background is in order I think on exactly why we have The Webcomic List Awards in the first place.
The Webcartoonists' Choice Awards ran every year between 2001 and 2008 and during that time they became quite a big thing for a lot of webcomic folk. Unfortunately things went awry and come last July people were starting to question whether or not there were going to be an awards at all for 2009. Specifically, people were beginning to question it on The Webcomic List forums, where I spend a large amount of my time deleting spam and occasionally telling people off.
It was actually Luke Surl of lukesurl.com that first made the suggestion of starting up our own replacement.
"How about starting a TWCL awards?" he wrote, "I'm actually serious, talk to Ash and see if he'll give the full TWCL endorsement. We can then use our combined resources & contacts to create the necessary system (be it a select jury of esteemed persons, a closed election of peers, or an open election of general public). Thoughts?"
Other people starting chiming in with ideas including Zoë Robinson, Oliver Knörzer and future fellow forum lacky Chilari, who ended up as part of the organising committee. In a moment of madness I offered my support for the idea, sought out the approval of my higher ups on the site and suddenly, and reading through the threads in question, without any big decision I was organising the thing somehow.
I thought, and still think, it would be a terrible shame not to have anything like the WCCAs or TWCLAs around. I believe in things that can bring the webcomic community, or communities, together in some way and I think things like the awards offer that.
We held a poll to pick the name of the awards. The Webcomic List Awards won. After that there were several public polls on the forums, a committee was formed and barely organised chaos ensued. Eventually the awards took shape and on the 1st of November the nomination phase went live.
Nominations were collected, massive amounts of emails were answered and sorted, judges were recruited and given comics to judge and artists were given things to draw for the site. Somewhere in the middle of that I moved house and my intenet was accidentally disconnected when it wasn't meant to be, but somehow we pulled it all together and the ceremony went live on the 7th of February this year, only a little bit behind schedule.
On the 8th of this month nominations opened for The Webcomic List Awards 2010, a new, bigger and better version of the awards.
So far things are going well. We have a really good committee and selection of judges aboard and nominations are coming in at a steady pace already.
All in all, I'm very happy with how things are going this year.
So, one final word before I get back to work, go check out the site and if you happen to be involved in creating comics yourself or reviewing comics or distributing comics or are in any other way actively involving yourself comics then go nominate some webcomics that you think deserve the recognition.
Just make sure to read the insturctions first, okay? :)
That's all for now. I'll post more in the next couple of days. Right now I have some work to be getting on with.
TTFN.
