Stolen Pixels #176: The Best Webcomic

By Shamus Posted Friday Mar 12, 2010

Filed under: Column 24 comments

This one is about the webcomic contest.

Post comic introspection:

“It’s funny because it’s true!” as the saying goes. Except, the punchline is that it isn’t funny. Which means this is the comic strip equivalent of “Everything I say is a lie!”

 


From The Archives:
 

24 thoughts on “Stolen Pixels #176: The Best Webcomic

  1. Irridium says:

    hehe, wow.

    Hopefully the other comics get picked up somewhere else. After all, how hard can it be? You seem to be doing just fine grabbing screenshots and putting funny words over them. Or gibberish, in this case ;)

    1. Factoid says:

      Actually I hope they all just self-publish.

      As much as I like the Escapist, they’re going to own the copyright to this stuff.

      Going in with the escapist is an easy way to get paid and find an audience quickly, but in the long term I think your earning potential for good quality work is lower.

      Seems to me like you’d be better off owning your own work, publishing it yourself and making money off of ads and merchandise. That’s pretty much how all the professional web cartoonists have done it.

      But then again not everyone has that kind of aptitude. Some people are just artists and have neither the skills nor the inclination to self-monetize their comic. So for those people getting paid for the work probably seems like a good deal. And it will help them build a reputation that could be used to fold readers into another webcomic that they do control the rights to.

      1. Irridium says:

        I think they only have the copyright of the panals that were sent in. If the authers who didn’t win wanted to continue with their comics, they can. They just can’t use the ones they sent in.

        Unlessed I missed something like that while reading the rules.

  2. SolkaTruesilver says:

    I really find funny at the number of people on the Escapist’ forum who are commenting how funny today’s comic actually is.

    I guess showing Dr. Breen as a retard has some intrinsic comedic value, eh?

    1. swimon says:

      what he said.

      Also does it count as irony that I found this funnier than the winner and all the honorable mentions? Not that I didn’t find them hillarious it’s just that this is a masterpiece of comedy for some reason.

    2. Matt K says:

      I definitly cracked up at Breen’s facial expressions. Sometimes silly is just comedy gold.

    3. Meredith says:

      I found it funny too. Sometimes I think we just all need a little silliness.

    4. Yar Kramer says:

      I think it was his expression in the last panel that made me grin. It was halfway intelligent, coupled with the abject stupidity of the … “dialogue.”

  3. someboringguy says:

    I have also found Shamus strip to be funnier than the winner.Good job Shamus! Showing dr Bren behaving like that is funny as hell :)

  4. wtrmute says:

    I didn’t find today’s strip to be funny, perhaps because I’ve never played Half-life 2; but since you weren’t going for funny anyway, it’s all cool. I thought today’s strip was interesting, which is a superset of funny, and what you probably were going for. It’s also a good bit of what I look for in your Experienced Points column, or the posts in this blog.

    So yeah, good job.

  5. Gandaug says:

    I read a lot of the entries. Some shouldn’t take comfort in your comic, Shamus. I won’t say it’s funnier than the winner, but it does stand over at least 75% of what I read in the entries.

    1. Galad says:

      ouch, burn =X

      I’d say 25%, since I’m a nice guy, and I did see some pretty awful entries on the last pages. But not that many

      1. Meredith says:

        Wow, I didn’t even make it to the last pages. The honourable mentions were mostly decent, but the first page of regular entries did me in. Today’s comic was definitely funnier than most of that.

        1. Mari says:

          I’m with you there. I made it through the honorable mentions and the first page of regular entries and just couldn’t stand it any more. Many of the honorable mentions were funny or at least interesting. But several I saw on the first page of regular entries made “I Spit on Your Grave” look like a laugh riot in comparison.

          1. Galad says:

            ok, I admit I didn’t read many of the regular entries. But let’s look at the good side of this. We have a winner that’s sure to produce a content twice weekly and more than a dozen honorable mentions. They are all good webcomics, which we can hope they’d pick up their own life somewhere on the Internet. If this happens the comic lovers, and I guess I count myself in this group since the number of webcomics I’m following has only been growing lately, are only going to win.

            On an off topic, is there any way to change this horrible, lame avatar I seem to be stuck with?

            1. Shamus says:

              gravatar.com, and register. Then set whatever image you like to be associated with your email. It will appear on just about all wordpress blogs.

            2. ClearWater says:

              Or change your e-mail address and hope for the best ;)

            3. mark says:

              shamus made that horrible, lame avatar, you insensitive clod!

  6. Enrique says:

    Wait…so the comic is made of cake? I’m confused…

    1. Yar Kramer says:

      I see what you did there, and that’s approximately as amusing as a forum I’m on which had a “cake” smiley consisting of a blank image.

  7. Sean Riley says:

    See, the fact that you have the A Thing About Stuff’s on the right means I can’t comment on them there. Except to say that it is so utterly, utterly true. (It’s the ‘Choosing a GM’ one, for the curious.)

    (Today’s Stolen Pixels also amused me.)

  8. toasty says:

    You say this one isn’t funny, but its actually one of the funnier one’s you’ve done. I’ve read some of your comics that are… the same punchlines I’ve seen elsewhere (like so many of your DragonAge ones were). They were good punchlines, but they were also… very common ones. This one was nice, simple, stupid and funny.

  9. ClearWater says:

    It’s not a lie if it really isn’t funny. But it’s funny so it is a lie. Or maybe because it’s a lie, which is funny, cos if it wasn’t a lie, it wouldn’t be… arghhh. My head hurts.

  10. PhoenixUltima says:

    …Is Dr. Breen trying to speak in vortese?

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