The Bad Webcomics Wiki!

I just clicked on a page out of curiosity, and I have to ask: How long has the logo been goatsing readers?

At least six months.

BWW has potential. Really, at first I was amazed by it. I don't normally like caustic critic and I don't really like john solomon's blog, but this site actually give constructive criticism, eventhough it's caustic.

At first I wished that people would criticize my artwork like BWW, and if I ever wanted to make a webcomic, I'd browse this wiki so I won't make any mistake like most bad webcomics.

But as I browsed through more, and browsed the forum, I realized that BWW doesn't follow its potential. It sadly turned into a joke. The problem with BWW is.

There is just no standard on what you're reviewing. Seriously, and after reading the forum, most of the time people suggests comic just for the sake of suggesting it or because they don't like it. There is a difference between bad webcomic and webcomic with flaws. All webcomic have flaws. But BWW just... ugh, BWW want utopic, perfect webcomic, which since everybody has different taste, won't be created ever.

Seriously. People in the forum suggest Girl Genius? XKCD? Penny Arcade? Nobody Scores? OOTS? I'm not saying that they're perfect, they have flaws. All webcomic have flaws. But ugh. Putting webcomic with flaws on the side of really bad webcomic really won't work if what you want to have is a wiki that points badness in webcomic. Seriously, it looks like that people are just suggesting things for the sake of suggesting.

I can see why people said 'at the end BWW will add all webcomic in existance. That will work, if what you want to have is something like encylopedia dramatica for webcomic, that is, scathing article on everything ever including themselves. But... I assume that that's not what BWW want.

In general, a lot of those suggestions get turned down. That seems to be why they made the "Is this webcomic bad?" forum: for people who weren't sure if their tastes matched with the kind of thing they were going for. This prevented, say, Penny Arcade from being suggested as "bad," but merely posed as a question, if I'm remembering right.

The ruling was still "No, it's fine."

That said, it's a wiki, and pages are created, edited, and deleted all the time on there, although it seems to be a lot less active than it once was.

I say all of this as an observer. It's not a wiki I edit.

There are advantages and disadvantages to having a wiki format for reviews, as opposed to blogs as I've found most other webcomic review sites to be.

With a wiki format, there are two advantages. Firstly, the ratings that a webcomic gets can be democratically decided by the community, I.E if a user makes a badly judged review, then it can be dealt with and corrected in discussion. The second advantage is that with a large user base, more reviews can be made, and so more obscure webcomics get their chance at recognition. The disadvantage with these multiple users is that they can get out of control if the admins don't exercise a tight enough rein on them, and their reviews are often lesser quality. This can be seen on the BWW, the reviews made by the main contributors are decent, the others less so.

With the blog format, all the reviews are made by one person, meaning they will all generally have the same quality. Obviously, not all blog reviewers are good, but if you find one who is reasonably skilled, then you'll have a source of consistently decent reviews. There are two problems with this. Firstly, the blogger is one person, which means they cannot fire off reviews as fast as a wiki can. Secondly, no matter how skilled at critical analysis they are, they're bound to have their own personal tastes which might lead to them favouring some comics over others.

I agree that genuine criticism of any comic is good, in fact, I'd be perfectly fine with having a "this comic is bad page" if it'd have enough valid criticism and -suggestions- to allow me, as an author, to work my way out of the wiki.

The thing is, now it's been a while since I've explicitly read a whole number of articles but I do remember that certain articles are a lot less .. based on helping webcomics and more based on the whole "this sucks let us point it out"-aspect;

Although the name itself kinda puts it in the "everything on this site is bad"-category from the get go, I do believe that the website could actually improve as a whole if it -allowed- for critical but generally "positive" reviews of borderline/questionably good webcomics, because having an explicit list of your biggest flaws is -especially- interesting when you're actually capable enough to fix it. (most comics shown are pretty hopeless)

Another thing I'm curious about if the wiki has -any- sense of "redemption"; What if a comic that they've got on there actually turns good after improving a lot/getting rid of it's flaws? If the website was honestly interested in helping comics get better, more so than just bashing what's bad, I'd think that there would be some stated way to honorably leave your "bad webcomic" position on the very wiki.

Perhaps they have something like this, perhaps no comic mentioned ever turned good, I don't know; But these are the kinds of things that I'd like to see to make me feel like the website's good/useful rather than just people complaining about failures.

Peace out.

For what it's worth, the forum has topics where people check up on reviewed webcomics in a "where are they now" kind of way: for example, quite a few members feel that Ctrl Alt Del is improving, or at least that its creator is genuinely trying to.

Granted, that's the forum. I don't know if that sort of sentiment is carried over to the actual articles.

Just look at how many times John Solomon threw tantrums on his blog. Hell, I got him to do it in the comments once. All I had to do was question his story about Scott Ramsoomair throwing a con badge. Bloody hilarious.

Can I get a link to that? Solomon is #6 of my Top Ten Favorite Internet Butt-Monkey List.

The blog is long gone, I'm afraid. The wiki was originally intended to be a sort of continuation of Soloman's legacy, until Soloman himself showed up on the forums and raged at them. It was really quite vitriolic. So now the BWW is kind of doing its own thing.

...now that I would like to hear an elaboration on.

Link to the thread is here, if anyone needs to see it.

That's an interesting read, John Solomon sounds kinda ... not very pleasant though, I don't know much about him outside of him having that "your webcomic sucks" blog; But his aggressive stance on TB Wwiki seems ... harsh.

Some people have a blanket-clause disrespect of wikis and everything produced by them, sort of like how I hate all social networking sites. It's not an opinion I personally agree with, but I can certainly understand it.

In Solomon's case, the issue was Creator Backlash. He regrets writing that blog.

edited 28th Nov '10 12:47:17 PM by silver2195

To be honest, he sounds a lot like the webcomic authors he bashed...

Heh. Now THAT'S ironic.

Anyone know the particular reason he regrets writing the blog?

I doubt it's guilt or him suddenly thinking the comics in question "weren't that bad at all", because most of them definitely had their glaring flaws.

Did it have anything to do with the fact that he, himself, was capable of jack when it came to creating anything substantial?

That's the only valid reason I could imagine from his side, hearing about those emails and stuff it definitely had little to do with him deciding to stop being rude/profane.

Am I the only that remembers the frequency of John Solomon writing whiny entries on his blog demanding that people stop reading his blog?

Still, thanks for the link to yet another one of his crybaby breakdowns, this time in a form that seems to have more permanance.

Seriously? What's wrong with this guy.

I don't mind defending people who are arrogant [name often used in place of "Richard"]s for their right to be just that, but it's really sad to see someone that outspoken and crude shrivel up and whine/complain in such a way.

Even if you show dissent from a previously held stance, you can at least distance yourself with style or pride, not grovel up and get upset at people for reading it, geez.

It's entirely possible that Soloman realized that people were on to him taking things out of context, making things up whole cloth, and presenting opinion as fact in order to make a webcomic seem worse than it was. That's not exactly a flattering thing to have known.

Just admitting it and manning up would've been far better than whatever he did do, though.

To be fair, we really don't know what happened back stage. Not really.

Hey, excuse me, this seemed like the best place to ask. Does anyone know where there's an archive of John Solomon's blog? I checked wayback machine, and nada. I was wondering if anyone had a zip or something.

Solomon considers it an Old Shame, and "burned the evidence", so to speak. You'll have to dig deeper to taste his vitriol.

edited 14th Jul '11 7:29:05 PM by mrsaturn

Ah god dammit. So, no convenient .zips, then?