I'm not really sure what's going on here but I believe she is picking gold out of his ass wallet.
This was made by the same person who makes Humon, which is essentially about a chubby girl being chubby, it's boring. But sometimes racism flies out. Which I'll show in a bit after drinking. http://humoncomics.com
I'm probably going to get reamed for this, but I'm gonna say my pick for a bad webcomic: Ava's Demon.
I say this as someone who had followed the comic from the near-beginning. I was suckered in by the sci-fantasy aesthetic and the pretty colors. I followed the updates -when it actually updated on a frequent basis- regularly. I kind of started following it once a month, just to let the updates build up so I'd have more to read at one time. Now bear in mind, Michelle was originally part of the Homestuck fandom and like Toby Fox, she knew the pockets of HS fans were deep (or their parents' credit cards were seemingly limitless), so what did she do with this freshly minted goodwill and fandom? Do a Kickstarter, of course!
Then the first Kickstarter happened and everything went to hell from there.
Michelle pretty much used the money raised -all $300,000 odd of it- to pay off her student loans (which if I remember, she didn't specify at all in the KS itself. Technically that isn't illegal, but it does come off as pretty shady on her part) and quit her job at Dreamworks to work on the comic full-time. However, while she was kinda sorta able to update on a more frequent basis, things began to spiral out of control when she spent even more time trying to fulfill the backers' gifts -between playing cards, metal jewelry replicas of props from th ecomic, and the massive books themselves- and redoing the comic itself because the publisher wasn't keen on a lot of the swearing early on (which some suggest Michelle did to assert this wasn't a kiddie comic). Eventually, updates became fewer and fewer.
Some time after things got wrapped up with the first one, she did a second KS for Book Two. And pretty much proved she learned absolutely nothing from the first experience, throw in a Patreon, and now the comic's promised twice-weekly updates ground to an absolute standstill. I think this year alone, it only updated maybe less than a handful of times. I think she was also contracting out an outside animation studio for something related to a KS stretch goal, but fuckall if anyone knows how far that's come along. I think she'd mentioned that there were some life events going on, plus she got harassed by some psychotic "fans" who were hardcore SJWs that got bent out of shape over a joke or two (in addition to other things), never mind the allegations that Michelle was a SJW herself during her Homestuck days and engaged in bullying-like behavior.
But yeah, the comic hasn't really recovered from the first KS debacle, and Michelle has probably squandered a lot of good will from people because of how everything went off the rails. Last I heard, she was going to hire a new colorist, which is pretty much one of the final nails in the coffin IMHO, because let's be honest: the artwork is practically the reason why it got as popular as it did back in the day.
Now the reason why I say it's bad, is because of two reasons:
1) Everything moves at a glacial pace and, if you read it back when it actually updated, it felt like nothing ever happened after a while. Even when they finally got to Titan's place and shit hit the fan with Prudith, it still felt like nothing was happening because of the molasses updates. The storyboard/Homestuck format might work in some cases, but I really think AD's pacing problems could have been solved, if not ignored, by doing the page-and-panel format. Michelle's strengths are clearly in storyboarding, but while it benefits the art, it works against the story in a bad way. Homestuck's approach was lightning in a bottle, because nothing like it had really ever been done before. AD's approach... it feels oddly disconnected and slow.
2) The characters, after a second read, are the most insufferable and irritating fucks ever. The only characters I can remember are Ava and Wraithia: the former, because she's the damn title character and the latter, because she's the only character that has any real personality that stands out. The only other one I can think of is maybe Stratego Six, but that's only because we've been stuck on Namek for the last year and a half with some of the worst decompression this side of an early Brian Michael Bendis comic. But I had no emotional connection to any of the other guys, and the only remotely sympathetic character -the blue guy- comes off as a tool. When nearly 90-95% of your cast are forgettable and/or unlikable, then you have a major problem on your hands (And I've seen /co/ bring this up as well, so I'm not alone). I get that Michelle created all of this when she was an angry teen with depression issues, but come on: your ideas and characters should grow up with you, not remain in arrested development, ffs.
And the most headache inducing part is that the comic is not even out of the prologue phase yet.
tl;dr: Ava's Demon is a classic example of 'style over substance' in spades. Though I will give it a little credit for not being an obnoxious-as-fuck SJW comic and Michelle for standing her ground against her harasser. But that's about it.
Runner-up is NEO-KOSMOS or whatever the hell it's called. If you want a prime example of someone shamelessly riding off of Homestuck's coattails with a heavy dose of Tumblrina SJWism 101, there you go. Though IIRC, it's stopped updating because one of the creators is now a main storyboarder on Steven Universe.
PikaSemeChu is pretty much what it sounds like. An entire Ash/Pikachu yaoi webcomic. I have no idea what urged the author to make the anime’s Pokemon cast human, you’d probably get more views if you kept the sex interspecies anyhow. The designs are also insanely lazy for humanized Pokemon, which in itself is already a cancerous and autistic genre of fan art. This is the author’s interpretation of Misty's Psyduck:
Bittersweet Candy Bowl. (which unsurprisingly has a BadWebcomicWiki entry)
Furry webcomic with a basketcase creator (Veronica "Taeshi" Vera), terrible art, Degrassi-tier plot, and a cancerous fanbase.
Normally all of that would be forgettable, but what really made BCB stand out was the drama caused by the antics of the creator's husband and site admin, Oliver "SuitCase" Bareham. He's pretty much a case study of how to torpedo your online reputation at an alarmingly fast rate, even when compared to the shitshow that is webcomic creators.
He's already pathetic enough when you consider that he went to law school yet his only job is being a janitor for the website of his wife's badly drawn webcomic.
But his antics on the comic's forums before they nuked it were legendary.
He would get overly defensive at people giving even the smallest criticism about the comic and lash out like an autistic manchild. He'd do incredibly immature things like change the avatar of a forum user because they were conservative, mock people who didn't use Macs and threw a massive tantrum when someone said they liked Ubuntu.
Even after the forums got nuked he'd still be a dick to the fans. For a short time he implemented and used red text to annotate comments on the comic pages to mock the poster.
Nowadays they've gotten smarter and keep to their private IRC chat to hide their dirty laundry. But SuitCase has been known to show up anywhere the comic is brought up and if it's being criticized, he tries to whiteknight and tries to play nice because he's on a site where he has no power.
Funnily enough when the BWCW forums opened a thread about the comic, he appeared and proceeded to argue with everyone. Keep in mind that this was a full year before it had a wiki entry. He then showed up a day after a wiki entry was written for it, and pulled the classic "I'm not butthurt, look, I'll even help you make the review better" act and was promptly laughed off.
He still shows up on /co/ whenever they have a thread and swears that he's changed but at this point he's poisoned his reputation so badly that most people think he's still playing nice.
I'm probably going to get reamed for this, but I'm gonna say my pick for a bad webcomic: Ava's Demon.
I say this as someone who had followed the comic from the near-beginning. I was suckered in by the sci-fantasy aesthetic and the pretty colors. I followed the updates -when it actually updated on a frequent basis- regularly. I kind of started following it once a month, just to let the updates build up so I'd have more to read at one time. Now bear in mind, Michelle was originally part of the Homestuck fandom and like Toby Fox, she knew the pockets of HS fans were deep (or their parents' credit cards were seemingly limitless), so what did she do with this freshly minted goodwill and fandom? Do a Kickstarter, of course!
Then the first Kickstarter happened and everything went to hell from there.
Michelle pretty much used the money raised -all $300,000 odd of it- to pay off her student loans (which if I remember, she didn't specify at all in the KS itself. Technically that isn't illegal, but it does come off as pretty shady on her part) and quit her job at Dreamworks to work on the comic full-time. However, while she was kinda sorta able to update on a more frequent basis, things began to spiral out of control when she spent even more time trying to fulfill the backers' gifts -between playing cards, metal jewelry replicas of props from th ecomic, and the massive books themselves- and redoing the comic itself because the publisher wasn't keen on a lot of the swearing early on (which some suggest Michelle did to assert this wasn't a kiddie comic). Eventually, updates became fewer and fewer.
Some time after things got wrapped up with the first one, she did a second KS for Book Two. And pretty much proved she learned absolutely nothing from the first experience, throw in a Patreon, and now the comic's promised twice-weekly updates ground to an absolute standstill. I think this year alone, it only updated maybe less than a handful of times. I think she was also contracting out an outside animation studio for something related to a KS stretch goal, but fuckall if anyone knows how far that's come along. I think she'd mentioned that there were some life events going on, plus she got harassed by some psychotic "fans" who were hardcore SJWs that got bent out of shape over a joke or two (in addition to other things), never mind the allegations that Michelle was a SJW herself during her Homestuck days and engaged in bullying-like behavior.
But yeah, the comic hasn't really recovered from the first KS debacle, and Michelle has probably squandered a lot of good will from people because of how everything went off the rails. Last I heard, she was going to hire a new colorist, which is pretty much one of the final nails in the coffin IMHO, because let's be honest: the artwork is practically the reason why it got as popular as it did back in the day.
Now the reason why I say it's bad, is because of two reasons:
1) Everything moves at a glacial pace and, if you read it back when it actually updated, it felt like nothing ever happened after a while. Even when they finally got to Titan's place and shit hit the fan with Prudith, it still felt like nothing was happening because of the molasses updates. The storyboard/Homestuck format might work in some cases, but I really think AD's pacing problems could have been solved, if not ignored, by doing the page-and-panel format. Michelle's strengths are clearly in storyboarding, but while it benefits the art, it works against the story in a bad way. Homestuck's approach was lightning in a bottle, because nothing like it had really ever been done before. AD's approach... it feels oddly disconnected and slow.
2) The characters, after a second read, are the most insufferable and irritating fucks ever. The only characters I can remember are Ava and Wraithia: the former, because she's the damn title character and the latter, because she's the only character that has any real personality that stands out. The only other one I can think of is maybe Stratego Six, but that's only because we've been stuck on Namek for the last year and a half with some of the worst decompression this side of an early Brian Michael Bendis comic. But I had no emotional connection to any of the other guys, and the only remotely sympathetic character -the blue guy- comes off as a tool. When nearly 90-95% of your cast are forgettable and/or unlikable, then you have a major problem on your hands (And I've seen /co/ bring this up as well, so I'm not alone). I get that Michelle created all of this when she was an angry teen with depression issues, but come on: your ideas and characters should grow up with you, not remain in arrested development, ffs.
And the most headache inducing part is that the comic is not even out of the prologue phase yet.
tl;dr: Ava's Demon is a classic example of 'style over substance' in spades. Though I will give it a little credit for not being an obnoxious-as-fuck SJW comic and Michelle for standing her ground against her harasser. But that's about it.
Runner-up is NEO-KOSMOS or whatever the hell it's called. If you want a prime example of someone shamelessly riding off of Homestuck's coattails with a heavy dose of Tumblrina SJWism 101, there you go. Though IIRC, it's stopped updating because one of the creators is now a main storyboarder on Steven Universe.
Ive seen the comic but never really bothered to read it because it seemed to have too much "aesthetic" stuff for my liking.
I already saw it mentioned on kf somewhere, so sorry if im repeating someone but there is an artist on da that is super popular who made some webcomics but never finished them. the artists name is yuumei.
They have a comic fisheye placebo that is supposedly ongoing, but updates just never come. weirdly enough, a lot of their fans like it and keep requesting more, but the artist just doesnt give a shit. wouldnt people wanting to read it make you want to draw more of it?
In general a lot of webcomics have trouble with schedule. if you start a webcomic, why not post a couple of strips/chapters/whatever, see the reaction if people like it take some time to load up on chapters and release them on schedule?
That's pretty much the selling point of the entire thing. Most people saw the pretty artwork and got suckered in, and a good chunk of those people have long since dropped it because nothing ever happened; and when something did, the pacing + slow updates killed the momentum. It'd be like watching, say, Westworld or Game of Thrones, and having to wait 2-7 months between each individual episode.
Oh, did I mention Ava's Demon started back in 2012? That makes the "We're not even out of the prologue yet" revelation all the more frustrating. There's still characters on the "Cast" page that has still yet to even be introduced, and some on /co/ have joked we'll probably not see them until 2020 with the way things are going.
I don't think Michelle is a bad person or a con artist, mind you. I do think she was blinded by the stars in her eyes and got so wrapped up in trying to achieve her dream, she really didn't think a ton of things through. Especially the Kickstarter messes (since I think it was with Book 2, the books were damaged during shipping and she had to order a ton of new ones). And during that time she got harassed by that one Tumblrina psycho, her website hosting bill spiked because of some DDoS bullshit and stuff. She's had to deal with a lot of shit beyond her control, but that's still no excuse for dropping the ball. I mean ffs, the creator of 'Endtown' has chronic health issues and horrifyingly large medical bills, but he still keeps working and is too proud to beg for people to pay his debts for him via crowdfunding. (Though I think he finally got a Patreon, I'm not sure)
Ava's Demon, at this point, is also a bad webcomic in that it's also a cautionary tale of what not to do when you're determined to make a webcomic your day job and attempt to do a Kickstarter campaign right out the gate.
Oh, and I stand corrected: she only made $217k and not $300k for the first one (no, she made $350k for Book Two), but look at the stretch goals for book one alone, and you can see why things went south as badly as they did. Especially since she allegedly lost money from the Book Two KS because of various reasons.
That's pretty much the selling point of the entire thing. Most people saw the pretty artwork and got suckered in, and a good chunk of those people have long since dropped it because nothing ever happened; and when something did, the pacing + slow updates killed the momentum. It'd be like watching, say, Westworld or Game of Thrones, and having to wait 2-7 months between each individual episode.
Oh, did I mention Ava's Demon started back in 2012? That makes the "We're not even out of the prologue yet" revelation all the more frustrating. There's still characters on the "Cast" page that has still yet to even be introduced, and some on /co/ have joked we'll probably not see them until 2020 with the way things are going.
I don't think Michelle is a bad person or a con artist, mind you. I do think she was blinded by the stars in her eyes and got so wrapped up in trying to achieve her dream, she really didn't think a ton of things through. Especially the Kickstarter messes (since I think it was with Book 2, the books were damaged during shipping and she had to order a ton of new ones). And during that time she got harassed by that one Tumblrina psycho, her website hosting bill spiked because of some DDoS bullshit and stuff. She's had to deal with a lot of shit beyond her control, but that's still no excuse for dropping the ball. I mean ffs, the creator of 'Endtown' has chronic health issues and horrifyingly large medical bills, but he still keeps working and is too proud to beg for people to pay his debts for him via crowdfunding. (Though I think he finally got a Patreon, I'm not sure)
Ava's Demon, at this point, is also a bad webcomic in that it's also a cautionary tale of what not to do when you're determined to make a webcomic your day job and attempt to do a Kickstarter campaign right out the gate.
Oh, and I stand corrected: she only made $217k and not $300k for the first one (no, she made $350k for Book Two), but look at the stretch goals for book one alone, and you can see why things went south as badly as they did. Especially since she allegedly lost money from the Book Two KS because of various reasons.
Anybody keeping up with Zoophobia? I don't blame you if not... I heard its author was trying to reboot it with a better artstyle (only because BWW forums won't shut up about this pathetic excuse for R34/Furry fodder...). I'd been blissfully ignoring it until now, otherwise.
Reminds me of Zoophobia, where everything that's been released up to this point is "one very long introduction" and the Cameron chick isn't even the real protagonist.
Yeah, it really is. I also believe she mentioned in the first Kickstarter that she estimated the story to be around 7000 panels. Right now, she's at #1546 (which is also an animation).
You can probably understand why I bailed when I did.
Anybody keeping up with Zoophobia? I don't blame you if not... I heard its author was trying to reboot it with a better artstyle (only because BWW forums won't shut up about this pathetic excuse for R34/Furry fodder...). I'd been blissfully ignoring it until now, otherwise.
All I know about Zoophobia, I know from the occasional /co/ thread and that Viv allegedly had a chimpout over 'Zootopia' and how she was upset that people might mistake her comic for the movie. And the whole drama over that obnoxiously designed blue wolf character of hers. And how she hoped her beloved sempai Kesha would notice her after she did those animations set to 'Die Young' and 'Timber'.
Oh yeah. Though was that before or after she decided to change Mercury (ugh, can't believe I remember that) from a hermaphrodite/intersex naga to a 100% female naga?
But I remember that. She had these grandiose plans for Red Venom, despite the torrents of mockery she got over the concept, largely due to how asinine her take on an intersex naga (much less nagas in general) was. I seem to remember years after that aborted attempt, and now going by OwlGem, someone asked her if she was ever going to revisit Red Venom ever again. She pretty much torpedoed it for good by saying she had no idea to revisit it and that she was no longer interested in the concept. Good for her, I say. Sometimes, ideas you come up with as a teenager don't always end up holding up or working out over the years. Last I checked, if she wasn't bitching about people liking her Steven Universe fan art over her original stuff, she was doing something with bug people now, I think...?
Oh, I completely forgot about bad webcomics: AGENCY. 'Member when kitchen sink cartoon crossovers were all the rage thanks to Bleedman 8 years ago? This one is so batshit stupid, all I have to say is this: "Sandy from 'SpongeBob' and Shadow the Hedgehog have to investigate the disappearance of Fox McCloud. And Pink Panther is involved somehow." The art actually kinda sorta gets better over the years and I can't hate on the artist herself, because she seems like a genuinely nice person, but the concept itself is just a bucket of cringe. I feel like she should tweak the character designs and change the names, and she'd have a semi-decent if forgettable original web comic on her hands, but hey, it's her prerogative. I just think crossing over and shipping stuff like Sandy Cheeks and Shadow the Hedgehog is the kind of thing you grow out of when you leave middle school, I dunno. At least her DA page indicates that she plans to move onto doing original work when she's done with this.
