This has always been something that has bothered me, but very recently I stumbled across a number of podcasts, comments and outright snide remarks that got me thinking about it enough to address it.

What is with webcomic authors hating on other webcomic authors? When I was helping run Smackjeeves, I was never really surprised to see twelve-year-old sprite comic artists having flame wars or insulting each other in their comics themselves. I actually expected that kind of behaviour.

Weirdly enough, though I'm always surprised when I see older, well established webcomic artists participating in podcasts (when I discovered talkshoe a couple months back I found quite a few) where they blast other popular webcomic artists (who will likely never even hear the podcast) or randomly hate on popular comics in random forum posts here or elsewhere. Why is it like that?

I've always felt that your attitude directly affects how your readers feel. Even if your comic is great, I'm less inclined to read it if you're a total jerk in your dealings with others, especially those who are working just as hard as you are.

So what do you think when you see people doing this? Do you do it? Why? Does it change how you feel about the author's comic? Does it make it less enjoyable or make no difference to you either way? I'd like to get some discussion going.

It depends on the setting the comment was made and how it was directed. When someone insults a comic on a forum mostly viewed by comic writers like this one it doesn't change my view of that person. If there is a place to be displaying that kind of opinion, this is it.

However, I think once people insult an author instead of a comic that type of thing really should be kept in a less public setting.

I also think the idea that people are randomly hating on popular comics is kind of skewed. The reality is that most popular comics just happen to suck.

Anthony has a lot of good points. There is a difference between insulting a comic and insulting a creator. Sometimes personal and professional lives interact in unexpected or unintended ways.

But you also have to differentiate exactly how these so-called blastings occur. I could write a heck of a post about how much I don't like Questionable Content or Nedroid, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm blasting them or flaming them.

If I talk about how I think QC is flat with 2-dimensional characters who never seem to grow or learn and that the jokes seem to be the same thing and that the loser who never gets any becomes stale surprisingly fast, these are honest, legitimate criticisms. And if I am talking on a podcast about qualities in comics that I really don't like, I will say these things.

Now, if I said QC is dumb and boring and only stupid people like it, that would be inexcusable because it is pure, unhelpful hatred.

I look at criticism the way I look at our In the Hot Seat topics. I'm going to be absolutely brutal, at least as brutal as people will be able to handle. But the whole point of it is to illustrate what I think does and doesn't work.

People in any industry will tend to 'hate on' others in the same industry. It happens, and it's not unusual to hear it happening in webcomics.

I find this interesting because most of the podcasts I listen to are just full of praise and compliments from one creator to another. It's like listening to Hollywood pat themselves on the back to promote a new movie. The only problem with it is that I feel society as a whole is getting too sensitive to dissenting opinions as a result. If you put yourself out in the public someone will criticize you. That's life. Grow some skin.

Whether you are insulting the creator or insulting the comic, the operative word is still "insult". It is perfectly possible to do negative critiques, especially in the cases of this forum's "Hot Seats" where the creators asks for bold honesty, but in my opinion there's no reason to resort to cruelty.

If I meet a creator or hear them on a podcast, then their general attitude (cheerful, grumpy, enthusiastic, snarky, etc) will totally affect how I feel about their work. That's probably not fair, but it's true. I suppose there are readers out there who respond favourably to Big Drama by the author, or at least enjoy the spectacle, but I am not one of them.

I wasn't really talking about personal experience. I can't say I've ever had someone talking behind my back. I tuned into an older podcast featuring the author of a pretty respected webcomic (I don't want to name names, because I'm not feeding drama here) in where she and several other notable names blasted some pretty main stream stuff like Least I Could Do. I'm not a LICD fan by a long stretch, so it wasn't that I felt the attack on it was an attack on me because I'm a big fan or anything.

It wasn't 'brutal honest critique'--It was the 'This sucks and anyone who reads it should feel bad for liking it' (this was said in a less family-friendly way that I didn't want to post up here) attitude. Honestly, regardless of content, it has some merit. It's well done, and I can respect the schedule they repeat. Just because you're not a fan of something doesn't mean that it is your right to be a dick about it. Example: I'm not a huge fan of PVP. I looks good, it's polished, etc.--it just isn't my cup of tea. Does that mean I should hate Scott and everything he stands for? Of course not. I find the advice dispensed by the halfpixel crew to be some of the most fantastic information I could ever hope to glean from anywhere on the subject of webcomics.

Maybe I'm looking at it from a different perspective. When I was in college for animation, my professors always told us 'don't get cocky. Be polite, be professional. You never know...that guy you called a hack on your blog or in class may be the guy interviewing you for a job five years down the road.' Maybe that's why it's so baffling to me that people who are up there at the top will eat each other alive rather than network a lot of the time. Weirdness.

The reason why your professor told you not to call people hacks is because animation is an industry built upon connections and correspondance. You will get a job because of a recommendation, or because you know people involved on the project. And the industry is full of pettiness and cattiness. You do not want to throw stones because they will bounce back and strike you in the temple.

Webcomics are built on self-sufficiency, where the cartoonist is his own boss. I'd rather people be honest than talk behind each other's backs. Honesty is not being an a******, even if that honesty is saying you dislike a comic for shallow reasons. It's not always rational or justified. But people are allowed to feel that way and say how they feel, and I don't think it should be oppressed. Cartoonists should be mature enough now (as the median age continues to rise) to accept those feelings and realize that that person is still a good guy, with different tastes.

This is different from the person who thinks they are being edgy and is giving his bros a high five for slinging shit at someone from across the hall. Because that's not honesty, and that is being an a******. But I think the webcomics reader (and some cartoonists) don't know how to differentiate between the two. Which is probably because they are paranonid introverts who have decided to treat people they meet on the internet like characters, and not real people. And to those people, there always has to be some other angle or meaning behind anything anyone says, because they can only speculate about a person from the perspective of what a character in a story might do. Which is why someone like Scott Kurtz is always misinterpreted, because those people have decided that he is a 'villain', and villains can never be trusted, and all of their words are deceptive, and there's always a catch, and-- no. Shut up. Go outside and meet some people, for god's sake. Don't develop a disorder.

I've always separated the artist from the work, and I'd like to know why other readers can't. I don't think you should be consuming media based on how nice or mean the creator is. Because you don't know any of these creators personally, so you really don't know what they're like in real life. If that's how you choose to view the world, I would advise you not to look into the biographies of famous painters and artists of the past, because it would quickly shatter that view.

Careful with the language- this site is supposed to be Guigar-style. Guigar at the BEACH.

As for webcomic author drama- cartoonists are pretty crazy and insecure, and it's not actually easy to sit with that and keep doing your thing when there's flame-wars about. You want to get praise, and it's a very rare thing- you want to avoid flames, and the internet is a series of flames (not tubes, that's a misnomer- the tubes are ON FIRE).

The single quickest thing you can do to feel better about your own frustration with your piteous efforts is to flame the heck out of somebody else, projecting the self-anger onto another hapless scribbler. Interestingly, doing this doesn't mean you're a bad creator- the frustration is really the motivating factor to learning better. It just means you're taking your nose off the grindstone for a moment and sticking it somewhere else less uncomfortable.

There's also this: to flame on some hapless fool, you have to have either a taste for idle torture or some really passionate, strongly held opinions. Opinions so passionately held that you can't bear to see the examples of things contradicting them... and it's tough not to flame on, and MAKE people understand why your opinion is significant and important.

This is simply the rawest form of the critical impulse. It can also exist in a positive form where you're that passionate about some work (for instance, 'Achewood' for Straub and Kellett) and need to convey why that work matters. The flame version is just the same thing, conveying why that work is harmful :)

Because opinion is subjective, some opinions are just more right than others, for any given audience. It's going to continue to be a noisy fight, and that's healthy. I would just say, be careful not to dismiss people simply because their tone offends you. There's a guy on these very forums who's criticized me quite harshly, and he's absolutely right. From seeing his work, I know he couldn't do what I do in the better way that he'd like to see. Doesn't change the fact that I have to figure out how to incorporate the complaints into what I meant to do anyway. I don't have to like the tone, and if I could do what he says I'd be doing it already- but just because a criticism is harsh doesn't exempt it from significance.

We do have to remember, however, that the mindset of a critic is not the same as a pleasure reader. I work in pro audio and we've been really slammed by that fact, because we have the ability to fix any mistakes or wrong notes nowadays- and critical listening has caused much pop music to be absolutely bland and flavorless through the obliteration of any error or fault. I've actually ended up rebelling against this and recording music with less perfection, knowing full well that many choices I'm making on purpose will automatically torpedo me with many professional listeners- just as many choices I make in the comic torpedo me with normal healthy humans :D

I'm going to say, get used to harsh criticism, because if you're not seeing any or getting any, you are selling yourself short and just plain refusing to expose who you really are, artistically. There is NOTHING truly special or original that can't be found fault with. You have to have enough experience to know what specifically you're trying to do, and then only accept criticism that speaks to what you actually want. I care very little about genre criticisms because I chose that, but slam my facial expressions and you cut me to the core and cause me to redouble my fruitless efforts, because that's at the heart of what I want to develop :)

"cartoonists are pretty crazy and insecure,"

Most of the cartoonist and illustrators I have met have been pretty much normal. And the ones playing into that suffering artist stereotype tend to check their myspaces so often they forget to draw anything.

I'm just going by the Halfpixel guys, Penny Arcade, R. Crumb, Dave Sim, Vaughn Bode, and Charles Shultz. How about, 'GOOD cartoonists are pretty crazy and insecure'? ;)

Occupational disease, which is most certainly shared by musicians, actors, even the more creative sound mixers. Some wear it on their sleeve more than others. Bear in mind also that people can act normal, as a courtesy to others: Jerry Holkins considers this one of his superpowers, but clings to his craziness and insecurity quite openly.

I'm gonna stand- courteously- by my statement :)

I don't get that vibe off of those guys at all. I guess I am thinking of people who romanticize the idea of a tormented artist when you say crazy and insecure.

Also, it's a load of hooey to say that cartoonists are self-made. Sure, it's possible to make a comic that is just so epically amazing that word of mouth will get you to the top, but far more likely, you're going to get more links when people like you. Kurtz always says that the best thing you can get is a mention in somebody's blog. You won't get that unless people like you.

Webcomics is totally a community. Granted there are a ton of cliques within that community, some of which are just like the cliques in high school, but the point is that no man is an island.

Also, I want to add that the people who are ragging on popular webcomics for no good reason are also the ones who are checking their myspace more often than they make cartoons.

O'Doyle Rules!

You don't need to be well liked to get promotion, but my point is that you shouldn't be disliked because you dared to be yourself and gave honest opinions. Being a good guy isn't bottling everything up to make people feel better. I think the drama that we are talking about is largely created by the people on the outside looking in; the readers and the small-fish cartoonists who take words that are printed by other people on the internet way too seriously. That is why you often hear con recaps from people saying "He was a lot different in person than I expected, he was very nice." And you might think "that's why the cartoonist needs to change his image." NO!! THEY created that image in their head! And that is THEIR fault. NOT the cartoonist's.

The amount of cartoonists who are actually terrible human beings can probably be counted on one hand. And they're probably the people you'd least expect. The only people still perpetuating this myth of webcomics being full of drama are part of the old catty webcomics community that is fading away like a dying star as we speak. We're all older, and we're all wiser, and we're all ready to get to work. Nobody has time for that anymore.

Pettiness and jealousy exists in every industry, and inevitably, something you say or do can easily come back to haunt you... especially on the internet where things never really go away (ie. people losing jobs because of something in their Facebook profile... which is kind of hilarious).

Just like the animation industry is quite small and rather contact driven, I see webcomics being very similar. As was mentioned above, links and refferals from larger comics are huge ways to get traffic. If you regularly shoot your mouth off about other creators you may be limiting your appeal. And it's one thing to negatively critique something, quite another to base your attack on the person and not the work.

On the other hand, there's also a lot of whining in webcomics. The benefit of an animation background is the thick skin it will give you when it comes to taking in and dealing with crits. If you're going to present yourself as an artist, you have to be prepared to put something out there that definitely won't please everyone... and someone will likely tell you some day just why they don't like it. I kind of find the whining harder to take then the a*******; a******* can be amusing :)

But who is doing the whining? Animation is still largely a gated community. You need to be let in by the gatekeepers. Webcomics have torn down the gates of the comics community. Sure, everybody has a fair chance, but it also means we can't keep out the riffraff. If I were a betting man, I'd lay down some money that the more a person whines, the lower the quality (and readership) of that person's comic.

Gonna disagree with ya Kevin. During an animation boom they let anyone in with a 1 year college certificate in animation which means the ranks are flooded with whiny 19 year olds who need to be trained from the ground up. The older guys bitch and moan plenty but the new kids don't know when(or around who) to be quiet once the whole "I'm an ANIMATOR!" effect wears off. It's all the same petty crap you read in forums. Jealousy over popularity, pecking order gripes, my camp vs your camp... I think the only difference the internet makes in all of this is the lack of someone physically slappin you upside the head and telling you to grow the hell up. (sorry to follow that rathole, I saw the word animation and lurched at the keyboard)

I hope what Matt says is true and everyone is growing up just by getting older... don't know if I believe it but I certainly hope it's true.

You don't need to be well liked to get promotion, but my point is that you shouldn't be disliked because you dared to be yourself and gave honest opinions. Being a good guy isn't bottling everything up to make people feel better.

Again, I don't know if I made this clear enough in the original topic, I'm not talking about 'giving honest opinions'. There's a blatant difference between harsh critique (perfectly acceptable) and outright flaming (just...why?).

There is a difference between (not really intentionally picking on Scott, here, sorry guy) saying something like 'While the Art in PVP is great, I feel the writing is sub-par' and 'PVP is a steaming pile of (fill in the blanks)'. One of them is respectable on some level--I will not tell someone to shove it because they don't like something, but seriously, resorting to insults when both sides are well known and well respected is just plain childish.

And you might think "that's why the cartoonist needs to change his image." NO!! THEY created that image in their head! And that is THEIR fault. NOT the cartoonist's.

If I spend all my time online being a colossal jerk to other readers on my blog or in author comments, and then I go to a con and people are surprised by how nice I am, I am directly contributing to whatever mental image they had of me. It would be mostly my fault, imo.

Your comic is you, and you are an essential part of your comic. People might stumble upon my comic and give it a read through. They may like it, and if they check out my author comments or responses I have left to other people, they make a connection with me, even if it is one-sided, that may make them more excited to come back next week, or check back to read comments or have discussions or debates on days that they know I don't update. It's the first step in building a community, and building a community is much harder to do if you're posting up comics and trying your best to not attach your personality to any part of it. People stay for you, and for what you bring them, so your behaviour really does matter.

Just like the animation industry is quite small and rather contact driven, I see webcomics being very similar. As was mentioned above, links and refferals from larger comics are huge ways to get traffic. If you regularly shoot your mouth off about other creators you may be limiting your appeal. And it's one thing to negatively critique something, quite another to base your attack on the person and not the work.

Absolutely. This is exactly how I see it. That may be because we went to the same college for animation, I guess.

On the other hand, there's also a lot of whining in webcomics. The benefit of an animation background is the thick skin it will give you when it comes to taking in and dealing with crits. If you're going to present yourself as an artist, you have to be prepared to put something out there that definitely won't please everyone... and someone will likely tell you some day just why they don't like it. I kind of find the whining harder to take then the a*******; a******* can be amusing :)

Again, this thread isn't really about me. My skin is plenty thick, and I love harsh critique. It was more of a 'I am observing something that makes no sense to me. Why would creators shoot themselves in the foot like that? Don't they see that they're burning bridges that lead to some potentially awesome networking and marketing? Alkdgdfgndf' Not everyone has the benefit of an animation background. Heck, a lot f webcomic artists have no art schooling, at all.

During an animation boom they let anyone in with a 1 year college certificate in animation which means the ranks are flooded with whiny 19 year olds who need to be trained from the ground up.

This is a strange concept to me. Perhaps that's the difference in Canadian Post-Secondary that's getting me a bit confused about this quote. The animation program I participated in was portfolio based, and if people with weak portfolios got in, they improved fast or dropped out or switched to another program that they could actually handle. I wish I could have finished, but your options are limited when you run out of money and OSAP won't give you a loan because your parents, who don't pay for your schooling because they have five kids to feed, make too much money. Where was I?

Oh, yeah. A lot of the whiny, elitist children who got into that course never made it out the other end.

hope what Matt says is true and everyone is growing up just by getting older... don't know if I believe it but I certainly hope it's true.

I wish it were so. I worked for Smackjeeves for more than a couple of years. More and more young children are discovering free comic hosting, and they bring highschool attitudes with them. It never ends. =/

Actually, whining is of course not just limited to online comics, but a lot of online art in general. I'm talking about forum posts or deviant art/etc. posts where people ask for a crit, get a negative one, and can't handle it. Then there's pages of discussion about how unfair or mean the crit was, how they meant it to look that way, or that wasn't their best work, or my personal favorite: "But that's my style!"

And when it comes to animation-woah. I'm classically trained, the workload was huge and your output had to match or you'd never keep a job. We pulled all nighters all the time in school, and then we pulled them at work when deadlines neared. Anyone who complained would be quickly replaced (and no one did, these guys were all pros.) Now with all the schools pumping out flash and 3d grads, it's harder for everyone to get work and if you ask me, the overall quality of many shows has plummeted. I had a friend who taught a first year 3d animation class in Maya and roughly 50% of her students didn't feel they should have to draw since they were there to learn how to animate on a computer. They complained about having to create drawn character reference and turn arounds for their final film projects and hated the fact that life-drawing courses were mandatory in the curriculum. Unfortunately, there's no better way to teach animation principals then to physically draw them and THEN transfer your knowledge to the computer. These kids won't last long.

And now I'm complaining! It just really rubs me the wrong way when people want to be artists but don't have the right attitude and don't put the time in... but get mad when they also don't get the attention they think they deserve....

Ok, I guess I misunderstood the question initially. It sounds like what's basically being asked is why do people feel the need to put other people down? I believe it's PRIDE (more specifically a wounded one). When someone's pride is hurting, they want everyone to hurt too (misery loves company). Pride interfering with judgment: They say to themselves, my work is great, why don't people realize that? Why am I not getting the praise I deserve. Pride also makes one look to someone else's work, not just to learn from or get some sense of validation or sense of placement, but rather to stoke their own ego so they can say to themselves, "yeah, that's right, I'm better then that guy". But when "that guy" is getting the praise that this person wants for themselves, they get jealous and lash out. It's just wounded pride. It's sad.

...and that's a Lot Like Webcomics! (tm) :D

I've been guilty of denigrating comics I don't like, as well as creators who say things in podcasts or whatever with which I disagree. I usually feel kind of dumb afterwards, especially since my efforts are nothing special and my readership is in double digits, but in retrospect, as long as you're not attacking someone personally, it seems to me like it's a symptom of passion. If you read something I've done and are so infuriated by it that you feel compelled to go somewhere and say "That Artist Wanted guy has no talent and is an insult to the medium," you'll be stating the premise of my strip, but more importantly it's a sign that you really care about what you're doing. Some of T. S. Eliot's best poetry came out of squabbling with Ezra Pound. Dr. Dre's best work is all on the subject of Eazy E's personal flaws. Jack Kirby's coolest stuff came from leaving Marvel and taking DC titles in as un-Marvel a direction as possible(if you're as into his Fourth World stuff as I am). I say, be passionate and contentious. It's what good stuff comes from.

I have to go now, Brad Guigar's posse is creeping by my house again.