Problems with Webcomics

This was a research project that looked over the 25 latest installments of 100 web comics and studied the characters that appeared within.

A character was defined as:

• Named. A title used as a name was accepted. For example, Captain was considered a name. My captain was not.
• Appeared in more than one installment.
• Spoke.

The webcomics had to fit the following parameters:

• Published exclusively or originally on the web.
• Currently updating as of mid-April, 2012 at least twice a month.
• Fifty pages already published.
• Primarily human cast.
• Cast stayed largely consistent update to update.
• No stick figures or such heavily stylized figures that were impossible to tell apart.

How the webcomics were chosen:

• A list of 500 webcomics that fit the parameters was pulled from http://thewebcomiclist.com and friends’ recommendations.
• From those 500, 100 were pulled using an online list randomizer (http://www.random.org/lists/). The top 100 after scrambling the list several times were the ones used.
• This was meant to provide as random of a sampling of webcomics as possible, based on the principle of simple random sampling without replacement, in the hope that this would provide a more accurate representative sample than consciously choosing based on a personal idea of the breakdown of webcomics.
• List of webcomics in the study

Characters were studied to find:

• Gender
• Race
• Sexuality

FAQ

1. What webcomics were included in the study?
2. You say there were no trans* characters, but how do you know that for sure? You can’t always tell by appearance.
3. Popular webcomics weren’t in this study.

• The webcomics I read weren’t in the study.
• I don’t think this was a representative sample of webcomics.