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.

Race was the most difficult to discover, but it was done to the best of my ability. Most frequently, race was decided by skin color and the origin of the character’s name. Occasionally there were additional visual cues or contextual clues, but those rarely appeared. Because of this, sometimes race could be decided and sometimes ethnicity was what came up instead.

This is an incrediblysimplified way to find race and not one that would work in real life. However, representation in comics is simplified, sometimes almost to the point of abstraction, and this sometimes made skin color and name the only way to discern race or ethnicity.