On the other hand, do you think you read all the same things as everyone else? The comics you read every week are probably not the same ones I read every week or the same ones Joe, the IT guy, read every week. A few big ones didn’t fit the parameters (XYCD, Cyanide and Happiness) and a few of the other ones that I know that are really large (Questionable Content, Ma3, and LICD) were all in the original list of 500, but weren’t pulled. Those are pretty much the only large ones I know of. This wasn’t a survey of the most popular webcomics anyway (although that could be something to do in the future) this was one of ALL webomics. (And by the way, they were all “real, live, and updating”.) Thewebcomiclist has almost 20,000 comics on their site and there was an estimate a few years ago that there are almost 50,000 webcomics online, and honestly, I believe that’s somewhat low. There are so many webcomics on the web, and most of them AREN’T popular. If I missed most well-know, widely-followed webcomics, that’s probably a very good thing, because how many is that? The popular webcomics are a tiny percentage of what’s out there so they be a tiny percentage of what’s in the study. (Also, some really popular webcomics were included. Girlswithslingshots, Family Man, Scandanavia and the World, and Gunnerkrieg Court were all mentioned over and over again when I was talking to people about this. If you’ve never heard of any of these, then guess what? My theory that everyone reads very different webcomics might just be true. I had never heard of 3 of those, but they were mentioned like 10 times each.)
In short, the comics YOU read every week are a tiny, tiny, miniscule percentage of what’s out there. It’s not possible to keep up with a majority of comics that update regularly.
As for it not being the best statistical model, I’m not up on statistics, but I did a little reading, and it looks like for the large set of data I had, simple random sampling was the best choice. Other options seemed to need more data than is available. There has not been any studies on webcomics really, that I’ve been able to find, other than this one. The distribution of webcomics isn’t known. How many comics are fantasy, how many are romance, how many are pornographic. There is no way to get a representative sample in that regards either, although I would have liked too.
The data on choosing the list is here.
Also, just because I didn’t study the popular ones, doesn’t mean it’s not true for them anyways. I would love to know how everyone’s favorite webcomics compare and if you want to submit stats on your favorites, I can start compiling a list of those. Just make sure to read all the parameters* that the webcomics had to fit to be included in the study and what qualifies as a character*.
*This information can be found at the same location as the data on choosing the list. Link found above.
For more information, go here.
For more information, go here.
I’m curious how many of the “gay romances” were written with gay men as the intended audience or if (as I suspect) most were written by women with women as the intended audience. Especially since it is the focus.
It’d be nice to have gay characters with the “roundedness” and creativity of straight protagonists (who get to be wizards, or fight as rebels in dystopian futures, or bring down Galactic Empires, or explore space) but was as undeniably gay as those are straight (fetishists aside who will deny anything for their fetish).
I totally looked this up after you said this. Actually the 3 comics focused on gay male relationships in the above comic were all written by men, although 1 was then drawn by a woman. I’m unsure about the intended audience. I see your point though; that does happen a lot. There were an additional 3 comics that had gay male main characters and 2 of those were written by woman and the third’s gender was unknown.
I included a short list of comics with well-rounded (in my opinion) gay main characters that do things. (They get to fight as rebels, explore and fight in space, road trip, and be attacked by government agencies respectively.)Artifice: “Smart Guy-on-Guy Sci Fi” (In space! With shootouts!)
Goodbye Chains : “Colin Lord is a cheerful Boston Communist, and Banquo White is a cranky half-Mexican with no philosophy beyond hedonism. Somehow they have become partners in crime, spreading a reign of terror and dialectical materialism across the plains of Colorado. Follow their adventures with explosives and ladies—and, possibly, men.”Robots and Racks : “Being a story about girls flying around in space.”
The Less than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal : “In the span of a single day, Amal calls off his arranged marriage, comes out to his conservative parents, promptly gets disowned, goes on a bender… and wakes up the next morning to find TJ, a lanky, dreadlocked vagrant, frying eggs and singing Paul Simon in his kitchen.
TJ claims that the two have made a drunken pact to drive all the way from Berkeley to Providence. As it happens, Amal promised his sister he’d be there for her graduation from Brown University. And TJ, well… TJ has his own reasons.
The agreement is simple: Amal does the driving; TJ pays the way - but a 3500 mile journey leaves plenty of time for things to get complicated.”Love is In the Blood : “When government agencies come to archaeologist Laila McCarthy for assistance, they are unaware her knowledge of dangerous relics was gained first-hand. But ancient enemies remember her as Sumerian demon Lamashtu and the first vampire.”
I’ve seen Artifice around but never read it, never realised it’s MCs were gay. I’ll have to take a look.
I actually looked at Goodbye Chains in the past but from my fuzzy memory I don’t have much positive to say about its treatment of the gay MCs (or their lesbian twinned counterparts) or the half Mexican character (and his lesbian counterpart). I am surprised the author is male… but maybe I shouldn’t be. It’s not like that eliminates problems inherently. Also, I may need to re-read it as it might’ve been when I was reading it rather than what I was reading that ave me the trouble.
I’ll take a look at the others as well as they are completely new to me. Thanks for the recs… and the interesting tumblr.
I can’t say much about Goodbye Chains or the rest as far as quality goes. Tj and Amal is the only one I have read completely through. Also, these aren’t all done by authors that are the same gender as their characters. Goodbye chains is actually done by women. These are just ones that I know have fairly main non-heteronormative characters that are not romance comics. Thank you for the reblogs and comments.
For more information, go here.
what? Okay, buddy.For more information, go here.
Yes? Questions?
I’m assuming this is disbelief or personal experience of romance webcomics based around a lesbian relationship and would like to say that this was a study of 100 webcomics, as randomly selected as possible to give as true of a representative sample as I could manage, and there were no comics with romantic or sexual relationships as the main storyline in that webcomic where the relationships were about lesbians.
There were some with prominent gay female women, some of them listed here, and I would like to add Girls With Slingshots to that list, as it has prominent gay, bi, and asexual characters, as well as one of two cross dressing characters I saw during the course of the study.
If this wasn’t it, feel free to shoot back questions, I’m just a little unclear what the skepticism was regarding.
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For more information go here.
