After the discontinuation of the Web Cartoonists' Choice Awards several members of the webcomic community site The Webcomic List felt the need for a replacement and came up with the idea for a new award called The Webcomic List Awards in July 2009. Comic artists and writers, community staff... basically everyone involved in comics were asked for their favorites; the winner of each category was then established by a panel of judges, including for example Brad Guigar of Evil Inc. for “Best Gag-a-Day”, among the five webcomics with the most nominations.

On the website of The Webcomic List Awards 2009 you can have a look at the comic pages drawn by our community members to present the categories, announce the nominees and celebrate the winners.

However, if you are just interested in the list of winners of each category, here it is:

Best Comic :

• Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell

Best New Comic :

• Moon Town by Steve Ogden

Best Gag-a-Day :

• Girls with Slingshots by Danielle Corsetto

Best Longform :

• Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell

Best Colour Art :

• FreakAngels by Warren Ellis

Best Black and White Art :

• The Abominable Charles Christopher [abominable.cc] by Karl Kerschl

Best Non-Traditional Art :

• The Dreamland Chronicles by Scott Christian Sava

Best Writing :

• Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell

Best Character :

• Digger of Digger by Ursula Vernon

As you can see the big winner of the first instance of The Webcomic List Awards was Gunnerkrigg Court written by Tom Siddell. Besides winning the main category “Best Comic” it also won the awards for “Best Writing” and “Best Longform”.

If you have a webcomic site of your own, it would be great if you could write a news entry about our award and the winners of it. It is currently the only general webcomic award with additional categories other than “Best webcomic” (which exists for example as part of the Ignatz Awards or the Harvey Awards). However, it was also our goal to keep the number of different categories low so that each one is worth more. Since it is also not a popularity contest the most popular webcomics, Penny Arcade, XKCD, etc., don’t win by default.

We believe that all winning comics are of very high quality and therefore worth checking out. So have a look at them and spread the word!