I’ve become fascinated with the “March Madness”-style tournament the ComicMix website has been running, partly because such a structured excersize is right up my alley, but also because it’s blown up into something no one could have ever anticipated, one that’s gotten multiple webcomickers’ competitive juices flowing, helped by the increasing cash prizes for comics making the Final Four. I only ever heard of it because of various webcomickers’ linking to it.
The site did much the same thing last year, but that stayed fairly self-contained and saw several fairly obscure webcomics having considerable success. That’s far from the case this year; the only comic in the Sweet 16, let alone later rounds, that I didn’t recognize is something called Romantically Apocalyptic, which knocked off the likes of Girls with Slingshots and defending champion Erfworld before finally falling to Goblins in the Elite 8, in a George Mason-esque run that would be like if a 14-seed in the NCAA Tournament somehow reached the Elite 8. The very first round saw every contest get more votes than the final round last year, and it’s only gotten more so from there; one particularly important creator has been Andrew Hussie, whose linking to the tournament has caused the site to repeatedly crash (which seems to be the case with everything MSPA touches). I’m positively scared of what they’re planning next month. I can’t imagine what this thing is going to look like next year, but I’ll probably be following it closely every step of the way.
When the final four came down to MSPA v. Gunnerkrigg Court and Goblins v. Order of the Stick, I figured for all the world that this gigantic showdown would, against all odds, come down to the two comics I currently regularly follow (although more on MSPA next week), MSPA and OOTS. However, in the end, that didn’t end up happening; Goblins managed to survive against OOTS, while the showdown between MSPA and the Court came down to an earth-shattering, apocalyptic, site-crashing showdown that, when the dust cleared and the site came back up, ended with the Court prevailing by a grand total of forty-six votes.
Now the final battle is in progress between Goblins and the Court, which if you wish and are familiar with the comics, you can take part in (or at least follow) here. Neither are comics that I myself have reviewed, but they’re both comics I’ve considered. In fact, I’ve had plans to review the Court and Questionable Content in some order since 2009, and when they met in the Elite 8 I decided to use the result of that matchup to at least help determine which to review first. Now, however, I’ve decided that the winner of the tournament, whichever it is, will be the subject of a review in two weeks’ time. Both I intend to review before the end of May, but this will determine which gets the immediate spotlight, and which I end up delaying until next month.
What? Of course I’m still a webcomic reviewer. Why are you laughing?